Sports
Dodgers are hopeful Tyler Glasnow can be an ace. But first, he'll have to stay healthy
For a pitcher who just signed a nine-figure contract extension, who has been mentioned as one of the best natural talents in baseball, and who figures to be one of the key cogs for this season’s Dodgers team, Tyler Glasnow’s personal goals for 2024 might seem rather modest.
“I just wanna stay healthy this year,” the long-haired, long-limbed and oft-injured right-hander said at the start of spring training this week. “And make all my starts.”
The Dodgers, of course, are expecting much more from the new co-ace of their remade rotation.
They dealt a sizable trade package to the Tampa Bay Rays to acquire Glasnow this offseason — giving up highly touted pitching prospect Ryan Pepiot and outfield prospect Jonny DeLuca — in hopes the 30-year-old flamethrower could fill the club’s void of true front-line pitching talent.
They extended Glasnow on a five-year, $136.5-million contract — the most guaranteed money a Dodgers pitcher had received under president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, until Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s MLB-record signing a week later — with the idea the Southland native could help carry the pitching staff for a half-decade to come.
“When he makes his throw, there’s a lot of conviction,” manager Dave Roberts said. “His ball has a lot of carry in the strike zone. And when you’re talking about an upper-90s fastball that’s thrown with conviction through the catcher, it makes it pretty special.”
Before such lofty expectations can be met, however, Glasnow will have to hit a few more basic objectives first.
Get through the rest of this spring training healthy. Manage what could be the first true full-season workload of his career. And consistently showcase his potential over a 162-game season , avoiding the kind of injury-related speed bumps and detours that have limited him to only two campaigns of 100 or more innings out of his eight MLB seasons.
“We feel like the arrow is really pointing up and that, over the next few years, he is really going to take on a lot of starts,” Friedman said of Glasnow last week. “The work ethic is there. We spent a lot of time digging into that. And that’s a bet we’re making.”
Whether that gamble pays off or not could have far-reaching impacts for the Dodgers.
The last two years, the team lacked a consistent ace to stabilize an often-times patchwork rotation.
Walker Buehler was supposed to be the guy in 2022, before blowing out his elbow and undergoing Tommy John surgery. Julio Urías was primed for the role last year, only to underperform through the summer before missing the stretch run following an arrest for suspicion of domestic violence in September. Clayton Kershaw tried to step up in their absences, but dealt with his own physical limitations before having a shoulder surgery this past offseason.
That’s why, outside of the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes, the Dodgers viewed the rotation as their No. 1 priority this winter.
Yamamoto, the Japanese league star who signed for $325 million, ended up being their splashiest free-agent addition. But, as he eases into his transition to MLB, it’s Glasnow who might be the biggest factor in the Dodgers’ near-term success.
“He’s in a good spot right now,” Roberts said after watching one of Glasnow’s first bullpens of the spring this week. “We just want him to be himself.”
Glasnow has rarely been able to showcase his true self over extended stretches on the mound.
Tyler Glasnow, pitching for the Tampa Bay Rays against the Seattle Mariners on July 1, 2023, has never gone more than 14 consecutive starts in a season without getting injured.
(Stephen Brashear / Associated Press)
A former fifth-round draft pick of the Pittsburgh Pirates out of Hart High in Santa Clarita, Glasnow has dealt with injuries at almost every turn of his journey in the big leagues.
After his second outing as a rookie in 2016, he went on the injured list with a shoulder injury. After being dealt in 2018 to the Rays, who made the then-swingman reliever a full-time starter, Glasnow dealt with a litany of elbow and forearm problems — all of which culminated with Tommy John surgery in 2021.
Even last year, as Glasnow set career highs in starts (21), innings (120) and strikeouts (162), he missed two months with an oblique injury and another week with back spasms.
As a result, Glasnow has never been to an All-Star Game, despite a highly touted pitching arsenal that pairs his power fastball with a hard slider and wipeout curveball. He has never received Cy Young votes, even though he has the 11th-best ERA among MLB pitchers since 2019 (minimum 300 innings). And he’s hardly even experienced a half-season of uninterrupted play, having never made more than 14 consecutive outings in a single campaign without suffering an injury.
Latest from spring training
“I think sometimes with medical histories, there’s usually breadcrumbs of what was going on, what happened,” Dodgers pitching coach Mark Prior said. “I think, in his situation, it sounds like there was some stuff that always persistently lingered.”
This year, the Dodgers are hoping Glasnow will turn a corner.
Most of Glasnow’s past ailments, both he and Dodgers officials believe, were either related to his now surgically repaired elbow, or were “freakish” issues, as Friedman described them, that the team feels confident won’t pop up again.
“We feel like he is going to hold up and he’s going to be a big part of what we do,” Friedman said.
“I think it’s probably safe to say if we didn’t feel optimistic,” Prior added, “that we wouldn’t have done it.”
Glasnow also indicated he is in a better place physically than he has been in years past, noting that ever since his elbow healed, “everything was good and I feel really good right now.”
Indeed, instead of a rehabilitation or recovery program this spring, the 6-foot-8 hurler has been working with Dodgers coaches to refine his mechanics and hone in on specific “feels” with his pitches — a key process for a veteran that Roberts described as “thoughtful” and “cerebral” with his delivery.
During a bullpen session last week, Glasnow and Prior spent several minutes talking through the pitcher’s delivery on the mound; covering everything from Glasnow’s release point (as Glasnow would mimic slow-motion throws, Prior would position his hand in the optimal spot) to his footwork (“For a bigger, taller guy, he moves really well,” Prior noted) to his plan for using different pitches to attack the strike zone.
“A lot of these first weeks, especially with new guys, it’s just a lot of questions and probing, trying to get an understanding of how they interpret things,” Prior said. “We definitely have some thoughts. But I think our first thing is always to try to draw out of them how they want to go about the process and what they internalize.”
Once the season starts, Glasnow and the Dodgers will have to hit the ground running.
Yamamoto won’t be immediately rushed into a standard every-five-days starting schedule, needing time to adjust from his once-per-week schedule in Japan. Buehler isn’t expected to be ready in time for opening day, and will probably face workload restrictions after his expected return early in the year. Another new signing, James Paxton, has his own history of injuries that might prompt the Dodgers to give him extra rest.
While it doesn’t necessarily mean Glasnow will be asked to shoulder a greater share of the pitching workload early in the year — Roberts noted that the club remains “mindful” of the fact Glasnow hasn’t pitched a full season before — it will likely position him as the rotation’s anchor in the early going, if not its leading ace for much of the season.
“For Glass,” Friedman said, referencing an unintentionally ironic nickname for a pitcher who has too often seemed made of it, “I think he’s good to go however the schedule shakes out.”
“The body, the work ethic, the stuff we feel like is going to hold up,” Friedman added. “He’s going to be a big part of what we do.”
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This year’s NBA Finals is a rematch of the last time the Knicks made it to the championship series, way back at the conclusion of the 1998-99 season.
In that Finals, the Spurs defeated the Knicks in five games. Now, New York gets a shot to get its lick back, nearly 30 years later.
Regardless, whichever team wins this series will need huge performances from its star players.
Let’s check out the odds for NBA Finals MVP as of June 8 at FanDuel Sportsbook.
This page may contain affiliate links to legal sports betting partners. If you sign up or place a wager, FOX Sports may be compensated. Read more about Sports Betting on FOX Sports.
2025-26 NBA Finals MVP
Jalen Brunson: +115 (bet $10 to win $21.50 total)
Karl-Anthony Towns: +165 (bet $10 to win $26.50 total)
Victor Wembanyama: +380 (bet $10 to win $48 total)
Before the Finals began, anyone not named Wembanyama or Brunson didn’t appear to have much of a chance at this award, at least according to the early odds.
However, now that New York is up 2-0, its second star, Karl-Anthony Towns, has crashed the party.
Towns has moved to second on the board after playing Wemby to a standstill through two games. In Game 2, KAT had 21 points (8-for-12 shooting), 13 rebounds and four assists. The Knicks won by one.
Brunson put up 20 points in Game 2, but was 7-for-25 from the field. He also had four turnovers.
Wembanyama finished Game 1 with 26 points, 12 rebounds and three blocks. In Game 2, he had 29 points, nine rebounds and four blocks.
Sports
Commentary: She broke baseball’s glass ceiling. Now Kim Ng is taking softball to the next level
There’s no crying in baseball, but Kim Ng works in softball now. And as commissioner of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, the former Dodgers assistant general manager has been fielding lots of tearful feedback from fans overcome by the fact that softball players finally, finally have a big league of their own.
“I can’t even tell you the number of people that have approached me, just openly sobbing with happiness,” she said. “It’s been incredible, experiencing all of that and understanding how long people have been waiting for something like this.”
It really is like that. Ask Lisa Fernandez, softball pioneer and total boss: “I’ll be watching and get emotional, just looking at how far this game has come.”
With MLB backing the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, or AUSL, for a second season and Ng back to steer it, sustainable professional softball is starting to feel real.
Former UCLA pitcher Rachel Garcia plays for Athletes Unlimited Team McQuillin.
(Grant Halverson / Getty Images)
Fernandez remembers when it was a huge deal to get one softball game on TV, and now ESPN will broadcast 50 AUSL games and ABC will carry the championship. And after last year’s four-team 10-city barnstorming tour, the league will add two teams and anchor itself to locations in North Carolina, Illinois, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Utah.
The ball gets rolling on Tuesday, just days after the conclusion of the Women’s College World Series — which last season averaged a record 1.3 million viewers on ESPN, including pulling 3.9 million for UCLA’s thriller against Tennessee.
Big steps, baby steps. All going the right direction.
“I would hope that we are the major league baseball of softball,” Ng, 57, said in a phone conversation. “That is a good number of teams, spread out across the country, with a huge following, all of our games televised.
“That’s the goal. To be the MLB of softball.”
Ng spent more than 30 years in the MLB, including a decade-long stint with the Dodgers. She was also the first woman to serve as a big-league general manager, leading the Miami Marlins from 2020 through the 2023 season. She declined her option after the team made its first full-season playoff appearance in two decades and then announced plans to introduce a president of baseball operations position that would’ve siphoned away some of her say-so.
Miami Marlins general manger Kim Ng, left, sits in a golf cart and talks with manager Marlins Skip Schumaker during a 2023 spring training workout.
(Lynne Sladky / Associated Press)
“Breaking that glass ceiling, that’s special to me,” Ng said. “But I think in a different way, this [work with the AUSL] is for sure one of the more meaningful things I’ve done.”
She said a former MLB colleague recently asked her about the AUSL: “I said, ‘I’m working for the women now.’”
The former co-worker corrected her: “You were always working for the women.’”
Before that, as a kid, she was a softball infielder in Long Island and then at the University of Chicago. “I was scrappy,” Ng said, “which is definitely how I describe my personality and the way I approach most things in life.”
It’s served her well. And now it’s serving softball, a sport that for decades has been among the most popular for girls in America, even without long-term playing prospects or pro players to strive to emulate.
Compare it with basketball: About three-quarters of the WNBA’s current players have never even lived in a world without an established professional women’s basketball league in America.
UCLA star hitter Megan Grant will play in the Athletes Unlimited softball league after wrapping up her record-setting college career.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
The NBA-backed WNBA is celebrating its 30th season this summer with a lucrative new CBA and 15 teams, two of them expansion franchises, including one in Canada, and the Bay Area-based Golden State Valkyries valued at $850 million.
The AUSL is about to embark on Year 2.
There have been attempts to start up professional softball leagues before. Those weren’t just long shots, more like Megan Grant moonshots.
But now we have Bryanna Lopez, a 12-year-old catcher from Alhambra, sitting in the Easton Stadium stands at UCLA, watching her heroes play and telling me, without hesitation: “I want to play professional softball. It’s a really big dream.”
And a really big deal.
For players and a growing audience of folks like Kaitlyn Laabs, the superfan in a chef’s hat at UCLA games, who want to watch the home run queen Grant continue to mash. To see her teammates Jordan Woolery keep flaunting her flashy slash line and Taylor Tinsley sharpening her wicked arsenal of pitches.
UCLA starting pitcher Taylor Tinsley and first baseman Jordan Woolery are poised to start their professional softball careers this week.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
“A lot of times, seniors come in their last year thinking it’s the end of their career, and that puts a lot more pressure,” UCLA’s Woolery said earlier this month, before the Bruins advanced to the Women’s College World Series for the third straight season. “So, for me, Megan, Tins, [the AUSL] opens us up a little bit to play free, knowing it’s not the end of the road.”
Ng’s presence, first as an adviser and starting last season as commissioner, is helping legitimize the new league.
“She’s the right person at the right time,” said Fernandez, the UCLA associate head coach, who is also the general manager of the defending champion Utah Talons. “Knowing Kim’s background in baseball, having her know the business of how to run a league, a no-brainer for me.”
Ng’s team-building acumen is helping her coach up first-time general managers. Her experience at MLB’s league office, working to grow the game internationally, ensures she’ll be patient, methodical — which is to say, the AUSL is not rushing to join the Sparks and the National Women’s Soccer League’s Angel City FC in the complicated, competitive L.A. market until it’s good and ready.
“Softball just has had its ups and downs in terms of creating a solid foundation,” Ng said. “Why has it taken so long? It’s hard to say, but obviously the revenue is a huge piece of it. Now, with MLB as a major investor, they’re understanding of the idea that we’re complementary.”
MLB has invested a reported $10 million in the AUSL — in addition to offering its massive promotional platform. So after Grant hit an NCAA record-extending 39th home run, the No. 4 overall pick was interviewed by Harold Reynolds on “MLB Tonight.”
Beside Grant, who is bound for the Portland Cascade, there will be 12 other former Bruins sprinkled among the league’s six rosters. Woolery and Tinsley will team up with a few other former Bruins on the Talons.
“You’d lose a generation of players if the growth is capped,” said Laabs, the softball fan. “But right now, softball is on a rocket ship. Let’s keep on cooking, let’s keep on flying, let’s show that if you build it, they will come.”
Sports
Ketel Marte frustrating Diamondbacks by opting to take days off with trade deadline looming: report
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Arizona Diamondbacks All-Star second baseman Ketel Marte has reportedly been frustrating people within the organization with the MLB trade deadline looming.
Marte, a switch-hitter with power from both sides of the plate, is someone Arizona has tried to trade this past winter despite his talent and six-year extension that kicked in this season.
But USA TODAY reported Marte “continues to frustrate segments of the organization by opting to take days off.” Most recently, Marte decided to sit for last week’s game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, where superstar Shohei Ohtani was pitching, and he then proceeded to hit a walk-off home run the next day for the D-Backs.
Ketel Marte of the Arizona Diamondbacks looks on before the game against the Seattle Mariners at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Washington, on May 30, 2026. (Maddy Grassy/Getty Images)
The reason for Marte missing the game last Wednesday was a mixture of his decision as well as the second baseman dealing with lower-back and hamstring ailments, per Arizona Sports. Marte didn’t want to risk any further injury.
“We’re all human, and we all need a day here and there,” Marte said through a translator following the walk-off homer he hit on Thursday’s game.
KETEL MARTE RECEIVES STANDING OVATION FROM DIAMONDBACKS FANS IN FIRST HOME GAME SINCE CONTROVERSIAL HECKLING
This also isn’t new for Marte, who created some tension in the clubhouse due to absences and off-day requests near the All-Star break. It was reported that Marte’s teammates didn’t appreciate trying to time his off-days, leading to an apology later on.
Ketel Marte of the Arizona Diamondbacks bats during the first inning against the Seattle Mariners at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Washington, on May 30, 2026. (Maddy Grassy/Getty Images)
With Marte being involved in trade rumors in the past, they will certainly pick up with MLB’s trade deadline scheduled for Aug. 3 this year. It’s later than usual, but with teams dealing with injuries as well as trying to bolster their lineups, rotations and bullpens, players with Marte’s talent will surely lead to calls to those in the Arizona front office.
Marte should be sold at a high price, if at all, given he is under contract through the 2030 campaign at a relatively low price after signing his six-year, $116.5 million contract. He also has a player option for the 2031 season, where he will be age 37.
While second base is his usual spot on the field, Marte has played shortstop as well as center field in his 12-year career. The Dominican Republic product has earned three All-Star nods, including each of the past two seasons.
Ketel Marte of the Arizona Diamondbacks celebrates after hitting a two-run home run against the Colorado Rockies during the fourth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz., on May 23, 2026. (Norm Hall/Getty Images)
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This year, Marte is slashing .250/.304/.450 with a .754 OPS — the lowest mark since his 2022 campaign in Arizona (.727). He has hit 11 homers, driven in 37 runs and scored 37 times across 60 games.
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