The Los Angeles Dodgers ended the 2024 Major League Baseball season as World Series Champions, but with the 2025 year hours away, there is still some room for improvement for the upcoming season.
That said, with the New Year coming up, what are some New Year’s resolutions that the Dodgers themselves can make for the upcoming 2025 season?
Make Starting Pitching Great Again
Historically, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ identity has been their excellent pitching. From Sandy Koufax to Clayton Kershaw, pitching has been the bloodline for the Dodgers franchise, leading Major League Baseball with twelve National League Cy Young winners.
However, over the last two seasons, the Dodgers have taken a more offensive first approach, which is to be expected when you have a three-headed monster atop the lineup in Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman.
One area where the Dodgers have “struggled” is their starting pitching, which they have tried to correct but to no avail.
After an offseason in which the Dodgers added right-handed pitchers Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, brought back veteran lefty Clayton Kershaw and recruited some reinforcements from the farm system in Gavin Stone, the Dodgers ranked bottom in the National League in multiple categories.
As a whole, the Dodgers’ starting rotation ranked 12th in innings pitched (797.2), 10th in ERA (4.23), 11th in FIP (4.28), and 9th in WHIP (1.26), when just three seasons ago, they ranked in the top five in all of Major League Baseball.
To make matters worse, the Dodgers have not had a top-ten finisher in the National League Cy Young race since 2022, when estranged young lefty Julio Urias finished third in the voting.
With the Dodgers set to deploy a six-man starting rotation along with the additions of lefty Blake Snell, who himself is a two-time Cy Young Award winner, and Shohei Ohtani returning to the mound, let’s hope the Dodgers rotation can stay healthy and perform and get us our first Cy Young winner since 2014 when Clayton Kershaw won.
Limit Pitching Injuries
You could argue that the first two New Year’s resolutions go hand in hand as the health of the Dodgers pitchers dramatically impacts the overall performance on the field.
Overall, in 2024, the Los Angeles Dodgers used nineteen different starting pitchers, which was by far the most in baseball this season. But despite all odds, the Dodgers still managed to win the National League West, finish with the best record in Major League Baseball, winning the National League Pennant, and defeat the New York Yankees in the 2024 World Series with just three starting pitchers (Jack Flaherty, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Walker Buehler) and a bullpen that started four games winning two of them.
While it was an unorthodox route to the franchise’s eighth World Series title, it is something they won’t want to roll back come October of 2025.
Pitching injuries are a league-wide issue, but they seemed to have hit the Dodgers the hardest, with multiple young starters having season-ending arm/elbow surgeries, such as Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin, River Ryan, Emmet Sheehan, and countless others.
The Dodgers’ plan to counter this is load management. It starts with the aforementioned six-man rotation, which should alleviate the potential burden of being overworked and manage the innings of returning pitchers from injury or just ones with a shaky health record.
The Dodgers, as an organization, have one of, if not the best, pitching depths in Major League Baseball, and you will see them take advantage of that.
The Dodgers are also not finished this offseason as the last prize of the offseason would be young right-handed Japanese pitcher Rōki Sasaki, who they have already met with and have stated is a “major priority” this winter.
If the Dodgers were to get Sasaki, that would give them an absurd eight starting pitching options with Snell, Yamamoto, Glasnow, Ohtani, followed by May, Gonsolin, and potentially Bobby Miller and Clayton Kershaw.
Solidify the Bench
As the offseason progresses, the Dodgers will soon address the depth of their roster. One area that could use to retolling is their bench.
Currently, the only locks for the Dodgers bench are Austin Barnes, Miguel Rojas, Michael Conforto, and Chris Taylor, but there is always room for improvement.
For starters, what do the Dodgers do with young Andy Pages, who showed he was a Major League-ready hitter and elite against southpaws with a 164 wRC+?
Top prospect Dalton Rushing also seems poised to take the next step in his career but is blocked by Will Smith and Barnes. Do the Dodgers switch him back to left field as they did last season in Triple-A?
Then you have fan-favorite Kiké Hernández, who is still unsigned, has stated he wants to return to Los Angeles, and has a proven postseason track record.
These questions will all be surely answered by the end of spring training, but it’s never too early to think of them now.