The Dodgers officially re-signed Clayton Kershaw earlier today but it seems he won’t be helping them early in the season. He tells Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic that he expects to be on the 60-day injured list to start the year, likely returning about when those 60 days are up. That suggests he’s targeting a late May return.
Kershaw’s 2025 timeline has never been clear until now. He announced in early November that he would require some surgical work on his lower left leg. Part of that was due to a bone spur in the big toe on his left foot, which sent him to the IL last year. The surgeries would also address a ruptured plantar plate and a torn meniscus in his knee. It was never expressly laid out when Kershaw expected to return, though there’s now at least a vague target.
Players can be placed on the 60-day IL once pitchers and catchers report to spring training, so several players are already there, including Dodgers like Gavin Stone and River Ryan. Kershaw could follow them there but the 60-day count doesn’t begin until Opening Day. IL transactions can be backdated three days, so teams will only put guys on the 60-day if they don’t expect them to be healthy in the first 57 days of the season.
The Dodgers start the schedule a little bit earlier than most teams, as they and the Cubs are facing off in the Tokyo Series this year. Two regular season games between those teams will take place on March 18th and 19th, while the 28 other teams will play their first regular season game March 27.
The update from Kershaw makes the rotation picture a little less crowded in the short term. As of right now, the Dodgers project to have a six-man starting staff consisting of Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin. They will start the season with Shohei Ohtani acting as the designated hitter but not pitching. He didn’t pitch in 2024 while recovering from Tommy John surgery and also required surgery on his non-throwing shoulder in the fall. He is expected to be back on the mound in May and it seems Kershaw’s timeline is similar.
It’s theoretically possible the Dodgers will have too many rotation options at times this summer. Once Kershaw and Ohtani are back in the mix, they could have eight viable candidates for six spots. Sasaki and Gonsolin are the only two who can be optioned to the minors. It seems highly unlikely Sasaki will be sent down at any point, given that he’s already considered an ace-level talent. Gonsolin is also just 20 days away from five years of MLB service time, at which point he would have the right to refuse being optioned.
However, there are also health concerns all throughout the group, so it seems fair to wonder how often six or more of them will be healthy at any given time. May and Gonsolin missed all of 2024 recovering from surgery. Snell only pitched 104 innings last year and has only hit 130 twice in his career. Yamamoto’s first MLB season saw him spend a lot of time on the IL, only getting to 90 innings. Glasnow set a personal best last year by getting to 134. Sasaki never hit 130 innings in any of his seasons in Japan.
It’s an extreme quality-over-quantity group, so it will be interesting to see if it ever feels truly crowded. If significant injuries pile up, the club also has Bobby Miller, Landon Knack, Nick Frasso, Justin Wrobleski and Ben Casparius as optionable guys on the roster who should be in the Triple-A rotation.
For Kershaw personally, he will be looking take on a sizable workload for the first time in a while. It used to be his norm to log about 230 innings in a season but he hasn’t done that since 2015 and he hasn’t hit 132 since 2019. He did get to 131 2/3 in 2023 but was clearly working with diminished stuff and required shoulder surgery in the offseason. He returned from that procedure to make seven starts in July and August of last year but then went back on the IL due to the foot issues and finished the year with just 30 innings pitched.
Missing the first few weeks of 2025 will prevent him from having a massive workload this year but he could certainly go well beyond those 30 frames if things go according to plan. As for what’s beyond that, it seems the future Hall-of-Famer isn’t making any decisions yet. He tells Bob Nightengale of USA Today that he plans to go year to year, as opposed to putting a firm timeline on how many more seasons he plans to play in.