Cody Snavely
PHILADELPHIA— Entering the 2025 Major League Baseball season, few Los Angeles Dodgers fans were familiar with the name Ben Casparius.
To their credit, when the team broke for camp, Ben was on the lower end of the totem pole in terms of the roster, but after a few key injuries and a decent spring, he earned himself a spot on the roster.
Drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the fifth round of the 2021 Major League Baseball Player Draft, Casparius was an intriguing pitching prospect during his time in college.
During his freshman year with North Carolina, he was a two-way player with a 1.69 ERA, eighteen hits, and fifteen RBIs. However, he would translate to pitcher only the following season before finishing his collegiate career at the University of Connecticut (UCONN).
Casparius’s minor league career with the Dodgers has been primarily as a starter, appearing in seventy-nine games and starting fifty-seven of them.
Overall, Casparius posted a 4.62 ERA in 292.0 innings in the minor leagues. He had his best season last year, posting a 3.35 ERA in nineteen starts and earning a call-up to the Major League club.
Casparius’s time with the Dodgers during the regular season was brief, but after right-handed starter Michael Grove was injured, his role evolved during October.
Last season, the highlight of his young career thus far was getting the Game Four start in the 2024 World Series against the New York Yankees, with the team already up three to none.
Casparius would rise to the challenge and pitch two innings of one-run ball and, ending his 2024 postseason with a 1.42 ERA in 6.1 postseason innings.
When it was time for spring training, the Dodgers pitching staff was already feeling the injury bug. Right-handed relief pitchers Evan Phillips and Michael Kopech were expected to be out to start the season.
Michael Grove, who held the multi-inning bullpen role, would miss the rest of the season after undergoing shoulder surgery. Tony Gonsolin would have back tightness, leaving him off the roster to start the season.
All of these injuries created opportunities for multiple arms in the Dodgers organization, but it was Casparius who made the most significant leap from year to year.
The velocity was immediately noticeably different from Casparius’s, which was up around 1-2 mph on average from last season and even reached 99mph.
- 4-Seam: 95.5 -> 96.9 up 1.4 MPH
- Slider: 84.3 -> 86.7 up 2.4 MPH
- Cutter: 91.0 -> 95.3 up 4.3 MPH
- Curveball: 79.8 -> 85.6 up 5.8 MPH
His advanced metrics were also up across the board, according to Thomas Nestico’s tjStuff+ (@TJStats).
- 4-Seam: 112
- Slider: 115
- Cutter: 111
- Curveball: 109
Fast-forward to today, and Casparius has gotten off to a terrific start to the season, pitching seven scoreless innings out of the Dodgers bullpen with seven strikeouts and a 0.71 WHIP.
When I asked Dodgers manager Dave Roberts after yesterday’s game, in which Casparius pitched two scoreless innings out of the pen, how important that was, he could not agree more.
“Ben is a natural guy; he’s a multi-inning guy, he’s really tough on right-handers. So just kind of being a bridge guy that I can trust in leverage, but also keep up in a game if we’re down, eat up some innings; today Ben was fantastic.”
With the recent injury to left-handed pitcher Blake Snell earlier today and the pushback of Yoshinobu Yamamoto‘s start to Friday, it would not be shocking to see Ben pitch the bulk of innings out of the pen in one of the game while the team is in Washington D.C., against the Nationals.
It will get interesting down the stretch once key arms return to the Dodgers’ pitching staff. Who will be the odd man out, and how can Casparius make sure that it’s not him?
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