Dodgers News: Former slugger signs with Red Sox, Shohei Ohtani bullpen, Bobby Miller

The Dodgers and Red Sox have had a weird amount of player overlap in recent history. There's Mookie Betts, of course, but also JD Martinez, Justin Turner, Kiké Hernández, Joe Kelly, Kenley Jansen, Ryan Brasier (and more). The Dodgers have almost always come out on the better side of things — Red Sox fans will never forgive John Henry for trading Betts, Hernández has made it clear his heart is in LA, and Jansen and Turner have said they want to retire as Dodgers.

But the back-and-forth keeps on. The latest former Dodger to go to Boston will be Trayce Thompson, who signed a minor-league deal with the Red Sox on Monday and will join the team at spring training.

Last year, he split time between the Mets' and the Cubs' Triple-A teams but never saw the majors. His second-half stint with the Dodgers in 2022 is still his claim to fame; in just 74 games, he hit .268 with a .901 OPS, 13 homers, and 39 RBI for a 2.1 fWAR and earned himself $1.45 million for 2023 to avoid arbitration. However, the bloom came off the rose quickly in 2023, when he hit .155 with a .676 OPS in 36 games as was traded to the White Sox.

There is a chance that Thompson makes it back to the majors with the Red Sox in 2025, if their overcrowded infield and sparse outfield is any indication.

Dodgers News: Shohei Ohtani's first bullpen, Bobby Miller and Blake Snell team up

Over the weekend, Shohei Ohtani threw his first bullpen since an elbow surgery in 2023. He threw just 14 pitches, all fastballs, but he'd been kept to drills and long toss before Saturday. The Dodgers plan to work him back into the rotation in May, but the rest of his recovery should be tricky, as there are no plans to send him down to the minors for a rehab assignment. Instead, the Dodgers will have him throwing sim games every five or six days, ahead of regular contests.

In other pitching news, Bobby Miller, who was kind of an afterthought going into spring training, could threaten Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May for the fifth spot in the rotation if Blake Snell has anything to say about it. Snell committed himself to a mentor to Miller after the latter's awful 2024 season, and doubled down over the weekend, saying: "He’ll learn. He’s such an amazing talent. I don’t ask him what he did last year because I don’t care. I think what he’s gonna do is way more important than what happened. Learn from it, get better, whatever it was going bad and then this year is this year. Be ready for it."

Miller has historically been a standout at spring training; he impressed at Camelback during the ramp up to the 2023 season and was given an MLB debut in May. If he can replicate that somehow, the Dodgers might have some even tougher decisions to make about the rotation.