To save Dustin May, we must destroy him

Dustin May is a free agent. It’s not that he wasn’t tendered; He’s entering his sixth year this season and hits the open market at just 28 years old.

I admit that this person sneaked up on me. May was a highly sought-after Dodgers prospect who rose to fame after joining the Los Angeles pitching staff in 2019 at the age of 21. In October of that year, he pitched in the Dodgers’ playoff game and started 2020 as the No. 1 pitcher. He was ranked No. 14 in baseball, spent most of the year in the rotation, received several Rookie of the Year votes and made seven appearances during the Dodgers’ run to the World Series.

May is not a Stephen Strasburg or Paul Skenes-level rising star, but he has been in or near the global top 20 for several years. He made it from the minor leagues to the major league playoffs in two months and to the World Series by the end of his first full season in the majors (presumably 2020). Add to that a few other factors: upper-90s fastball velocity, his Scut Farkus complexion and Carlos Valderrama hair, and what Craig Goldstein memorably called “extreme Waluigi energy.”

In short, May was unforgettable.

The reason May’s free agency surprised me is simple: Memorable young players either stay in the public eye and develop, or they get wrapped in amber. Even though May has been part of baseball’s most scrutinized team’s pitching calculus for seven consecutive years, he hasn’t actually spent much time on the mound.

Tommy John surgery ruined much of 2021 and 2022, and then May messed up his elbow again after getting off to a hot start in 2023, requiring a UCL repair. It also cost him all of 2024. Also in 2024: May tore her esophagus while eating a salad, requiring emergency surgery and being hospitalized for nearly two weeks. Kids, eat donuts and you’ll live longer. Last season was the second time in May’s career (after 2020, so even that probably doesn’t count) that he was more or less healthy for a season. Unfortunately, “more or less” is important here, as he missed the final three weeks of the season with elbow neuritis.

The upshot of it all is that May has amassed six and a third seasons of service time as a starting pitcher while pitching just 338 innings between the regular season and postseason. His 2025-26 free agent classmate Shota Imanaga has pitched that many innings in just two major league outings.

The good news is that nearly 40% of the innings came last season. At 28, May is the youngest American starting pitcher in this class in an era when players’ primes often don’t coincide with free agency. Only the late Seibu Lions’ Tatsuya Imai was younger.

Still, May didn’t make our list of the top 50 free agents this winter. As far as I know, he’s nowhere near making the list.

Considering his performance this season — 4.96 ERA, 4.88 FIP and 11.5% K-BB rate — you can understand why. The Dodgers certainly have a ton of starting pitchers to choose from, but it’s hard to conclude from how their pitchers performed in the postseason that May 2020 was useless. Still, they exiled him to Boston at the trade deadline, essentially to free up a spot on the 40-man roster. (If you have strong opinions about James Tibbs III, feel free to disagree, but I don’t.)

With all this in mind, I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth dedicating an entire article to May, when just a few weeks ago he wasn’t even worth mentioning. That’s okay, I’m committed now. We move on.

There’s nothing major league general managers love more than someone they can fix. Any idiot can sign the best pitcher on the market, but it takes a true genius to buy a Jesus Luzardo, Carlos Rodon or Kevin Gausman at a low price and restore him to his former glory. Let’s first look at how things have changed for May since 2020:

Well, the speed dropped significantly. That’s not good. Especially since pitchers are throwing harder now than when May was a rookie; average fourth-string velocity is up 1.1 mph since 2020. May’s fastball velocity was 98% in 2020 and 59% in 2025.

The labels on Mei’s things haven’t changed as much as you might think. Still mostly three fastballs and a sweeper. This change was rare in 2020 and has now essentially disappeared.

It’s interesting to look back at May’s consensus as a prospect, given what we’ve learned about pitching over the past five years. Even in his prime, when he could throw the ball past catchers, May was never a big strikeout player. The lack of strikeouts is puzzling given the velocity of his fastball and his 3,100-rpm breaking ball (which he calls a sinker, which moves more like a curveball and is now classified as a cleanup pitch).

At the time, this could be explained by May’s habit of throwing sinkers that went under the bat and produced many weak ground balls instead of missing the bat entirely. A four-seamer in the zone is what you want to throw to get a whiff, but May didn’t do that.

Looking at it through 2025 eyes, you’ll see that May is right to throw his sinker more often than not, as his four-seamer is pretty dead zone. I don’t know, maybe in 2020 you could get away with 99 mph, but not now.

With Elbow of Theseus, May can no longer hit 99 very often. When he reappeared in the Dodgers’ rotation this year, he addressed his fastball movement issues by lowering his arm slot a few degrees, which gave his four-seam less rise and more action on the arm side while still being separated from the sinker.

Another thing the Dodgers did was convert May from a sinker-first pitcher to a sweeper-first pitcher. However, the movement in the arm slot that takes his fastball out of the dead zone also takes it out of the same vertical plane as the sinker, making it less effective as a drop ball. It also destroys May’s curveball depth at sweeper, but to be fair, the breaking ball is May’s best pitch in 2025. Indeed, his only effective pitch in 2025.

After the trade, May made just six appearances, but the Red Sox removed him from sweepers and sinkers — two pitches that dropped from May’s 77.2 percent pitch rate in Los Angeles to 58.6 percent in Boston — and doubled his cutter usage. Is it effective? Not really. He posted a 5.40 ERA, 5.39 FIP and 6.26 xERA in 28 1/3 innings with the Red Sox.

Overall, I think the way out of May is not to look back. Even though he can still pitch as hard as he did in 2020, the way he pitched then is now outdated. If we learned anything from May’s disappointing 2025 season, it’s that he needs to start over. Once again we understand why he is not in the top 50.

So why would anyone be interested in him other than because of his depth or being a blood sacrifice to the gods of the game?

Because when you take the structure down, there are still some attractive bricks. Even with May’s sinkers being hit all over the yard, he still has great level athleticism on the field. His sweeper had the highest average spin rate of any breaking pitch in the majors last year: an average of 3,182 rpm.

Someone will look at those building blocks — the spin, the traces of the sinker, May’s age — and convince themselves that they still have a mid-spin starter. I’d love to see it tried; I doubt it can be done.