River Ryan shook his right hand in the middle of the fifth inning on Saturday and grimaced in pain. Manager Dave Roberts saw the facial expression and ran out to him with an athletic trainer.
After 4.2 innings of scoreless baseball, the rookie was lifted for what was termed right forearm tightness.
The Dodgers went on to beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 4-1 but the news regarding Ryan on Sunday morning was just another obstacle on the team’s path to the postseason.
A Sunday morning MRI confirmed that Ryan’s injury was significant enough to sideline him for at least the next two months, ending his season after just four starts and adding him to what seems like a forever-expanding injured list.
The Dodgers have already placed 11 pitchers on the IL at least one time this season. Ryan joins them and surgery could be “in play” according to Roberts.
“Fortunately, we’ve got a lot of depth and a lot of good ball players, so we’ll just try to backfill,” Roberts said Saturday night. “But I just feel bad for River.”
In four MLB starts this season, Ryan had a 1.33 ERA and 18 strikeouts in 20.1 innings. Those are incredible numbers for a positioned player who turned into a pitcher just two years ago.
Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin, Emmet Sheehan, Kyle Hurt, Walker Buehler, Clayton Kershaw, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, and Bobby Miller are just a few of the names who have spent time on the IL this season.
“I think that we clearly don’t have the answers to taking care of pitchers and keeping them healthy,” Roberts said of the baseball industry at large, which has reckoned with a perceived epidemic of pitching injuries in recent years. “I think the industry is doing the best they can to manage workload, manage pitch count, but clearly we don’t have it nailed … The bottom line is injuries are way up.”
However, the Dodgers’ pitching staff has been quite injury-prone over the past few seasons.
Over the last five years, they’ve had seven pitchers undergo Tommy John surgery, a total that ranks in the top third of the league, according to a database compiled by baseball researcher Jon Roegele.
In the last three seasons, Dodgers pitchers have managed at least 25 starts in a season just four times.
“There are a lot of factors that are involved,” Friedman said, arguing those woes reflect a larger trend around the sport, which has incentivized pitchers to push the limits of their bodies in search of higher fastball velocities and breaking ball spin rates.
“But the point is,” Friedman added, “it’s too much.”
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