LOS ANGELES – Bobby Miller has had enough of the rehab life.
“Pretty anxious. I’ve been really bored,” Miller said of his eagerness to return from shoulder discomfort that has had him on the Injured List since his April 10 start in Minnesota.
“It’s definitely been longer than I thought. After like, a week or two after I went out, I was feeling great and I thought it was gonna be a lot faster. But we’ve got a really good team right now. So there’s no reason to rush anything.”
Miller made his second start on a minor-league injury-rehabilitation assignment with Class-A Rancho Cucamonga on Saturday and it was messy. Miller allowed four runs on five hits and a walk in 3 ⅓ innings and didn’t strike out a batter, getting only two swings-and-misses in 66 pitches.
Miller said he feels fine physically and shrugged off a slight drop in his fastball velocity as likely attributable to a lack of adrenaline in the minor-league game.
“It could have just been an adrenaline thing. Not much adrenaline at all,” he said. “But I got my work. Wasn’t happy with it. But I came out feeling good.”
The biggest issue, Miller said, was “command of my offspeed mostly.”
“Fastball command was fine,” he said. “But if that’s the only pitch you got, it’s gonna be a little rough, just command of the off-speed, that was it.”
He is scheduled to make another rehab start on Friday, this time with Triple-A Oklahoma City, where he hopes to build up to six innings and roughly 80 pitches. He hopes to be back in the Dodgers’ starting rotation soon after.
“I feel ready,” he said.
“I just want execution on every one of my pitches. I know my velocity will be there, so I’m not worried about it.”
A velocity drop is relative for Miller whose fastball averaged 98.3 mph in his three starts before going on the IL this year. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said he saw reports that it was in the 95-97 mph range on Saturday. The most important thing, Roberts said, is that Miller came out of the outing feeling well.
“So for me it’s a net positive,” Roberts said.
MUNCY STATUS
Almost three weeks after suffering what he thought was a mild oblique strain and a week after he hoped to return, Max Muncy remains in limbo.
“Very frustrating,” Muncy said.
“I don’t think anybody has a timetable because we can’t really put one on it. … It’s probably the worst injury you can have as a position player because you can’t do anything. You can’t strengthen it. You can’t strengthen the area around it. You can’t do anything with the rest of your body because you have to involve your core to do that. You have to just sit and let it heal and that’s where we’re at.”
That’s not where Muncy was when the Dodgers left town for their trip to Cincinnati and New York. Muncy said he was feeling “great” and went to Arizona to start “ramping up” for his return. He took batting practice for two days without a problem.
“I didn’t feel anything at all and having done obliques in the past I knew exactly what to feel in my body,” he said. “It felt great. It felt loose. I didn’t feel any tightness at all, no pain. So started to ramp up.”
That’s when he felt it “flare up” again.
“I didn’t hurt it any worse,” Muncy said. “I just felt it flare up so we shut it down from there. It just hasn’t calmed down since.”
Muncy has no plans to head back to Arizona until it does.
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TRAVEL GUIDE
The Dodgers are in the middle of a stretch of their schedule that will have them play twice as many games in New York (three against the Mets, three against the Yankees) as Dodger Stadium. Twelve of their 15 games in this stretch will be in the Eastern Time Zone with cross-country flights broken up only by this weekend’s three-game series against the Rockies.
Just to make it more taxing, the Dodgers were stranded at the Newark airport for over seven hours before they could fly home Thursday.
“I’m sure there’s some reasoning behind it,” Roberts said. “But I think with the balanced schedule now (each team plays every other team in both leagues), there’s some things that are different for everyone.”
The Dodgers leave for Pittsburgh and New York on Monday.
UP NEXT
The Dodgers are off Monday.
Dodgers (RHP Tyler Glasnow, 6-3, 3.04 ERA) at Pirates (RHP Jared Jones, 3-5, 3.55 ERA), Tuesday, 3;40 p.m., SportsNet LA, 570 AM
