World Series-winning manager has painfully unsympathetic take on Dodgers' injuries

25 Dodgers have spent over 2,000 collective days of the season on the IL, the most in baseball by far. Some of those days have been because of unfortunate accidents for position players — Mookie Betts getting his hand broken by an errant fastball — but most of them have been pitchers going down for soreness or inflammation and so on. Pitching injuries might've cropped up at an alarming rate at the beginning of the season, but the Dodgers are one of the only teams to have carried them through the entire year.

Tyler Glasnow is the latest to fall. When he went onto the 15-day IL for the second time this season, he was sure he would return as soon as he'd served his time. A month later, he's out for the rest of the year and was granted an "excused absence" from the team. Although Yoshinobu Yamamoto made it back and looked good doing it, he was on the shelf for two months.

The problem clearly needs to be diagnosed within the Dodgers' organization. You can't blame everything on the pitch clock; if it was all the pitch clock's fault, the rest of the league would be in similar situations now.

Former Angels, Cubs and Rays manager Joe Maddon had no sympathy for the Dodgers. In an appearance The Ricky Cobb Show, he said, "They don’t have enough starters. And even if they did, they don’t pitch deeply into the game and then you’ve got a worn-out bullpen. It’s their own fault. Don’t blame it on anything else."

Former Angels manager Joe Maddon didn't mince words about Dodgers' recent plague of pitching injuries

It's hard to admit that a guy who managed the Angels for five seasons was right about something, but Maddon is right. The pitch clock excuse has been one of the most common this season — River Ryan even called it out specifically before he went onto the IL and underwent Tommy John — but there's clearly something more at work within the organization.

The answer should be very simple: pitchers are throwing harder. Throwing harder means more wear and tear on the body. We really shouldn't have to be the ones to explain that to major league pitchers.

Andrew Friedman also tried to redirect blame, saying, "I think a lot of this starts at the youth level," but he also acknowledged that the Dodgers needed to put their heads together in the offseason to "investigate and 'reimagine' inward this winter when it comes to their pitching development and protocols" (subscription required).

The Dodgers are the only ones to blame here. When they get to the postseason with only two reliable starters, maybe it'll make that even clearer.