They were both learning to do something they had never done before, Mookie Betting play shortstop full time and Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitching in the major leagues.
Their respective educations were suddenly suspended on Sunday.
bets he broke his left hand when he was hit by a 98 mph fastball during the Dodgers victory 3-0 about him Kansas City Royals. Yamamoto was placed on the injured list with a strained rotator cuff.
Manager Dave Roberts He said he expected both players to return this season, but what he didn’t mention was how unlikely it was that they would return as the players the Dodgers hoped they would be.
How can the Dodgers count on Betts to play shortstop at a championship level in October after missing the next few weeks?
How can they trust Yamamoto to be their second starter in the playoffs after he slumped just two months into the season?
In both cases, they can’t.
Read more: Mookie Betts will miss several weeks after suffering broken hand in Dodgers’ win
This shouldn’t cost the Dodgers the National League West (they lead the division by eight games) but if they really want to compete for a World Series, they’ll have to reach a couple of deals between now and the July 30 trade. deadline.
Here’s the problem: there may not be any deal they can close.
The Brewers are in first place and are unlikely to trade their shortstop, even though he will be a free agent this winter.
The two-time All-Star is experiencing the worst season of his career and the Toronto Blue Jays They may only want to move it if they have a liquidation sale.
The pitcher market is equally boring, if not more so.
Corbin Burnes and dylan cessation, the top two pitchers expected to be on the market, have already been traded. Burnes went from the Brewers to the Baltimore Orioles and Cessation of white sock toward San Diego Padres.
Luis Severino of the New York Mets and tyler anderson of the Angels figure that will move in the coming months, but neither is considered better than the pitchers the Dodgers already have.
The Dodgers should not look for quantity, of which they already have a lot. They should look for quality.
Their lack of high-level pitching cost them the last few postseasons, and the more than half a billion dollars they invested in Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow It was an indirect recognition of that. Yamamoto and Glasnow, however, carried great risks.
Glasnow has never made more than 21 starts in a season nor pitched more than 120 innings. He made his 15th start of the season when he pitched seven scoreless innings on Sunday, the most starts he had made in a row without suffering an injury.
There were also questions about the durability of Yamamoto, who is 5-foot-10 and pitches just once a week in Japan. Yamamoto rarely threw his slider in his home country, as he believed it caused discomfort in his elbow. He didn’t throw a single slider in any of his first six starts with the Dodgers, but the increased level of competition forced him to adapt.
Yamamoto threw the floor a season-high 13 times during a recent start against the New York Yankees in which he recorded seven blank innings. He delayed his next departure for three days. When he finally returned to the mound on Saturday, his fastball velocity had dropped and he lasted only two innings.
Was the slider responsible for your injury?
“That’s a fair question,” Roberts said.
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Do you need the pitch to be effective at this level?
Considering Yamamoto relies heavily on a four-seam fastball, a splitter and a curveball, Roberts said that “having something that’s hard and spins left, that’s definitely another weapon.”
“But there’s a balance: If that’s something that causes discomfort, then you have to think carefully about it,” Roberts said.
Yamamoto will refrain from pitching for the next few weeks, according to Roberts.
“We’ll see where we go from there,” Roberts said.
The timetable for Betts’ return was also unclear, although Betts said he should have a better idea after a scheduled visit Monday with hand specialist Steven Shin.
Shohei Ohtani said in Japanese about watching Betts fall to the ground after being hit by a heater thrown by the Royals right-hander. and altavilla: “I think it was a difficult moment for the team as a whole. I think he is an indispensable player.”
On the offensive, certainly.
However, on defense, Betts remains a below-average shortstop. The last time he played that position regularly was in high school and he didn’t move there this year until shortly before opening day. Betts has tried to make up for his experience by throwing ground balls before almost every game.
Every game Betts misses will cost him a chance to make up the ground he lost while playing right field and second base during the previous 10 years of his major league career.
“As I pray for his return,” Ohtani said, “I’d like us to cover him as a team.”
Ohtani didn’t say this, but the responsibility to do so is not exclusive to the players. Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and the small army of assistants who make up the front office share the load. They will have to find players in a down market.
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This story originally appeared on Los Angeles Times.