Andrew Friedman gave a longer answer Sunday morning when asked about the Dodgers’ recent — and, by the feel of it, familiar — pitching woes so far this year, the club’s president of baseball operations bemoaning another wave of injuries that has left the pitching staff shorthanded.
But the gist of his answer was in the two words he uttered at the start of his response.
“Not fun,” he said.
In the Dodgers’ 6-4 loss to the Angels later in the day, it became even less so.
As things currently stand, Tony Gonsolin is effectively the No. 2 pitcher in the Dodgers’ rotation, thrust into such a prominent role with Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell and Roki Sasaki injured. But in a four-run, four-inning start, Gonsolin was derailed by his own physical issue, battling a bloody thumb in a three-run first inning that put the Dodgers behind the eight ball.
The Dodgers rallied, erasing what grew to a 4-0 deficit on Shohei Ohtani’s RBI single in the fifth and Will Smith’s tying three-run home run in the seventh. But then a banged-up bullpen gave the Angels the lead right back, with Travis d’Arnaud going deep in the eighth against Anthony Banda — himself forced into a high-leverage role lately, despite a disappointing start to the year, because of injuries to Blake Treinen, Evan Phillips and Kirby Yates (who became the latest pitcher to hit the injured list on Sunday with a hamstring strain he suffered the night before).
Friedman argued the Dodgers’ injury problems this year don’t compare to the dire straits they navigated en route to last year’s World Series title. Unlike then, the team hasn’t suffered any season-ending losses. In the big picture, they remain confident they’ll have enough depth to mount a title defense.
And yet, the team hasn’t discovered the secret to better health. Their rotation problems are giving the bullpen an unsustainably grueling workload. And figuring out how to better protect the club’s expensive stable of arms is “by far the No. 1 thing that keeps me up at night,” Friedman said.
“I mean, everything from my brain is about what we can do, like, how we can solve this,” Friedman added, the self-described “deep dive” the organization took into pitching injuries this offseason having yet to yield better results. “It’s like a game of Whack-a-Mole, and things keep popping up. … The definition of enough depth, I think is a fool’s errand. I don’t know what enough depth means. I think more is always better with pitching depth.”
But, with the team ranking 21st in the majors with a 4.18 team earned-run average, what they have currently certainly isn’t enough.
“It is what it is, I guess,” manager Dave Roberts said. “You just sort of have to deal with things as they come up.”
Gonsolin’s bloody thumb was the latest unexpected dilemma, arising when the pitcher picked at some dead skin on his thumb after his pregame warm-up and “took some good skin with it,” he said. “Just wouldn’t stop bleeding.”
After Gonsolin gave up a leadoff home run to Zach Neto on a sunny afternoon at Dodger Stadium, trainers came to the mound to check on his right throwing hand. As they examined him, applying a skin adhesive to address the problem, the television broadcast zoomed in on streaks of blood covering the backside of his pants.
While Gonsolin said he didn’t want to use his bloody thumb as an excuse, his struggle to command the baseball quickly became obvious. With one out, he walked Yoán Moncada, looking visibly uncomfortable as he sprayed the ball wide of the zone. In a 2-and-0 count to his next batter, Taylor Ward, Gonsolin threw a fastball over the heart of the plate. Ward crushed it for a two-run homer.
“I just couldn’t execute pitches,” said Gonsolin, whose 4.05 ERA still ranks second among the Dodgers’ current five-man rotation. “I’m not going to blame my thumb or whatever. Just didn’t pitch good today.”
Gonsolin did settle down from there, giving up just one more run the rest of the way. But his pitch count never got back under control, requiring 97 throws to get through four innings.
It was already the 14th time in 47 games that a Dodgers starter failed to work into the fifth, and left them with just 13 combined innings from their starters in this weekend’s series sweep by the Angels.
“We were fortunate to get him through four, but still, you know, with what we went through this series with the starters, there’s a lot of innings our ‘pen had covered, and that’s unfortunate,” Roberts said.
Indeed, all those short starts have had a cascading effect on the team’s relievers. And pitchers such as Banda have had to compensate as a result.
Sunday’s outing marked Banda’s 21st appearance this season, becoming the fifth Dodgers reliever to reach that mark. Entering the day, no other team had more than three.
After pitching a clean seventh, Banda returned for the eighth and was bitten again by a common problem. In a 3-and-1 count against d’Arnaud, he threw a center-cut sinker that d’Arnaud crushed to left. It was Banda’s fifth home run given up, tying the total he yielded in 48 appearances over last season. It raised his ERA to 4.37, more than a run above his mark last season.
“I think that there’s a lot of sinkers that are not sinking, they’re not commanded. He’s getting into some bad counts. There’s times where he’s not landing his slider,” Roberts said of Banda’s struggles. “So I think it’s just a compilation of things.”
And this time, the Dodgers couldn’t answer, suffering their first three-game Freeway Series sweep to the Angels since 2010, and first three-game sweep at home to anybody since 2023.
“I think, to be honest, we just didn’t pitch well this series,” Roberts said.
Until the pitching staff gets healthy, it’s a shortcoming that will continue to threaten the Dodgers.