LOS ANGELES — There are a lot of dangerous jobs — loggers, high-steel ironworkers, lion tamers and, if reality TV is to be believed, ice-road truckers.
It might be time to add ‘Dodgers starting pitcher’ to the list of hazardous occupations.
River Ryan took a shutout into the fifth inning Saturday night only to leave the game after reacting with discomfort following a slider thrown wide of the strike zone. Ryan said he felt tightness in his right forearm. He will undergo an MRI on Sunday.
The Dodgers’ bullpen picked up from there, answering yet another early call to work and taking it from there as the Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 4-1 Saturday night.
The win maintained the Dodgers’ lead in the National League West on another day when both of their pursuers, the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks, won again.
“Third inning, I started feeling a little tightness in my forearm,” Ryan said after the game. “I got the Theragun, ran it through my arm a little bit. Went back out there for the fifth. Last two pitches, really started to tighten up on me a little bit. I begged Doc to let me keep going. But he pulled the plug on it.”
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Ryan will go on the Injured List Sunday as they await the results of his MRI. Ryan becomes the 10th starting pitcher the Dodgers have placed on the Injured List already this season (including Tony Gonsolin, Emmett Sheehan and Dustin May who won’t throw a pitch this year).
“This is probably the highest number I’ve dealt with. And really quality arms,” Roberts said. “You try to do everything you can to prepare them, take care of them, give them extra rest. Right now, it’s just happening a lot, certainly to us.”
If it has happened to Ryan now, he thinks the stress of MLB’s 15-second pitch clock is to blame.
“The pitch clock definitely makes you speed up a lot. Which back in the day you didn’t have to speed up as much when you threw,” he said. “Throwing back-to-back pitches within 15 seconds, it starts to take a toll. But I’m going to go to the doctor tomorrow morning and see how it pans out.”
Matched up against rookie sensation Paul Skenes (the National League’s starter in the All-Star Game) Saturday, Ryan was the rookie who was more in command of the moment – thanks to some stellar defense.
Ryan started it himself with the play of the night on the first play of the game. Ryan was a shortstop as well as closer in college who flirted with the possibility of a two-way career before the Dodgers turned him towards pitching full-time. He looked like a shortstop when he bare-handed Isiah Kiner-Falefa’s chopped ground ball on the grass near the third-base line and made a spinning, nearly-blind, off-balance throw to get him at first base.
“River’s play in the first — the level of difficulty, I don’t see a pitcher making that play,” Roberts said. “That’s extremely difficult, athletic, arm strength to make the throw.”
Gavin Lux helped Ryan out with a leaping catch of Rowdy Tellez’s line drive in the second inning, throwing to first to double up the runner there.
And four-time Gold Glove winner Kevin Kiermaier contributed his first Gold Glove-level play since joining the Dodgers, leaping up and crashing into the wall in center field to catch Tellez’s warning track drive in the fourth inning.
All of that allowed Ryan to take a four-hit shutout into the fifth inning. He retired the first two batters – one on a nice running catch by Jason Heyward down the right-field line. But he pulled a 2-and-1 slider to Michael A. Taylor wide of the plate and grimaced, shaking out his right arm. That brought Roberts and a trainer to the mound and ended Ryan’s fourth major-league start after 56 pitches.
“It really just started tightening up on me a bit, and then Doc was concerned, the trainer was concerned,” Ryan said.
“I definitely didn’t want to come out of the game. I wanted to finish. But they saw me grimace a little bit on the mound, and they’re not going to take any chances. So they decided to call it then and there.”
He left with the Dodgers leading 4-0 thanks largely to Lux.
When the Dodgers faced Skenes for the first time in Pittsburgh earlier this season, Lux was still trying to find himself after missing last season with a knee injury, taking what he called “defensive swings” that produced weak contact.
They produced no contact against Skenes that night. Lux struck out twice.
In his first two at-bats Saturday, though, Lux lined an RBI double to center and a two-run single to right.
Lux has been the Dodgers’ best hitter over the past month, batting .364 (28 for 77) with seven doubles, four home runs and 18 RBIs in 26 games.
“Just in a better frame of mind,” Lux said of the difference in him since that June series in Pittsburgh. “I think just having more at-bats – when did we face him? June? – yeah, just having more at bats and building confidence. Second time you see a guy hopefully you see him better than the first time and also he made some really good pitches that first time we played him and I didn’t get much to hit.
“I think just a better frame of mind, more confidence and more at-bats.”
Skenes’ fastball averaged 99.5 mph and topped out at 101.3 mph during that June start against the Dodgers. His velocity is down now in the second half of his rookie season – he never broke 99 mph and averaged 97.7 mph Saturday.
Teoscar Hernandez turned on a ‘splinker’ — a hybrid splitter-sinker that Skenes throws — at a mere 93.4 mph for a solo home run in the fifth inning for the Dodgers’ fourth run off Skenes. It was the first time anyone has homered off that pitch, Skenes said, and the first time he has given up four runs in a game as a big-leaguer.
