In Order to Save Dustin May, We Must Destroy Him

Dustin May is a free agent. And not because he got non-tendered; he’s passed six years of service this season, and hits the open market at the tender age of 28.

I admit this one snuck up on me. May, a highly touted Dodgers prospect, stormed into prominence when he joined the L.A. pitching staff in 2019 at the age of 21. He pitched for the Dodgers in the playoffs that October and started 2020 as the no. 14 prospect in all of baseball, and spent most of the year in the rotation, garnering a few Rookie of the Year votes and making seven appearances during the Dodgers’ run to the World Series.

May wasn’t a Stephen Strasburg or Paul Skenes-level prospect, but he was in or around the global top 20 for multiple years. He went from the minors to the major league playoffs in the span of two months, and pitched in the World Series at the end of his first full (sort of, it was 2020) season in the majors. Add in some other factors: upper-90s fastball velocity, his Scut Farkus complexion and Carlos Valderrama hair, and what Craig Goldstein memorably called “extreme Waluigi energy.”

May is memorable, in short.

The reason May’s free agency surprised me is simple: Memorable young ballplayers either stay in the public eye and evolve, or they get encased in amber. And even though May has been part of the pitching calculus for the most heavily scrutinized team in baseball seven years running, he hasn’t actually spent much time on the mound.

Tommy John surgery wiped out most of 2021 and 2022, and then May, after having started 2023 on fire, messed up his elbow again, requiring revision of the UCL repair. That cost him all of 2024 as well. Also in 2024: May tore his esophagus while eating salad, requiring emergency surgery and nearly two weeks in the hospital. Eat doughnuts, kids, you’ll live longer. This past season marked only the second time in May’s career (after 2020, so even that might not count) that he got through a season more or less healthy. The “more or less” is important here, unfortunately, since he missed the last three weeks of the season with elbow neuritis.

The result of all this is that May has amassed six and a third seasons of service time, as a starting pitcher, while throwing only 338 innings between the regular season and the postseason. Shota Imanaga, his 2025-26 free agency classmate, has thrown about that many innings in just two major league campaigns.

The good news is that almost 40% of those innings came this past season. And in a time when a player’s prime years are usually not matched up closely with his time in free agency, May is the youngest American starting pitcher in this class, at 28. Only Tatsuya Imai, late of the Seibu Lions, is younger.

Nevertheless, May didn’t make our list of this winter’s top 50 free agents. As far as I’m aware, he didn’t come close to making the list.

Given his performance this season — a 4.96 ERA, 4.88 FIP, and 11.5% K-BB rate — you can understand why. The Dodgers certainly had a wealth of starting pitchers to choose from, but it’s hard to look at their pitchers’ performance in the playoffs and conclude that 2020-vintage May would not have been useful. Nevertheless, they exiled him to Boston at the trade deadline, basically to clear a 40-man roster spot. (Feel free to disagree if you have strong opinions on James Tibbs III, which I don’t.)

Given all that, I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth it to devote an entire article to May, when just a couple weeks ago he wasn’t even worthy of a blurb. No matter, I’m committed now. We press on.

There’s nothing major league GMs love more than a guy they can fix. Any schmuck can sign the best pitcher on the market, but only a real genius can buy low on a Jesús Luzardo, or a Carlos Rodón, or a Kevin Gausman, and return him to his former glory. Let’s start by seeing how May’s stuff has changed since 2020:

Well, the velocity is down big time. That’s not great. Especially because pitchers throw harder now than when May was a rookie; the average four-seam velocity has gone up 1.1 mph since 2020. May’s 98th-percentile fastball velocity in 2020 was 59th-percentile fastball velocity in 2025.

The labels on May’s stuff haven’t changed as much as you would think. It’s still mostly three fastballs and a sweeper. The changeup, rare in 2020, is now mostly vestigial.

It’s interesting to go back and look at the consensus on May as a prospect given what we’ve learned about pitching in the past five years. Even at his peak, when he could throw the ball through the catcher, May was never a big strikeout guy. Given his fastball velocity and 3,100-rpm breaking ball (he called it a sinker, it moved more like a curveball, it’s now classified as a sweeper), the lack of strikeouts was mystifying.

Back then, it got explained by May’s habit of throwing a sinker, which got under bats and generated lots of weak grounders rather than missing the bat entirely. Four-seamers up in the zone were the pitch you’d want to throw to get whiffs, and May didn’t do that.

With 2025 eyes, you can see that May was right to throw his sinker a lot, because his four-seamer is quite dead zone-y. I dunno, maybe you could get away with that movement at 99 mph in 2020, but you can’t now.

Not that May can hit 99 regularly anymore, with his Elbow of Theseus. When he popped back up in the Dodgers’ rotation this year, he had solved the fastball movement problem by dropping his arm slot a few degrees, which gave his four-seamer less rise and more arm-side action, while still leaving it distinct from the sinker.

The other thing the Dodgers did was turn May from a sinker-first pitcher into a sweeper-first pitcher. But the arm slot shift that got his fastball out of the dead zone also took it out of the same vertical plane as the sinker, reducing its effectiveness as a barrel-misser. It also wrecked the curveball-ish depth on May’s sweeper, though to be fair, the breaking ball was May’s best pitch in 2025. His only effective pitch in 2025, really.

May only had six appearances after the trade, but the Red Sox took him off the sweeper and sinker — those two pitches went from 77.2% of May’s offerings with L.A. to just 58.6% in Boston — and doubled his cutter usage. Was it effective? Not really. He had a 5.40 ERA, 5.39 FIP, and 6.26 xERA in 28 1/3 innings with the Red Sox.

Generally, I don’t think the way out for May is to look back. Even if he could still throw as hard as he did in 2020, his method of pitching then is outdated now. If we learned anything from May’s disappointing 2025 season, it’s that he needs to start from scratch. Again, we see why he didn’t make the Top 50.

Why should anyone be interested in him, then, as anything more than depth, or a blood sacrifice to the God of Innings?

Because after you tear the structure down, there are still some enticing bricks. Even as May’s sinker got pounded all over the yard, he still has elite horizontal movement on the pitch. And his sweeper had literally the highest average spin rate of any breaking pitch in the majors last year: 3,182 rpm on average.

Someone’s going to look at those building blocks — the spin, the vestiges of the sinker, and May’s age — and talk themselves into there still being a mid-rotation starter in there. I’d love to see it attempted; I’m skeptical that it can be done.