Jack Flaherty has been good for the Dodgers since coming over in a deadline trade last month. He has three wins in five starts. He has a 3.49 earned-run average and 34 strikeouts. And, at a time the club has been without aces Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, he has provided stability by working into the sixth inning in every outing but one.
“What Jack’s done,” manager Dave Roberts said, “has been everything we had hoped.”
However, as the Dodgers enter the stretch run, Flaherty might be needed to do even more.
Yamamoto is weeks away from returning from his shoulder injury. Glasnow’s timeline is even more concerning as his initially minor elbow injury continues to linger.
If the postseason started tomorrow, Flaherty likely would be the Dodgers’ Game 1 starter.
Which is why, for as solid as he looked in a six-inning, three-run outing against the high-powered Baltimore Orioles on Tuesday night, it wasn’t enough to satisfy his own lofty standards, nor the needs of a short-handed Dodgers team.
Once again, the right-hander was good. But in a 3-2 loss at a sold-out Dodger Stadium, he wasn’t quite good enough to save his new team from defeat.
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“Overall, just two pitches that I’d really like back,” Flaherty said. “Just continuing to find ways to get outs. Gotta get deeper.”
Flaherty avoided a worst-case scenario, staying in the game after taking a fifth-inning comebacker from Colton Cowser off his right wrist. Both Flaherty and Roberts believed the pitcher would be fine after the game.
In the at-bat before it, though, Flaherty made one of his two big mistakes, giving up a go-ahead, two-run home run to Baltimore’s No. 9 hitter, Ramón Urías, on a slider that stayed up just enough to catch the bottom of the strike zone.
“I’m not trying to throw it there,” said Flaherty, who dropped to a knee in frustration as Urías’ ball sailed out to left field. “Just need to get it more to the outer half and get it down away. In there is where he can handle it and he put a good swing on it. Doesn’t always happen. Hitting’s hard. But … you want to make a better pitch there.”
This has been a common theme of Flaherty’s first month as a Dodger, in which he has slightly regressed from the stellar 2.95 ERA he posted over the first four months with the Detroit Tigers.
None of his starts have been poor, allowing him to accumulate a team-high 28⅓ innings in August….