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.

Treinen’s Road to Success

Treinen’s story follows that tragic plot arc of many relief pitchers in today’s game, but before he even was drafted, his story is certainly different than most. Despite not playing NCAA collegiate baseball in his freshman year, Treinen trained to walk-on to the Div. I powerhouse program at the University of Arkansas. After failing to make the team, Treinen sent tape to South Dakota State, where he ended up staying until he was drafted by the A’s.

For the first few years of his professional career with the Oakland Athletics and Washington Nationals, Treinen was a starting pitcher. In 2012, Treinen made 15 starts in High-A for the A’s farm team and in 2013, he made 20 starts for the Nationals Double-A squad. Across both of those seasons as a minor league starter, Treinen struck out less than a batter per inning while allowing an opposing batting average of right around .270.

These unremarkable numbers continued in 2015 with the Nats major league club, who he started seven games for. Across 50 total innings that season, Treinen struck out 5.33 hitters per nine innings, but he allowed a minuscule 3.1% HR/FB rate and a solid 2.49 ERA. The promise was certainly there, as was evidenced by his sinker that averaged 95.8 mph. But maybe his value was not as a big-league starting pitcher.

That’s what the Nationals decided at least. His former team opted to push Treinen to the bullpen to leverage his wicked sinker. It worked. His average sinker velocity increased to 97.1 mph, and his numbers improved as well. His K/9 crept up to 8.65, demonstrating the added velocity helped him punch out hitters.

But not every aspect of his game improved. Compared to 2014, his ERA swelled up to 3.86, which was largely thanks to a 14.8% HR/FB rate. The main takeaway outside of home runs came in terms of his control. Treinen went from walking 2.31 batters per nine innings to 4.26 BB/9. That increase amounted to having more runners on base, and this more pressurized environment yielded more home runs and more damaging home runs.

But the difference in FIP was only .40 though, which implied that in general, he really had improved, or at least that he had not fallen off like the rest of his numbers implied. His 2016 season confirmed this, as his numbers largely stayed the same in terms of home runs, strikeouts, and walks, even as his ERA fell back down to 2.28.

The next season, the Nationals traded Treinen, along with a pair of big-time prospects, to the A’s in exchange for established veteran relievers Sean Doolittle and Ryan Madson. Treinen’s 2017 numbers looked a lot like his 2015 numbers though, which seemed to help the Nationals decision to ship him off. At the time of the trade, Treinen had a 5.73 ERA and 1.62 WHIP in less than 40 innings according to CBS Sports.

Treinen certainly didn’t seem like a viable setup man, let alone a closer for a potentially solid A’s club, but that’s when things started to change…

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.