Mayday in LA: The Dodgers Can’t Catch a Break

The Dodgers came into 2023 with a ton of question marks. Was a platoon of James Outman and Trayce Thompson truly the answer in center field? Was Miguel Rojas a sufficient backstop given Gavin Lux’s injury? Was Jason Heyward’s bat salvageable, and where would he play if it was? Was Miguel Vargas ready? The offense was hardly up to the standards of the team’s recent run.

They didn’t answer all those questions positively, but with the benefit of hindsight, the offense seems fine. The team is hitting a collective .243/.328/.446, good for a 110 wRC+. They’re one of the best baserunning teams in baseball. Mookie Betts can play shortstop now, which is neat. But they’ve exchanged those worries for one that has dogged every team in baseball over the years: Is there enough starting pitching to go around?

In the past week, the Dodgers were dealt two more blows on that front. One is a bump in the road: Clayton Kershaw’s sore left shoulder sent him to the IL Monday, where he hopes to make a minimum 15-day stay. That’s mildly concerning, but if Kershaw and the Dodgers are right, it’s just a temporary setback. One of Kershaw’s potential replacements got far worse news, however. Yesterday, the club announced that Dustin May will have elbow surgery to repair his flexor tendon, which means he’s done pitching in 2023.

It might not feel this way, but May debuted in the majors nearly four years ago, in August of 2019. He’s been tantalizing Dodgers fans with his high octane sinker for years and frustrating them with his injury luck for just as long. Is he a lockdown reliever? A mid-rotation cog? An ace? This year, it looked like he might finally be fulfilling the rosiest possible outlook. In his first eight outings, he put together a 2.68 ERA (3.36 FIP) while averaging nearly six innings per start. Then he came out on May 17, felt elbow pain, and departed after one inning where his fastball was down two miles an hour.

As Jay Jaffe noted at the time, May’s original injury timetable was 4-6 weeks. The Dodgers knew that his flexor tendon was the issue, though. Fabian Ardaya reported that the tendon didn’t heal properly during May’s recovery from Tommy John surgery in 2021. Like I said, his injury luck is abysmal. May and the team opted to treat the arm with platelet-rich plasma, but as the weeks passed and May didn’t start a rehab assignment, the wall was increasingly covered with writing.

Flexor tendon surgery generally requires six to 10 months of recovery. Tarik Skubal is a recent example: he had surgery on August 17 of last year and threw his first minor league start on June 4 before returning to the majors yesterday. That puts May on track to return to the majors next June, or perhaps earlier if his rehab goes well. That’s the optimistic case, though; the pessimist’s view is that repeated elbow injuries are the worst omen imaginable, and that May might need more time to return at all, and certainly to return in good form. After all, he’s only made 14 starts since Tommy John surgery; that’s hardly enough time to know what kind of pitcher he is now, let alone whether he’ll be able to mount another comeback so soon.

The Dodgers have built their team around pitching redundancy in recent years. They’ve signed reclamation projects in free agency, hoarded pitching prospects, and generally tried to keep more pitchers around than they’ll need at any one time. That was a prescient decision. May’s initial injury coincided with an IL stint for Julio Urías, and Noah Syndergaard followed not long after. Walker Buehler is recovering from his own TJ surgery. Throw Kershaw in the mix, and that’s a solid five-man rotation’s worth of injured Dodgers.

Where does that leave their regular starting rotation? There’s a lot of uncertainty, no doubt, but their team-building might just dig them out of this pitching hole. Urías returned on Sunday. He looked rusty, and he probably is, but he’s still an excellent pitcher. Tony Gonsolin is off to a forgettable start, but he’s a nice mid-rotation arm, a luxury for a team flailing for starters. After that, the Dodgers turn things over to the kids.

Bobby Miller is the team’s second-best prospect (and No. 33 overall), and he’s been showing off his upper-90s sinker for over a month now. There’s a lot of May in him, minus the delightful hair and hopefully minus the injury concerns. Emmet Sheehan got roughed up by the Pirates yesterday, but he looked sharp in Double-A and then put up three straight solid starts to kick off his major league career. He has a nasty four-seam fastball… and a slider that needs all the help it can get.

That’s not where the rookie parade ends, either. Michael Grove is more of a swingman, the type of guy you hope to keep as a “seventh starter” for injury protection, and it has shown in his major league results this year (7.02 ERA in 41 innings). But his underlying numbers look uninspiring rather than abysmal (4.53 xFIP), and he’s likely headed back to the bullpen. Gavin Stone, another top 100 prospect (no. 63), got an early-season cup of coffee and is back in the majors now as a long reliever. He was called up after Kershaw hit the IL, and I suspect he might fit into the starting mix if Kershaw misses more than the minimum time.

Urías, Gonsolin, and four rookies: it hardly sounds like a dominant rotation. It’s not a dominant rotation, in fact. Kershaw and May lead all Los Angeles starters in WAR this year, and that’s with May not having pitched for nearly two months. The Dodgers don’t need it to be dominant, though. Hit on one of the four rookies, get Kershaw back, and trade for a decent starter at the deadline, and the result would be a perfectly serviceable playoff group. Heck, hit on two of the four rookies, and you’d have that same group with injury backup. That’s a perfectly reasonable plan, and it doesn’t assume anything from Syndergaard (who might just be bad now) and Buehler (who might not be back in time). That doesn’t mean that they’re in the clear, of course; further injuries could leave them in a pickle, and Kershaw is on the IL literally right now. But for a team with this deluge of injuries, the Dodgers are in reasonable shape.

The May injury news is a bummer all the same. He’s an absolute joy to watch, 15 pounds of twitchiness in a 10-pound bag, and that’s just his mannerisms; his explosive sinker and turn-on-a-dime cutter are also great fun. I’m concerned about his future prospects, though. Two major surgeries on the same elbow in a three-year span is beyond ominous. I’m rooting for a full-strength return next spring, but it’ll be a tense offseason waiting for updates on how his rehab is progressing. Don’t get me wrong: this is tough for the Dodgers, too. But they’ve got an army of reinforcements. For the moment, I’m more worried about May’s future than their present.