SAN DIEGO — Justin Wrobleski went through an awful lot to become an overnight sensation.
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When Wrobleski was a freshman at Clemson, he was riding his scooter to baseball practice one day when a female driver ran a stop sign and hit him.
“It wasn’t, thank God, too bad,” Wrobleski says now – no broken bones, just “a little knee injury.”
“Nothing crazy. I got really, really lucky.”
When he returned from the accident to pitch for Clemson, things did not go very well. He had a 10.38 ERA over 10 games. And that was the end of his time at Clemson.
“I ended up earning a weekend starting spot. Probably wasn’t ready for it,” he says. “I don’t know. I was just young. Didn’t throw it great but didn’t throw it bad, but I was told I was throwing it horrible and I started pressing. Ended up having a couple bad starts. They moved me to the bullpen. Didn’t get to throw very much and ended up being told to leave, that it wasn’t a fit for me there.”
Wrobleski wound up taking a big step back to State College of Florida – where he promptly suffered a broken jaw when he was hit by a ball during the first practice of spring.
“I was out for five weeks with my jaw wired shut right as the season started,” Wrobleski says. “I went from throwing 94-95 (mph) to throwing 88-91 because I had lost 20 pounds. Liquid diet for five weeks. That was brutal.”
There was more adversity ahead. Wrobleski made a handful of appearances “and COVID hits, the season is shut down.” As a result, the 2020 MLB draft was shortened to five rounds. Wrobleski (a 30th-round pick of the Seattle Mariners out of high school) was expecting to get drafted that summer but his name went uncalled in the shortened draft.
On to a third college – Oklahoma State – where Wrobleski made eight starts … before injuring his elbow and undergoing Tommy John surgery.
“That was my college career,” he says.
But it wasn’t the end of the adversity he would face.
Wrobleski was just a couple of months into his recovery from Tommy John surgery when the Dodgers picked him in the 11th round of the 2021 draft – a break Wrobleski calls “super lucky” because of the Dodgers’ history of developing pitchers post-TJ surgery.
He progressed through the Dodgers’ farm system and made his major-league debut as a spot starter in 2024. It didn’t go well. He had a 5.70 ERA in eight appearances.
The Dodgers turned to him again in April 2025 for a spot start after Blake Snell went on the injured list with a shoulder problem. Wrobleski took the mound at Nationals Park and was shelled for eight runs, including two home runs by James Wood. With the Dodgers’ pitching depleted, he was left in the game for five innings and 87 pitches – then was demoted to Triple-A immediately after.
It was a pivotal moment for Wrobleski, 25.
“He went down to Triple-A and worked really hard with our Triple-A group,” Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes says. “I think he really got punched in the mouth and took that feedback and went down and really worked on it and took it to heart.
“You can take it one of two ways. ‘Well, I’m not good enough’ or ‘I’m going to make adjustments and work at it.’ To his credit, with his work ethic and the way he goes about his business, he’s done an excellent job of taking all that information and working with it.”
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When Wrobleski returned to Triple-A after that embarrassment, he went to work with pitching coach Dave Anderson on his delivery, taking a risk in the short term that he might not make a quick return to the majors but would emerge as more capable of getting big-league hitters out when he did.
“When you’re an up-and-down guy (between the minors and majors), it’s always tough to make changes because you don’t want the big-league club to get upset or whatever,” Wrobleski says. “After having a good spring, I was, ‘Okay, I think there’s stuff I can do to make myself better.’”
He widened out his delivery, making it “more linear” with “more of a move toward home rather than being so rotational.”
“I wasn’t creating the angles that I needed to get the miss I needed or the deception I needed or whatever,” he says. “We were, ‘Okay, let’s try this.’ I did it for a week then brought it into a game. ‘Alright, this looks kind of good’ and we looked at the numbers and the approach angle was a little better, the extension was a little better, everything was playing good. Kind of rolled from there. It’s been super good since.”
Indeed. Since that drubbing in Washington, Wrobleski has a 3.02 ERA, mostly in relief last year and now as a breakout star in the Dodgers’ starting rotation this year. He will make his eighth start of this season on Friday in Milwaukee.
“I think it just speaks to the fact that there is adversity that obviously is never pleasant at the time but it shapes you down the road and it’s very impactful,” Gomes says. “Failures are only failures if you let them be. The adversity is only bad if you allow it to be.
“I’m sure his having gone through all those things (in college), ‘Okay, this (the loss in Washington) is just another bump in the road. I’m going to keep going. I’m not going to crumble.’ And he’s been a huge part of what we’ve been able to do to this point.”
Wrobleski has gone 6-1 with a 2.12 ERA and a 1.01 WHIP in his first seven starts – with a strikeout rate (4.8 per nine innings) straight out of a different era. His success has come with a decidedly old-school approach – work fast, throw strikes, don’t be afraid of contact.
“You could call it that,” Gomes said. “I think it’s a very good archetype for success.”
In the ‘Three True Outcomes” era of baseball, though, Wrobleski has found himself defending his lack of swing-and-miss even as he retired batters and went deep in games – he has gone at least six innings in each of his past six starts, completing eight innings in one game and pitching into the ninth in another.
“I’m out there trying to get outs. However I get them, that’s great,” he said after one start. “I think the strikeouts will come. I struck out people last year. That’s not something that’s a crazy worry for me.
“I think I’m doing a good job of understanding who I am, understanding the game and where we’re at, understanding the hitter and the situation. … Continuing to harp on those things that make me good, I guess.”
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