NL West Arms Race: Can Pitching Prospects Contribute to the Dodgers and Padres?

We’re in the phase of the minor league calendar where the domestic complex league seasons have ended, in order to accommodate the incoming draft classes, while the rest of the minor leagues continue with their regular seasons for a few more weeks. There are some recent draftees who have already been sent out to affiliates, but the majority have gotten going at their respective facilities during unofficial “Bridge League” or “Continuation Camp” activity with loose, flexible schedules and start times. There’s a big group chat in which scouts and development personnel (plus a handful of media folks, and probably a clandestine autograph hound or two) exchange lineups and pitching probables to keep everyone abreast of the goings on. Ceasing official play in Arizona and Florida allows teams to onboard their draft classes in an unofficial setting and avoids the traffic jam of minor roster spots, which would exceed the allowed amount if the draft classes were just assigned to affiliates right away.

This is also a fruitful place for rehabbers to see their first real game action since injury because teams can just “roll” innings whenever they feel like it. If you’re on a 25-pitch limit and you’ve hit your count without getting three outs, the inning will just turn over regardless of how many guys are on base. This setting is about development and is not an actual game, so it’s a safe place to shake off rust and work up a sweat. On Tuesday, when the Padres officially caught the Dodgers in the NL West race, I saw their Bridge League teams square off with two rehabbing members of their 40-man rosters getting an inning of work at the start of the game. In this piece, I’ll pass along how Kyle Hurt (Dodgers) and Bradgley Rodriguez (Padres) looked and examine whether either team has a postseason pitching weapon lurking in the minors.

Hurt’s Tommy John surgery was performed in late July 2024. He entered that season as a 50 FV prospect after he struck out 39% of opponents across 92 innings (mostly as a Double-A starter) in 2023, thanks largely to an elite changeup that looked and performed like a weapon in the Devin Williams stratosphere. A proactive, early-2024 move to the bullpen and the timing of Hurt’s surgery (which meant he’d miss most of the next two years) had a sizable impact on the way I then updated his grade to it’s current 40+ FV. Rather than seemingly poised to join the 2024 rotation at some point, Hurt was now on track to exhaust rookie eligibility at age 27 or 28, likely in a relief role but potentially an important one.

Hurt threw a single inning on Tuesday, his fastball in its usual 95-96 mph range. His changeup feel isn’t back yet, and he left a lot of them sitting over the heart of the plate, including one that undrafted free agent Bradley Frye tagged for a pull-side homer. Here’s Hurt’s inning; his changeup and breaking ball are both around 80 mph:

The Dodgers’ many injuries (they have 12 pitchers on the IL, including five significant ones to their bullpen in the last month) have left their relief corps thin and potentially vulnerable. Hurt’s late-season availability could be meaningful if the group incurs more injuries during the final six weeks of the season. One could make a case for peak Hurt as a better option than Alexis Díaz and maybe Edgardo Henriquez if Henriquez proves too wild to command a playoff roster spot, but Hurt looks a ways off from that right now (which is understandable given the context of the look).

Other proximate internal options for the Dodgers include José Rodríguez, a 6-foot-6, 24-year-old Mexican righty with multiple deceptive mechanical traits (a huge hip turn, late reveal of the baseball, seven feet of extension), mid-90s arm strength, and the secondaries to douse both lefties and righties. He pretty comfortably has the top swinging strike rate of any Dodgers pitcher in the minors who’s worked at least 100 combined innings during the last two seasons (and he’s second in the entire minors when you raise the IP minimum to 120), and has been punching tickets at a 34% clip in Triple-A, but he isn’t on the 40-man roster yet.

Matt Sauer is working with pretty nasty sinkers and cutters as a starter and might have a meaningful second gear in relief. It’s the gear Bobby Miller has been searching for as he’s been pitching out of the Oklahoma City bullpen for the last couple of weeks, always with lots of space between outings. Miller has taken a max-effort approach to throwing and his fastball has been parked in the 98-101 mph range, though he continues to work with all three of his secondary pitches. He and Henriquez (sitting 100 and peaking at 104 in the big leagues with crude feel for strikes) can both be considered high-variance “lightning in a bottle” contributors who have the stuff to work in high-leverage spots but haven’t proven they’re reliable enough to do so. If you told me either or both of them got hot late in the year and were unhittable in the playoffs, I’d believe you. If you told me neither made the playoff roster because of walks, I’d buy that, too.

Julian Fernández and Will Klein are slightly lesser version of this, while deadline acquisition Paul Gervase (who is on the 40-man) and Ronan Kopp (who is not) are inefficient strike-throwers whose fastballs have traits that help them play up despite “only” wielding mid-90s velo. If I’m handicapping candidates to help stabilize things in Los Angeles, Rodríguez is arguably the most complete pitcher of this entire group, while Miller and Henriquez wield the highest upside.

San Diego’s big league pitching staff is in a much better spot right now and less likely to be cracked by any new names. The Padres are uncommonly healthy, with only Joe Musgrove (whom I saw taking BP groundballs just for fun at shortstop during San Diego’s recent series in Arizona) and Jhony Brito on the IL, and then, of course, Bradgley Rodriguez, who has been on the shelf since July 4 with a biceps injury. This week Rodriguez sat 97-99 (his usual), while his breaking balls and splitter were both in the 84-86 mph area. Here is his inning of work:

The Padres bullpen is probably too good for Rodriguez to crack on talent alone during the rest of this season. It’s been the best bullpen in baseball by a pretty wide margin all season and added Mason Miller at the deadline. Though the space between his outings shrank throughout the year, Rodriguez hasn’t yet worked on back-to-back days this season and has only done so a couple of times throughout his entire career. That’s not damning long term, and Rodriguez still projects as an eventual higher-leverage arm (he’s only 21), but it’s tough to call someone ready for a pennant-race relief role when he has not worked on consecutive days for over a year as we hit the stretch run.

Most readers are familiar with the options the Padres have at Triple-A (Sean Reynolds, Ron Marinaccio, etc.) who aren’t “prospects” per se, and given the quality of the big league bullpen, they are relegated to depth roles at the moment. If there’s a pitcher in this system who is nasty enough to possibly make an argument that he’s one of the dozen best arms in the org come playoff time, it’s 23-year-old Miguel Mendez, who was recently promoted to Double-A San Antonio. Mendez has, historically, struggled with walks, but he posted a single-digit walk rate prior to his promotion. He has been a fastball/slider monster this year, with the latter generating elite miss and the heater peaking in the triple digits. He pitched last night against Tulsa and struggled, but he sat 97 throughout the entire outing (97-99 early) and reached back for an angry 100-101 after giving up a homer to Dodgers prospect Chris Newell. Mendez has starter ingredients (a projectable starter’s frame, a burgeoning changeup, sustained plus velocity), and he is a virtual lock to be put on the 40-man roster after the season and has a shot to be an offseason top 100 prospect. His strike-throwing improvement does not look, to the eye, as stark as it does on paper, but there’s huge ceiling here. It would take a couple of injuries at the big league level and an aggressive late-season bullpen trial to put Mendez in play for the bigs this year. It’s a long shot, but this guy is throwing really, really hard as a starter and is at least on the radar as a potential postseason piece based on the pace of his promotion and the quality of his stuff.

I’ve moved Mendez’s grade from the 40+ FV tier into the 45+ FV tier. He has mid-rotation ceiling if he can polish his command, but should at least be a nasty late-inning reliever if things continue to look like they did last night.