Dodgers: Recounting Blake Treinen’s winding path to LA

The Dodgers added reliever Blake Treinen on a one-year, $10 million deal. Will he pitch like he did as an All-Star in 2018, or remain stuck in his 2019 rut?

Over the course of just two seasons, Treinen, a now-31-year-old righty sinkerballer, went from being arguably the best reliever in all of baseball to being removed from the closing role by the Oakland Athletics during the regular season and being non-tendered this offseason by the team that drafted him back in 2011, before being signed by the Dodgers. The lanky 6’5” power pitcher mixed his sinker, fastball, changeup, and slider almost perfectly two seasons ago, solidifying the A’s bullpen on his way to his first career selection to the All-Star team. A seventh-round pick out of South Dakota State, a school that only went Division I the year he signed with them, Treinen needed less than 50 games in Single-A before being elevated into the MLB.

So how exactly did he get to LA? Did he rise through the ranks as a top prospect or did he emerge from obscurity? Is he on the rise or has he already hit his peak?

Like many stories surrounding the Oakland A’s, from their general manager Billy Beane’s to that to their historic losses of the 1980s against the Dodgers, the story of Treinen belongs in Hollywood, and fittingly, that’s exactly where he ended up.

In this article, I’ll get into the story of Blake Treinen, across his time in the minors and with the Washington Nationals into his peak with the Athletics, before discussing his 2019 season and what his future with the Dodgers in 2020 holds.

Life after the trade: Treinen’s breakout 2018 campaign

After the trade, Treinen found a way to turn his season around once he arrived in Oakland. In 35 games with his new team, Treinen became the closer, saving 13 games with a career-high 9.95 K/9 and a 2.13 ERA. His velocity on his signature sinker was up to 97.8 mph, another career-best mark.

All signs pointed to a major turnaround for Treinen, and his 2018 season proved to be by far the best of his career.

The fateful 2018 season saw Treinen’s sinker liven up to 98mph, but that certainly was not the only career-high the Kansas-native saw that year. Treinen pitched in 80.1 innings, his most in the major leagues and his most as a professional since his 2014 stint as a starter. In those innings, Treinen set a career-high in saves (38), K/9 (11.2), and in FIP (1.82).

His walk rate and HR/FB dropped back down to near their 2014 levels, and his ERA plummetted to an elite 0.78. His ERA was the lowest in the MLB amongst qualified relievers, and his WAR (3.6) led all qualified relievers as well.

This was Treinen’s year. This was the season where all of the potential the A’s saw in him after the Doolittle trade was being realized, as he even out-performed Doolittle. Treinen never really even had a cold stretch. He had sub-1.00 ERA’s in the first and second halves of the season. Across the entire season (six months) Treinen allowed one earned run or less in a month four times. In his 32.1 second-half innings, the newly-dubbed star reliever only allowed five walks.

All of the statistics and certainly the majority of analysts saw Treinen’s breakout campaign as a sign of future success. How could a pitcher this dominate fall out of the spotlight? At the end of the 2018 season, Treinen was 30 years old, still well within his physical prime, without any major injuries to his name during his MLB career. He had successfully navigated the whirlwind of success that he’d seen in 2018 and was ready to regroup with a strong 2019 Athletics club primed to make another run at a Wild Card slot, but in classic Treinen fashion, the most likely result failed to come to pass…

Treinen’s 2019 collapse

After his 2018 season, many predicted Treinen to be one of the elite relievers in the game for the 2019 season, and one month into the year, there were no reasons to doubt that. Through March and April, Treinen had a 3.00 ERA with 18 strikeouts in 15 innings pitched. He had 11 walks though, and five runs allowed were more than he allowed in any one month in 2018. In fact, five runs were more than he’d allowed in any two consecutive months from the 2018 season combined.

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The decline only steepened from this point on. Treinen’s monthly ERAs all were higher than 4.00, with his June and August ERAs climbing above 5.00. In September/October, Treinen only pitched 2.2 innings, allowing five walks and a home run. Even with all of these ERA struggles, in May, Treinen still struck out 11 batters, and he even found a way to curb the control problems that plagued him for the rest of the year, as he only walked one.

Treinen ended up walking 17 batters across June and July with only 15 strikeouts; he also faced less than 45 batters in both months. This marked a steep decline in usage that certainly makes sense based on the statistics, but also must have made it difficult to find a rhythm. A season before, Treinen had thrown 12 or more innings every month.

Maybe he lost some of his signature stuff and his control due to fatigue from being overworked, which makes sense based on his diminished velocity numbers. If that is the case, the less than 60 innings he threw in 2019 should have helped refresh his arm, which bodes well for the Dodgers in 2020.

Treinen’s journey to and through the Major Leagues has been long and circuitous, but if he can regain his 2018 form this season for the Dodgers, he certainly will have a chance to pitch in meaningful late-postseason games in front of 50,000+ for the first time in his career, something that a young kid from Wichita, Kansas certainly never could have envisioned.

Regardless of how well he performs, the Dodgers certainly made the right move in giving Treinen a shot at righting the ship, and hopefully, he repays them with a bounceback season.