Some Sunday morning Dodgers notes after they lost Saturday night to the Red Sox to even the weekend series at Fenway Park, ahead of the rubber match on today’s getaway day.
Blake Treinen is expected to be activated off the 60-day injured list either Sunday in Boston or Monday in Cincinnati, manager Dave Roberts told reporters in Boston on Saturday. Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register has more.
Rich Hill started for the Royals on Tuesday and at age 45 is their oldest player in franchise history. The left-hander tied another former Dodgers pitcher, Edwin Jackson, for most teams in major league history (14). Enjoy this Venn diagram from Baseball Reference of those two pitchers’ careers.
Richard Staff at Defector talked to several “phantom ballplayers,” players who spent time on a major league active roster but never appeared in a game. One of them was pitcher Mike Antonini, who was called up to the Dodgers in 2012 but never pitched for them.
I talked to Antonini way back in 2016 about his time in the majors. Here’s what the left-hander told Staff at Defector this year:
“Just through the work that I put in and countless hours of training and spring games, minor league games, having that chance to be called up two separate times—I take credit for that. I know I don’t get anything recorded, but I take pride in considering myself a Major League player.”
Diamond Baseball Holdings is a private equity firm that over the last five years has purchased 45 of the 120 minor league teams, including Dodgers affiliates in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Rancho Cucamonga (soon to be Ontario in 2026). Jen Ramos Eisen wrote about Diamond Baseball Holdings at Defector, and I talked to them about it on the Three-Inning Save podcast this week.