Dodgers depending on Blake Snell as ‘workhorse’ reinforces tricky rotation situation

The Dodgers rotation is, on paper, one of the best (if not the best) in baseball, but it comes with a lot of caveats. By the time Shohei Ohtani and Clayton Kershaw are healthy, LA will have eight starting pitching candidates with Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Tony Gonsolin, and Dustin May. This definitely seems excessive, but it may not be given the Dodgers' history of pitching injuries.

Ohtani, Kershaw, Gonsolin, and May will all be returning from surgeries. Yamamoto and Glasnow both missed a significant amount of the 2024 season on the IL (Yamamoto is still expected to get just one start a week and Glasnow ended the year on the IL). Sasaki is still a relatively unknown quantity with a potentially worrisome history of injury himself, and the Dodgers are going to want to mirror his pitching schedule in Japan (once a week) as much as possible, at least at the beginning.

That leaves Snell, who didn't go unscathed last season. He started late after signing just a little over a week before Opening Day (thanks, Scott Boras) and was on and off the 15-day IL through the season, limiting him to just 104 innings.

However, given Glasnow's noted history of injury and the rest of the rotation's limitations, Snell might be the only starter who will be able to reliably give the Dodgers regular starts every five days. He went as far as to describe himself as a "workhorse" and allude to shooting for 200 innings this season.

Blake Snell might be the only Dodgers starter to make regular starts at the beginning of 2025

Snell has been able to get up to the 180-inning mark twice in his career — in his 2018 and 2023 Cy Young seasons — but he averages closer to 122 innings a season with nine under his belt. This definitely makes 200 a steep goal. Ultimately, Snell kept his sentiment simple: "I came here to pitch as much as possible."

Dave Roberts also acknowledged that he'll have to do "a little rotation gymnastics" to figure out how to pitch everyone optimally, but it helps that the Dodgers have enough starters to go for a six-man rotation right from the jump and can give basically everyone but Snell close to a week between starts.

However, as Dodgers pitching coach Mark Prior noted earlier in the offseason, six-man rotations leave a small margin for error. It'll be a tightrope walk, and if everything hinges on Snell being able to stay healthy then things could get messy, fast.