LOS ANGELES — The Dodgers won a championship in 2024 with a decimated starting rotation and dominant bullpen, then flipped the script with a stellar rotation buoying a shaky bullpen to win another title in 2025. This year the Dodgers might have melded the two heading into October.
“We have a lot of really talented arms,” general manager Brandon Gomes said Tuesday. “I think this is about as deep of a pitching staff as we’ve ever had. There’s a lot of really good options to work through as a group.”
For now, we’ll focus on the rotation, which looks just as strong this year as it did last October, even though Shohei Ohtani hasn’t pitched since July 3 and will not pitch this postseason. The Dodgers filled that slot with a two-time Cy Young Award winner, trading for Tarik Skubal on August 2.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto was again the rock of the starting rotation, making every start for the second year in a row. Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow each missed multiple months with a long injured-list stint in season, then returned with enough of a runway to get ready for October. All four put up solid numbers this season.
“To be honest, we can kind of really put all four guys in a hat, and run them out there,” manager Dave Roberts said Tuesday.
Last year, Yamamoto, Snell, Ohtani, and Glasnow combined to start all 17 postseason games, and put up a collective 2.55 ERA in 113 innings, with 127 strikeouts and a 28.5-percent strikeout rate. All four of them pitched in Game 7 of the World Series, including Yamamoto getting the final eight outs one day after winning Game 6 as the starter. Yamamoto last October pitched the Dodgers’ first two postseason compete games since 1988, and Blake Snell had starts of eight and seven innings as well.
Quality starts are a bit crude, but criticism tends to focus on the minimum requirements — at least six innings, with no more than three earned runs allowed. But across MLB this regular season, teams went 1,094-484 (.693) in games when they got a quality start, with a collective 1.74 ERA from the starters in those games.
This season, the Dodgers led the majors with 83 quality starts, eight more than the next-best team, the Philadelphia Phillies. Those 83 quality starts by the Dodgers this year were their most since 2015, when they got 95 quality starts from a rotation that included the second- and third-place finishers in National League Cy Young Award voting (Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw). They were 60-23 (.723) when getting a quality start in 2026.
Dodgers starters last postseason had 10 quality starts, more than any pitching staff since the 2013 Detroit Tigers. Those 10 quality starts in 17 games were one more than the Dodgers had in their previous five postseasons combined, totaling 53 games.
Last postseason, the Dodgers won all 10 of the games in which they received a quality start, with zero or one run allowed by the starter in seven of those games. Two of those quality starts were by Ohtani, but he’s replaced in the rotation by Skubal, who last postseason posted three quality starts in his three tries, totaling 36 strikeouts and four runs allowed in his 20 2/3 innings for the Detroit Tigers.
“Watching Tarik Skubal pitch in the playoffs last year was must-see TV. I was in awe, watching the energy, the dominance he exhibited there,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said in August after trading for Skubal. “I can’t wait to see it on our club.”
