by Cary Osborne
It’s been a week since Tyler Glasnow threw his last pitch of the 2024 season.
It wasn’t in a Major League game. And it wasn’t in his scheduled simulated game that Sept. 13 afternoon in Atlanta.
Glasnow threw warm-up pitches that day, and the elbow didn’t feel right. So he shut it down.
Glasnow and the Dodgers had a shared vision for this year — that the last pitch he would throw would be in the postseason. Instead, a sprained elbow has him on the shelf.
The right-handed pitcher in his first year with the Dodgers, had elbow issues in the past, including 2022 Tommy John surgery. After a career high in starts (21) and innings pitched (120) in 2023 with the Tampa Bay Rays and new career highs in each category this year (22/134) after his final start on Aug. 11, he thought he was past it.
Glasnow on Friday shared his disappointment about the latest setback.
“It’s just exhausting, I guess. I’ve just done this so many times,” Glasnow said. “You go about it the first time and you try to find other ways to prevent it in the future. And then it happens again, and you try to find more ways to prevent it. It’s just kind of like over and over again. It’s extremely frustrating.”
Glasnow said the elbow will be re-examined in a few weeks and then a gameplan will come from that.
Ever the logical over emotional pitcher, Glasnow said the goal is to find a different gameplan to prevent injury going forward — in 2025 and beyond.
“Kind of searching for answers, and then a long-term plan that we’ll sit down and figure some stuff out,” he said.
Glasnow said he felt and data told him that he’s mechanically sound in his delivery. But the 6-foot-8-inch pitcher reasoned that his long levers and long extension put a lot of stress on the arm.
The Dodgers pitched him on normal rest — four days — once in his 22 starts. The other 21 were all with at least five days of rest between starts. He also threw half as many four-seam fastballs (down to 39 from 77) at 98 mph or higher compared to 2023 in a conscientious effort to not max out as frequently.
Glasnow was an All-Star, one of the toughest starting pitchers to hit in the Majors (.190 opponents average) and one of the top strikeout pitchers in the game (11.3 strikeouts per nine innings) in 2024. He now looks to be all of that again and healthy throughout 2025.
“If there are ways that I can maybe shorten up certain things that I delivered or somehow just make my delivery more efficient, and each start just try to keep it as consistent over the course of the season as possible — that’s every pitcher’s dream, obviously,” he said. “But I’m just trying to figure out something to get my arm to a good spot to try and relieve some of the tension in my elbow. So right now I guess I’m just trying to figure all that out and implement it through the offseason and next season.”
Glasnow shares frustration about injury, but is intent on preventing it in the future was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.