Dodgers: Recounting Blake Treinen’s winding path to LA

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.