SAN DIEGO — Emmet Sheehan was not pitching for his job Sunday.
That didn’t mean, however, it wasn’t a high-stakes outing.
Entering the day, the 2026 season had not gone anywhere near what the 26-year-old right-hander planned. He began the afternoon with an ERA over 5.00. He’d given up multiple runs in all but one of his first 14 starts. His fastball velocity and execution of secondary stuff had been inconsistent all year.
Things seemed to reach a tipping point last week when, after Sheehan gave up six runs in 3 ⅓ innings to the Orioles, manager Dave Roberts ominously said “he’ll get a start this next one, and we’ll see where it takes us.”
And while Roberts’ tone had softened by Sunday morning — the skipper clarified that Sheehan still “has plenty of leash” to figure things out, especially with the Dodgers lacking any viable rotation replacements in the wake of River Ryan reaggravating a hamstring injury in Triple-A last week — the pressure on the third-year big leaguer and former top-prospect talent was nonetheless mounting.
“It’s got to be better,” Roberts declared. “This is a good test.”
In the Dodgers’ 4-2 win over the Padres, Sheehan earned a passing grade with his best start in months.
He held the Padres to one run over five innings. He struck out five batters and yielded only two hits. And for the first time in a while, he finally flashed some long-lost consistency with his stuff.
“He knows that there’s more in there,” Roberts said pregame. “Obviously, we think the world of Emmet. He’s got really good stuff. There’s been times where it’s good until it’s not. I think the main thing is, this is just a good opportunity for him to go out there and give us a chance to win a series.”
Sheehan did so by going on the attack early, leaning heavily on his mid-90s mph fastball to get ahead in counts before consistently snapping off curveballs, sliders and changeups to put hitters away.
His command wavered a bit as the day went on, leading to two walks and a hit batter. He also hung a fourth-inning slider to Manny Machado that was launched to left for a solo home run.
But at the most pivotal moment of his outing, Sheehan bore down.
With two aboard and two outs in the fifth, he buried a curveball — a pitch he had tweaked with assistant pitching coach Connor McGuiness during a pair of between-starts bullpen sessions this week — that Samad Taylor chased in the dirt.
The strikeout retired the side and sent Sheehan skipping off the mound for the final time at 84 pitches with an emphatic pound of his mitt.
“You got to try to separate the process from the results as much as possible,” Sheehan said. “Which is pretty hard to do when you’re not pitching well and losing games.”
Indeed, washing away the frustrations of his ongoing struggles had been a challenge for Sheehan throughout the first half of the season.
At times, as his fastball velocity dipped earlier this year and his breaking stuff failed to induce its typical swing-and-miss, Sheehan found himself getting bogged down with thoughts about his flawed delivery. When pressure mounted and he faced jams that called for him to simply compete and make pitches, he instead only spiraled as ugly innings piled up.
“When you don’t feel great, it’s an easy default to focus on your mechanics and try to feel something,” Roberts said. “But in the heat of the moment of a game, you have to find a way to get past that and be external and get the hitter.”
That’s what Sheehan did Sunday, with the strikeout of Taylor — who Roberts said was going to be his last batter of the day — serving as an exclamation point on an outing the team is hoping can jump-start his season.
“Like I told him after the game, this is something for us to build on,” Roberts said. “Keep going to work this week and be ready for your next one.”
