Julio Urias could begin year in extended spring training
The Los Angeles Dodgers are strategizing how to best deploy young left-hander Julio Urias next season.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said on Wednesday that Urias could begin the year in extended spring training in an effort to limit his workload, per Ken Gurnick of MLB.com.
One of the options under consideration to limit Julio Urias' innings is to have him begin the season at extended Spring, Roberts said.
— Ken Gurnick (@kengurnick) January 25, 2017
The 20-year-old Urias went 5-2 with a 3.39 ERA and 84 strikeouts in 15 starts spanning 77 innings for the Dodgers in 2016. He also threw 45 innings at AAA Oklahoma City after never topping 90 total innings in a single calendar year.
But after starting two postseason games for the Dodgers last October, Urias is projected to be a back-end-of-the-rotation starter in 2017 behind Clayton Kershaw, Rich Hill, and Kenta Maeda. Still, with a number of other lefties on the roster theoretically capable of filling out the starting five (specifically, a trio of hopefully healthy options in Scott Kazmir, Hyun-Jin Ryu, and Alex Wood), the Dodgers could afford to take it easy on Urias early on and save his more impactful innings for the end of the regular season and the playoffs.