The Los Angeles Dodgers have developed another monster rookie. Bobby Miller, 24, is a right-hander who throws a fastball that tops out at 100.4 miles per hour (161.6 kilometers per hour).
“No pitcher has ever started a career like this,” MLB.com, the official website of Major League Baseball, wrote on Nov. 11, highlighting Miller’s recent success.
Miller was a college rookie selected by the Los Angeles Dodgers with the 29th overall pick in the first round of the 2020 Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft. He quickly rose through the minors and made his big league debut on May 24 스포츠토토 against Atlanta. He picked up the win in his debut with five innings of one-run ball, striking out five and walking one, and then quickly followed it up with three straight quality starts. He is now 3-0 with a 0.78 ERA in four starts and 23 strikeouts in 23 innings.
According to MLB.com, Miller became just the fourth pitcher in history to not allow more than one earned run in the first four games of his career, joining Cliff Markle (New York Yankees) in 1915-1916, Cody Anderson (Cleveland) in 2015 and Kenta Maeda (Los Angeles Dodgers) in 2016.
Miller averages 98.6 miles per hour (158.7 km/h) with a sinker and 89.9 miles per hour (144.7 km/h) slider as his primary weapons, along with a four-seam fastball, changeup and curveball, according to Statcast. All of his pitches are quality, with his 99.2 mph (159.6 km/h) four-seam fastball looking the weakest, with a .400 batting average. LA Dodgers catcher Will Smith said, “The slider has improved a lot. The changeup, the curveball, it’s great.”
What’s even more impressive is the rookie’s excellent command and control of his pitches. Miller has held runners in scoring position to a .077 batting average (1-for-13) with five strikeouts and has gotten out of every jam. A case in point was on Tuesday against Philadelphia, where he threw 49 pitches in the second inning with the bases loaded. However, he read the Yankees’ hitters perfectly and finished the next four innings with 55 pitches to close out the game with a quality start.
“He reminds me of Walker Buehler (29),” LA Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “It’s not always better to throw harder, but young pitchers, when they’re trying to settle down, they try to settle down by throwing harder. But Miller has the ability to control the tempo.”
Since the emergence of Clayton Kershaw (35), monster rookie pitchers like Miller have become a regular occurrence in the pitcher’s kingdom of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Kershaw in 2008 and Ryu Hyun-jin (36-Toronto), who arrived from South Korea in 2013, were both surprise rookies. Maeda arrived from Japan in 2016, and Julio Urias debuted that year. Buehler, who debuted in 2017, shined the following year, finishing third in the National League Rookie of the Year, and hard-throwing prospect Dustin May debuted in 2019.
With such confidence in their ability to produce an ace pitcher every year, the Dodgers let Zack Greinke (40-Kansas City), the 2015 Cy Young Award runner-up, walk in 2019, as well as Ryu Hyun-jin, the 2019 Cy Young Award runner-up, become free agents.
This year, the Dodgers faced a starting pitching crisis with the departures of Urias, May, and Noah Syndergaard in quick succession. But the Dodgers turned that crisis into an opportunity to call up another monster rookie and prove that they are a pitching powerhouse. According to MLB.com, “Miller is the first pitcher in major league history to go 3-0 with a sub-1 ERA while allowing fewer than 15 hits and striking out 23 in his first four games. Of course, what we just said is a bit of an exaggeration. What we’re saying is that no pitcher has ever started a career like Miller’s.”
