The Los Angeles Dodgers submitted their National League Division Series roster with a choice that will be argued for as long as the series lasts.
All-Star left-hander Justin Wrobleski, a regular in the rotation for much of the year, was left off the 26-man group that will face the Atlanta Braves at Dodger Stadium.
Fellow left-hander Jack Dreyer was also omitted. Manager Dave Roberts did not pretend the cuts were easy. “Those are really, really tough decisions,” Roberts said.
They were also structural. A postseason roster only has so many seats, and Los Angeles already owns one of the deepest starting groups in the game. Tarik Skubal, acquired at the trade deadline, opened the series on Saturday.
Blake Snell is lined up for Game 2. Yoshinobu Yamamoto is the expected starter for Game 3, with Tyler Glasnow also on the roster. In that company, Wrobleski was never going to take a turn.
The harder call was whether he still belonged as a multi-inning arm out of the bullpen. The Dodgers carried 12 pitchers and decided he did not.
That is a cold reading of a warm season.
In his third year in the majors, Wrobleski made 22 starts and appeared in 28 games, finishing 12-5 with a 3.66 ERA. He struck out 118 batters across 140 innings, the best body of work of his young career, and an All-Star selection to show for the first half.
The second half was less clean, which is the sort of footnote that becomes decisive in October, when managers stop rewarding regular-season volume and start sorting for matchups, length, and the arms they trust with a one-run lead in the sixth.
The omission does not erase what Wrobleski gave Los Angeles. It does show how the front office has built this club. Depth that looks excessive in April becomes a roster problem in October.
Someone who would start for half the league can watch from the side when the opponent is the Braves and the prize is a third consecutive World Series.
No team has won three in a row since the New York Yankees from 1998 through 2000. The Dodgers are built to chase that, and the construction shows in who starts and who waits.
Skubal, Snell, and Yamamoto will carry the series if the plan holds.
Wrobleski will be available again if Los Angeles advances and the roster is rebuilt.
For now, he is the clearest evidence of how crowded the Dodgers’ pitching room has become, and of why Roberts called the cuts what they were.
