The Los Angeles Dodgers are about to lose Blake Snell for a significant chunk of the season, and the rotation that was already shaky just got a lot shakier. The two-time Cy Young winner is scheduled for surgery on Tuesday and will miss what the team is describing as significant time.
The Dodgers have not specified the exact procedure or the projected timeline, which usually means the news is worse than they want to confirm publicly. When teams describe a surgery as significant without putting a number to the recovery, the over-under on the comeback date is usually in the four to six month range.
For the Dodgers, this is the worst possible time to lose a starting pitcher. Los Angeles has been dealing with a depleted rotation all season. Tyler Glasnow has been managing his own injury concerns. Yoshinobu Yamamoto is still ramping up after his own missed time. Shohei Ohtani is back to throwing but the team has been careful about his innings.
Losing Snell takes a top-of-the-rotation arm out of a group that was already too dependent on bullpen innings.
The financial side of the Snell situation is also brutal. Los Angeles signed Snell to a five-year, $182 million deal before the 2025 season. He missed time last year with shoulder issues. He pitched well when healthy and made a strong case for being the Dodgers’ best starter. The team needs that version of Snell in October, not on the operating table in June.
The injury also exposes the same recurring issue with the modern Dodgers. The team has spent more money on starting pitching than any franchise in baseball history over the past decade. The return on that investment has been remarkably inconsistent. Pitchers get hurt. Innings limits get triggered. The playoff rotations end up needing a Bobby Miller or a Walker Buehler in his comeback season to take meaningful starts.
For Andrew Friedman, the path forward is now defined by the trade deadline. The Dodgers were already looking at the available starters in the rumor mill. They will now look harder. Tarik Skubal is the obvious name. Freddy Peralta has been mentioned. The price for either one is going to be enormous.
The Skubal pursuit is a logical fit even though the Tigers will demand a fortune. Skubal is a Scott Boras client and will hit free agency at the end of the season. The trade cost has to factor in that the acquiring team is buying a rental. The Dodgers have prospect capital, but they have also been trading prospects for years and the system is thinner than it has been in some time.
The other option is internal. Roki Sasaki is in Triple-A and getting closer to a major league call up. Bobby Miller has been working back from his own injury issues. River Ryan is in the mix. None of those options inspire the same confidence as a healthy Blake Snell.
The Dodgers are still the best team in the National League West and one of the betting favorites in the National League overall. That is more a function of their offense and the rest of the league than any confidence in the pitching staff.
Snell’s surgery is the kind of news that changes the calculus for the entire NL playoff race. The Padres just got a little more dangerous. The Giants, if they go full sell mode, just made their division-rival job a little easier. The Dodgers still have time to figure it out. They just have less of it than they thought.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
