Inside Will Klein’s impossible rise to Dodgers

You’d be forgiven for not remembering the commerce.

On June 2 this yr, the Dodgers had been in need of pitching help. At the time, their rotation had been ravaged by accidents, and their bullpen was overworked and working low on depth. Thus, the morning after their relievers had been additional taxed following a short start from Yoshinobu Yamamoto against the New York Yankees, the Dodgers went out and added a little-known pitcher in a deal with the Seattle Mariners.

Will Klein’s origin story had quietly begun.

Almost 5 months before changing into a World Series hero for the Dodgers, pitching 4 miraculously scoreless innings in their 18-inning Game 3 win over the Toronto Blue Jays on Monday night time, Klein joined the group as a largely nameless face, acquired in exchange for fellow reliever Joe Jacques in the type of depth transaction the Dodgers make dozens of over the course of each season.

At that level, even Klein couldn’t have foreseen the star flip in his future.

He had a profession ERA over 5.00 in the minor leagues. He had struggled in restricted big-league motion in 2024, battling poor command while giving up 9 runs in eight outings. He had already modified organizations 3 times, and been designated for task by the Mariners the day before.

“I woke up to a 9 a.m. missed phone call and a text,” Klein recalled Tuesday. “Found out I was DFA’d. Really low then.”

Now, in the type of serendipitous flip only October can create, Klein has etched his title into World Series lore.

“I don’t think that will set in for a long time,” he said.

As the last man standing in the Dodgers’ bullpen in Game 3, Klein pitched more than he ever has as a skilled, tossing 72 pitches to save the workforce from placing a place participant on the mound.

Afterward, he was mobbed by his teammates following Freddie Freeman’s walk-off home run, then greeted in the clubhouse with a handshake and an completed “good job” from Dodgers pitching icon Sandy Koufax.

He had 500 missed messages on his telephone when the sport ended. He obtained 500 more as he tried responding to everybody Tuesday morning. His center faculty in Indiana, he said, had even hung a image of him up in a hallway.

“I woke up this morning still not feeling like last night had happened,” he said in a pre-Game 4 news convention. “It was an out-of-body experience.”

A thickly bearded 25-year-old right-hander initially from Bloomington, Ind., Klein’s path to Monday’s extra-inning marathon may hardly have been more circuitous.

In high faculty, he was primarily a catcher, until a damaged thumb prompted him to focus on pitching. When he was recruited to Eastern Illinois for school, his ACT scores (he obtained a 34) helped nearly as a lot as his natural arm expertise.

“I’m big into academics,” Eastern Illinois coach Jason Anderson said by telephone Tuesday. “If you can figure out science class, you can figure out how to throw a slider.”

Anderson wasn’t mistaken. Though Klein was initially uncooked on the mound, posting a 5.74 ERA in his first two collegiate seasons, he labored tirelessly on bettering his velocity, studying how to leverage the ability he generated with his long-limbed, 6-foot-5 body.

As his fastball crept toward triple digits, he began garnering the eye of MLB scouts. Though Klein’s junior season in 2020 was cut short after 4 outings by the COVID-19 pandemic, he’d shown enough promise in collegiate summer time leagues beforehand to get drafted in that yr’s fifth and last spherical by the Kansas City Royals.

Klein’s rise to the major leagues from there was not linear. His poor command (he averaged almost seven walks per 9 innings in his first three minor-league years) hampered him even as he climbed the Royals’ organizational ladder.

Klein reached the big leagues last yr, but made only 4 appearances before being included in a commerce deadline deal to the Oakland Athletics. This past winter, after ending the 2024 marketing campaign with an 11.05 ERA, he was dealt again to the Mariners.

The return in that bundle? “Other considerations,” according to MLB’s transaction log.

“His whole career has been [full of] challenges,” Anderson said. “He really just needed some time and somebody to believe in him.”

With the Dodgers, that’s precisely what he discovered.

Long before his arrival, Klein had admirers in the group. The membership’s director of pitching, Rob Hill, was immediately struck by his high-riding heater and mid-80s mph curveball when he first noticed Klein pitch in minor-league back-field video games during spring training in 2021 and 2022.

“I vividly remember his outings against us in spring training,” Hill said. “I was walking around, asking people, ‘Who is this guy?’ That was my first introduction to him.”

After being traded to the Dodgers, Klein was optioned to triple-A Oklahoma City to work under the tutelage of minor-league pitching coaches Ryan Dennick and David Anderson. There, he began to refine his strategy and trust his high-octane arsenal in the zone more. In 22 ⅔ innings, he struck out a whopping 44 batters.

“[He was] never short for stuff,” Anderson told OKC’s workforce broadcaster at the end of the season. “It was just accessing the zone and forcing action.”

During 4 stints on the MLB roster over the second half of the yr — during which he posted a 2.35 ERA in 14 outings — Klein also labored with big-league pitching coaches Mark Prior and Connor McGuiness on developing a sweeper to give him an all-important third pitch.

“I think our coaches have done a fantastic job of cleaning up the delivery, challenging him to be in the hitting zone, working on a slider,” supervisor Dave Roberts said. “He’s a great young man. And it’s one of those things that you don’t really know until you throw somebody in the fire.”

The Dodgers didn’t do that initially this October, sending Klein to so-called “stay hot” camp in Arizona for the first three rounds of the playoffs.

But while Klein was there, Hill said it “was very notable how locked in he was” during bi-weekly classes of live batting follow, with the pitcher “consistently asking for feedback and trying to continue to make sure his stuff was ready.”

During the workforce’s off week before the World Series, Klein was despatched to Los Angeles to throw more live at-bats against their big-league hitters. He promptly impressed once again, serving to thrust himself additional into Fall Classic roster consideration as the workforce contemplated methods to shuffle the bullpen.

Still, when Klein realized he would truly be energetic for the World Series, he acknowledged it got here as a shock.

“I’m just going to go out there,” he told himself, “and do what I can to help all these guys that have worked their butts off.”

After holding his own in a scoreless inning of mop-duty in a Game 1 blowout loss to the Blue Jays, Klein began sensing another alternative coming as Monday’s sport stretched deep into the night time.

“I realized that, when I looked around in the bullpen and my name was the only one still there, I was just going to [keep pitching] until I couldn’t,” he laughed.

Every time he returned to the dugout between innings, he told the teaching employees he was good to keep going.

“No one else is going to care that my legs are tired right now,” he said. “Just finding it in me to throw one more pitch, and then throw another one after that.”

Back in Illinois, Anderson was like everybody else from Klein’s past. Awed by how deep he managed to dig on the mound. Moved by a second they, just like him, may have never foreseen or probably imagined.

“Everything about him — his mentality, his work ethic, his obstacles, his path — it was like he was destined to be on that field at that time,” Anderson said. “That’s one of the greatest baseball games in history.”

And, against all odds, it was Klein who left maybe its most heroic mark.