How a Dodgers Six-Man Rotation Could Work. Or Could Not.
And my thoughts on the possible return of Teoscar Hernandez.
The Dodgers opting in to a six-man rotation was never the given it was made out to be. In fact, the notion that Los Angeles would employ six starting pitchers from their March 18 opener in Tokyo to the September 28 season finale at Seattle was more a media-created assumption than anything else.
I suppose such thinking was inevitable because of the hoped-for return of Shohei Ohtani to the mound some 18 months after his most recent elbow surgery. The thinking was flawed, however. The thinking that went something along the lines of this: “L.A. has a bunch of injured starters returning after missing the 2024 season due to injury, and they’ll have Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto back, and they’ve added 2024 Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell to the mix, so naturally they’re going to use an extra man to spread the innings around, to keep everyone fresh for another postseason run.
What’s missing from the equation is this: the employment of a six-man Dodgers rotation is and always was predicated on Ohtani being one of the six. Because with the
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