Alexander: A day in the life of a rookie pitcher
LOS ANGELES — By the time 11 hectic, thrilling, gripping, borderline insane innings were completed at Dodger Stadium Saturday night, the kid who took the mound for the home side at the start of the evening may have been forgotten.
He shouldn’t have been.
Left-hander Justin Wrobleski is one of the young guys asked to hold down the fort while much of what was expected to be a vaunted Dodgers pitching staff has been in various stages of injury, recovery, simulated games, rehab starts and the like.
The kid isn’t bad. And he showed it late Saturday afternoon, in the amount of time he had available to him. Wrobleski made his third big league start his best so far: No runs, three hits, two walks and five strikeouts in 4-1/3 innings.
He left the game with a 1-0 lead – yes, it may be hard to remember back that far, given that this tussle finally ended up 7-6 Dodgers in 11 innings, and it featured two hits, two RBI and the winning run scored by Kiké Hernández, who didn’t get into the game until the seventh. One of those hits was a game-tying (and save blowing) home run off of Red Sox closer Kenley Jansen in the ninth … and Dodger fans, don’t tell me you haven’t witnessed that before in this ballpark.
Wrobleski, in truth, was the other part of a juicy second-guess earlier Saturday. When he got the first out of the fifth inning, retiring Dominic Smith on a fly to right, manager Dave Roberts came out and took the ball from him after 82 pitches. Wrobleski’s replacement, Yohan Ramírez, gave up two singles – one of them an infield grounder on which Chris Taylor couldn’t make the play – and a two-run double by Jarren Duran to make that lead disappear.
“I thought Justin threw the baseball well,” Roberts said. “You know, he’s still kind of cutting his teeth. The at-bats they were having, kind of grinding a little bit the first four innings, I didn’t feel he had enough to get through four more hitters where he was at, to get through (Rafael) Devers (who was due up sixth in that inning). And so I wanted to shorten the game, go to the pen.”
Having just turned 24 and with, as we said, just three games of big league experience, who was he to say no to the manager?
“I just think they thought bringing Johan in was a better option,” Wrobleski said.
“I throw until he comes and gets the ball. I think that’s just kind of what you do as a starting pitcher. So I trust them. And at the end of the day, as a starting pitcher, your job is to throw and throw up zeroes until they come get the ball from you.”
There are signs of improvement and advancement. His first Dodgers start, against Milwaukee on July 7, he made it through five and surrendered a pair of two-run home runs, one to Christian Yelich, the other to backup catcher Eric Haase. Last Saturday in Detroit, he again gave up four runs and two homers, both in the fifth, in a game the Dodgers eventually lost 11-9 in 10 innings.
But you can see the promise. Wrobleski was picked in the 11th round in 2021 out of Oklahoma State and went that low because he’d had Tommy John surgery two months before the draft. He pitched 10 games in the Arizona Complex League and three at low-A Rancho Cucamonga in 2022, spent 2023 in high-A at Great Lakes, and this year sped from Double-A Tulsa (5-2, 3.06 ERA in 10 starts) to Triple-A Oklahoma City (0-1, 4.35 ERA in two starts) to Los Angeles in a little more than three months.
Saturday afternoon he topped out at 97.6 mph with his four-seam fastball, averaged around 95.5, and got 15 swings and misses, around a third of the pitches that Red Sox hitters swung at. Besides the four-seamer he has a slider, cutter and sinker – he threw 10 each of those, according to Baseball Savant, compared to 51 four-seamers – and a curve that he only threw twice, one of which was fouled off.
“It’s been obviously a learning process for me, just kind of trying to learn what I can and can’t get away with up here and (the) tendencies that are a little different than in the minor leagues,” he said. “But it’s been good. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve really enjoyed the learning process of it. I think that’s just, I don’t know, part of my personality. I really enjoy the challenge and trying to learn and trying to consistently get better.”
Roberts talked about Wrobleski as a pitcher poised beyond what you’d expect for his age and his experience.
“In recent memory, he’s as confident, as comfortable, as poised as any young pitcher with three outings under their belt that I’ve seen,” Roberts said. “There’s still some things that I think he’s going to get better at, but, very, very confident young man. He’s got really good stuff.”
The ideal, of course, is for young pitchers such as Wrobleski to hang around the veterans and soak up the wisdom of their years. One of the characteristics of this club over the years has been Clayton Kershaw, standing at the the dugout rail between starts, imparting a lot of that wisdom.
But the veterans, as noted, are either hurt or recovering, the main reason why the young guys – Wrobleski, Landon Knack, Gavin Stone and soon prospect River Ryan – are either here or about to arrive.
“Just kind of understanding what guys do and kind of how they go about their business, I think, has been really important for me,” Wrobleski said. “(The veterans) have been really kind to me and kind of just helping me figure out where I need to be headspace-wise and kind of understanding that … the goal is to win games. And I think me getting deep into games helps us win games.”
I asked Wrobleski if he’d had much opportunity to hang around Kershaw yet.
“Not too much,” he said. “But I’m looking forward to getting the opportunity.”
jalexander@scng.com