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…

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…