Will Klein Opens Angels Vs Dodgers After Blake Snell Scratch
Blake Snell was scratched a few hours before angels vs dodgers on May 15, 2026, and the Dodgers turned to Will Klein to open a bullpen game in Anaheim. Klein made the first start of his career as Los Angeles adjusted on the fly.
Will Klein Opens For Dodgers
The change came after Snell had been scheduled to make his second start back from injury. Instead, Klein got the ball for his first career start, a different assignment than the Dodgers had planned when they traveled to Anaheim for a three-game weekend series.
Los Angeles entered at 26-18 and had just won its final two games against the Giants to split the series. The Dodgers also had scored 12 runs in the first five games of their homestand combined before beating Atlanta 4-0 and the Giants 5-2, so the late pitching switch put even more weight on run prevention early.
Blake Snell And The Dodgers Staff
Snell had already given the Dodgers a mixed first outing back from injury, allowing six hits and four earned runs in three innings against Atlanta while generating a game-high 16 whiffs. He had not faced the Angels since 2023, when he shut them out over five innings as a Padre, struck out seven, and allowed seven hits and four walks.
The bullpen shape mattered because several relievers had already worked the previous night. Alex Vesia threw a scoreless inning on May 14 and needed 21 pitches, Edgardo Henriquez threw a scoreless inning and needed 17, and Tanner Scott closed it out in nine pitches after throwing 14 on May 13. Klein had topped out at 37 pitches so far in 2026, so his first start came with limited room to stretch him too far.
Angels Bring Jack Kochanowicz
The matchup also put the Angels’ rotation and relief corps under a different kind of pressure. Jack Kochanowicz made his ninth start of the season after allowing nine runs in 37 1/3 innings over his previous six starts before his last outing in Toronto, where he worked into the sixth inning in each of those six starts before the Blue Jays game changed that pattern.
Los Angeles arrived with the worst record in baseball at 16-28, having lost 11 of its previous 12 games after reaching 11-10 on April 17. The numbers around the club were rough, too: a 25.8 percent team strikeout rate that ranked worst in baseball, a 4.60 team ERA that ranked sixth-worst, and a 5.27 bullpen ERA that ranked third-worst. That left the Dodgers trying to manage a scratch and a bullpen game against a team still searching for anything resembling stability.
