The Los Angeles Dodgers are going to be without Tyler Glasnow for a lot longer than anyone hoped. The reigning World Series champs announced Saturday that the right-hander has been moved to the 60-day injured list, with Nick Frasso called up to take his 40-man spot.
Glasnow has not thrown a pitch in a major league game since May 6, when he left his start against the Astros at Daikin Park with back pain. Two days later, the Dodgers put him on the 15-day IL. The 60-day designation means the earliest he can pitch again is sometime in July.
That timeline might still be optimistic. Per Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic, Glasnow is “not throwing at the moment,” which is not the kind of update you want to hear about a guy you signed to anchor a rotation.
The Dodgers are absorbing this without flinching. They entered Saturday at 41-23, the best record in the NL West and second-best in baseball behind only Atlanta. Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani have carried the rotation while Blake Snell continues to rehab from elbow surgery, also on the 60-day list.
In seven starts this season, Glasnow had been excellent: 3-0 with a 2.72 ERA and a 0.83 WHIP. That production is exactly what made the Dodgers spend big to keep him, and exactly what they will miss for the next several weeks.
Here is the problem with the Dodgers’ rotation depth. Yamamoto and Ohtani cannot pitch every other day. Tyler Glasnow has now been hurt for parts of three straight seasons since joining LA. Snell is still recovering. The bullpen has been carrying more innings than anyone wanted at this point in the calendar.
If you are wondering whether this changes anything about the trade deadline calculus in LA, the answer is yes. The Dodgers were already going to be active. Now they have a clear, urgent need for an arm who can give them six innings without question marks. That is a short list of available pitchers, and the price tag for any of them just went up.
For Glasnow, this is becoming the same story he has been telling for years. He pitches at an ace level when healthy. He just is not healthy often enough to actually be one. Back issues for a 6-foot-8 pitcher who throws upper-90s heat are not a small concern. They tend to come back.
The Dodgers will keep winning games. They have too much talent to do anything else. But the longer Glasnow stays in the training room and not on a mound, the more this season starts to feel like a repeat of last October, when they had to navigate the playoffs without their full rotation. That worked once. Doing it twice is a different question entirely.
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.
