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The Dodgers face yet another NLDS early exit tonight when they try to save their season in San Diego. While the offense has done a little more than in recent previous postseasons, the pitching has been bad — specifically, the starting pitching.
Injuries have absolutely ravaged Andrew Friedman’s plans for the starting rotation. Here are all the starters on the injured list — either recently or the entire season:
You can pluck any five of those guys and create a well above-average starting rotation. The problem with relying on some of those guys to anchor/head the rotation is they’ve either not shouldered as much workload before (Glasnow), are past their prime (Kershaw) and/or untested before this season (Stone). We know Gonsolin and May weren’t going to be in the plans for the 2024 starting rotation. Sheehan was a welcome surprise last season before needing a partial UCL repair this year. Ryan was a breath of fresh air before he blew out his elbow.
Glasnow was acquired and extended to be the ace of the staff — and he was! He pitched to a 3.49 ERA, 2.90 FIP and 25.5 K-BB%. The ERA was a bit inflated due to a couple bad starts, but he’s definitely a sub-3 FIP pitcher when he’s healthy. And that has always been the question with Glasnow: his health. He logged a career-high 134 innings this season before suffering an elbow sprain that cost him the rest of his season. Stone, similarly, bested a professional career-high in innings pitched. His 140 1/3 innings were nearly 20 innings more than his minor-league career-high of 121 2/3 in 2022, and he actually led the Dodgers in innings pitched. You know, the 25-year-old rookie in a rotation with big-money arms and former highly touted prospects.
That, on the surface, is a problem. However, it appears the Dodgers had planned for their pitchers breaking, because it happens quite frequently. They had Bobby Miller, who looked like a frontline starting option after the 2023 season. They signed James Paxton to a 1-year deal for some depth. They gave Yoshinobu Yamamoto a 13-year deal to be a rotation stalworth. They even had guys like Landon Knack in the minors and Ryan Yarbrough in the bullpen to help in case of injury. And they acquired Jack Flaherty — the near-antithesis of the high velo/max effort arm — at the deadline, but that didn’t do enough to brace for potential injuries from then on.
Miller’s troubling regression is a thing that should be studied. Yes, he dealt with shoulder inflammation, but even when he was healthy (if he ever was fully healthy), he was bad. His first start of the season was really good. He threw six scoreless innings, walked one and struck out 11. His unseemly 8.52 ERA and 6.97 FIP are even worse if you take that start out of the equation: 9.54 ERA, 7.81 FIP. That’s unsustainable, but in a bad way. The fact that Miller had such a hard time this season not only puts his future as a starter in jeopardy, but also raises some questions about how the Dodgers develop their pitchers.
The Dodgers (and MLB, really) have a starting pitching velocity problem. It’s not a problem of not enough, but more likely a problem of too much.
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Let me preface this by saying I don’t know more than the Dodgers player developmental staff. I’m trying to understand this as best as I can as a dumb blogger.
So, I hesitate to jump on the idea that all these guys throwing at maximum velocity is the cause of all these injuries (not just with the Dodgers, but throughout baseball), but the evidence is a bit damming.
Let’s look at Glasnow. His average velocity this season was 96.3 MPH, down 0.1 MPH from last season. It’s down from 97.4 MPH in 2022, but he threw just 6 2/3 innings. A better gauge might be 2021, when he averaged 97 MPH over 88 innings. He dropped his fastball usage in every non-2022 season every year since 2018.
- 2024: 45%
- 2023: 43.2%
- 2021: 51.6%
- 2020: 60.6%
- 2019: 67.2%
- 2018: 70.5%
Throwing a fastball 96.5 MPH more than 70% of the time is sure to have some adverse effect on a pitcher’s arm and/or shoulder — especially one with an injury history like Glasnow’s. Perhaps the reduced fastball usage led him and the Dodgers to believe he could continue to throw at that sustained velo. But the makeup in usage has to come from somewhere. He incorporated a sinker last year and threw it 8.7% of the time this season at an average velo of 96.6 MPH, so that doesn’t exactly take the velo strain off his arm. His benders both saw a decrease in usage as well. His curveball went from 21.3% to 18.6%, while his slider went from 34.8% to 27.7%. So, he actually threw more fastballs this season than he has since 2020 (again, not counting his 6 2/3 innings in 2022).
Miller was known for his triple-digit fastball when he was drafted and coming up through the Dodgers’ system. In his 124 1/3 MLB innings last season, Miller threw his fastball 28.9% of the time at 99 MPH — the highest among pitchers with 120 or more innings pitched. Of note, the next seven on that list have all suffered some form of significant arm/shoulder injury since then:
- Sandy Alcantara: 98 MPH, Tommy John
- Grayson Rodriguez: 97.4 MPH, shoulder/lat
- Spencer Strider: 97.2 MPH, TJ
- Shohei Ohtani: 96.8 MPH, TJ(ish)
- Jesus Luzardo: 96.7 MPH, elbow
- Gerrit Cole: 96.7 MPH, TJ
- Glasnow: 96.4 MPH, elbow
That usage for Miller doesn’t seem like a lot, right? Well, when you factor in 19.2% sinker usage (98.8 MPH), you’re up to almost 50% fastball usage. This season (56 innings), Miller reduced his sinker usage to 13.6% (97.3 MPH), but increased his 4-seam fastball usage to 37.9% (97.6 MPH), good for 51.5% fastball usage.
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Basically, I wanted to try to find out what the magic formula was for keeping their starting pitchers as healthy as possible for October. It’s hard to use much of anything from 2020 because of the COVID-shortened campaign, so I’m going back to the 2017 postseason. Here was the Dodgers’ starting rotation innings leaders, 4-seam fastball/sinker velo and usage for the 2017 postseason.
| Pitcher | IP | FB Velo (MPH) | FB Usage (%) |
| Kershaw | 33 | 93 | 52.6 |
| Rich Hill | 17.2 | 89.1 | 62.9 |
| Yu Darvish | 14.2 | 94.5 | 37.5 |
| Alex Wood | 12.1 | 90.4 | 51.4 |
And here are those same numbers in the regular season.
| Pitcher | IP | FB Velo (MPH) | FB Usage (%) |
| Kershaw | 175 | 92.9 | 46.1 |
| Hill | 135.2 | 89.1 | 54.4 |
| Darvish | 49.2 | 94.2 | 13.7 |
| Wood | 152.1 | 91.9 | 50.1 |
This doesn’t even include Kenta Maeda, who pitched exclusively out of the bullpen in 2017, and Hyun Jin Ryu, who dealt with a couple lower-body injuries after coming back from a serious shoulder injury the suffered in 2015.
There is a big difference in the velocity numbers from 2017 to now, but not so much the usage. Kershaw was relatively healthy to that point in his career. Hill was/is a wizard. Darvish is a different kind of wizard who has seen his velo stay in that general range for the last seven years. Wood’s sinker velo was has fluctuated a bit since 2017, but never lower than 89.9 MPH (2018-19) and never more than 92.4 MPH (2022).
These guys aren’t velocity demons. They aren’t going going to make a Pitching Ninja tweet because they’re pumping 98 MPH in the zone by a guy. They used their fastballs well and leaned a lot on their other pitches. The difference being, they weren’t throwing as hard as they could as much as they could. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening with the current Dodger starting pitchers, but the optics aren’t great.
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Eno Sarris of The Athletic took a look at the rash of pitcher injuries back in April. The No. 1 culprit of the injuries: velocity.
“What is the main source of pitcher injury?
Velocity. Throwing hard is a direct stressor on the elbow, and throwing hard has been shown to lead to injury by multiple studies over the years. One study found that fastball velocity was the most predictive factor of needing elbow surgery in pro pitchers. Every additional tick is more stress on the elbow ligament.”
The links included go far more into depth as medical studies, so you can read at your own leisure.
Sarris looked at breaking balls and if the pitch clock has anything to do with it.
“One of the studies that looked at direct stress on the elbow for different pitch types did find that, although overall velocity was the biggest source of stress, once you adjusted for velocity, breaking balls provided more stress at any given mph. Eighty-five mph is a bit of a magic spot for breaking balls — they get better above that velocity, at least. In 2023, pitchers threw nearly 44,000 more breaking balls over 85 mph than they did when we started tracking pitches in 2008. But this is a distinction without a difference, probably: Whether it’s fastball velocity or breaking ball velocity, it’s still velocity.”
“Theoretically, if you ask an athlete to do the same amount of work in less time, you’re increasing their fatigue. That’s something so basic it shouldn’t require supporting research, but before Dr. Mike Sonne went to work for the Cubs, he wrote for The Athletic about how that works. And how that fatigue should lead to more injuries.
The weird thing is… it hasn’t. Yet. Not at the major-league level.
Despite an early surge in injuries in the first year of the clock, once the year finished, there was no real discernible difference in injury rates.”
Looking at breaking ball velocity (non-changeup/splitter division), the Dodgers starting pitchers ranked seventh in MLB at 83.4 MPH, while their usage checked in at ninth at 18.5%. If you filter it for curveballs, sliders, slurves and sweepers, those it’s exactly the same 83.4 MPH and 18.5% usage. So, I’m not sure there’s much to correlate from that. The biggest issue seems to be overall velocity, which is mostly contained with fastballs (cutters included). They ranked third in velo at 94.4 MPH and 19th in usage. However, if you look at just changeups and splitters, that might be where the problem lies. They had the hardest average changeup velo in baseball at 87.3 MPH — above the “magic spot” of 85 MPH for breaking pitches (offspeed, in this case). Funny enough, they were tied with the Pirates for the second-lowest usage on those pitches at 15.5% — and that’s after reducing it the last two years from 22.6% in 2022 and 19.4% in 2023.
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The TL;DR version of this is: pitchers break. We, as humans, were never meant to throw baseballs (or anything) this hard, despite being the only species able to do so. The harder the pitch, the harder it is to hit. This is pulled from David Schoenfield of ESPN. It shows the batting line against fastballs in certain velocity ranges for the 2023 season.
- 100+ MPH: .188/.265/.225
- 98-99.9 MPH: .253/.333/.357
- 96-97.9 MPH: .262/.342/.383
- 94-95.9 MPH: .279/.357/.413
- 92-93.9 MPH: .290/.369/.431
- 90-91.9 MPH: .286/.363/.449
- Under 90 MPH: .323/.394/.515
And here’s what it looked like for the 2024 season.
- 100+ MPH: .213/.290/.315
- 98-99.9 MPH: .214/.295/.326
- 96-97.9 MPH: .232/.313/.361
- 94-95.9 MPH: .256/.341/.411
- 92-93.9 MPH: .268/.354/.442
- 90-91.9 MPH: .286/.365/.492
- Under 90 MPH: .299/.375/.485
You can see why throwing harder is more advantageous for teams. But unless you have a stable to 10-plus starting pitchers, it might be prudent for a philosophy shift. I mean, the Dodgers have more than 10 capable starting pitchers, and yet, they’re going with a bullpen game with their season on the line. Sure, Knack will probably be the bulk inning guy (someone who has had velocity issues in his, so far, brief pro career), but to put the hope of extending the season on his shoulders isn’t something that was on anyone’s bingo card back in March/April. It’s just a frustrating situation to end up in yet again.
We’ll see if the Dodgers try something different going forward, or if they’re going to double down on the strategy that might work in the regular season but could be detrimental in the postseason because the vast majority of pitchers just aren’t able to throw so hard for so long over the course of the 6-7 month MLB season and be healthy by the end of it.
