Friedman: Dodgers want Urias to contribute despite limits

Julio Urias is making his major-league debut Friday night for the Los Angeles Dodgers. That much is known.

What the Dodgers will do with the phenom after his highly anticipated start still remains in question.

For all the hype surrounding Friday's game, this is still a raw 19-year-old with limited mileage on his arm, meaning he's not slated to join the rotation long-term just yet.

"He's not a guy, whether it's in Triple-A or the major leagues, who can make a start every fifth day through the balance of the year," Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman told Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register.

The Dodgers, recognizing his prodigious talent from the start, have made sure to watch Urias' workload as he breezed through the minor leagues. Since signing in 2012 he's never reached the 90-inning mark in a season, and has never thrown more than six innings in any one start.

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Urias has thrown 41 innings in 2016, and every start moves him closer to the limit. If the Dodgers want him to contribute to the big club later this year - most likely as a reliever - the time to start preparing him is now.

There are ways, Friedman explained, to get around the limits on Urias so he can contribute to a winning team while still developing him at his own pace, and the front office has already talked about this.

"You can take a break at certain points in the season and come back out," Friedman said. "You could just max it all out and then obviously he'd be done. Or you can have stints of a starter's workload and then use him in a controlled way in the bullpen.

"We've had a lot of conversations in the last month about Julio and thinking through different ideas in terms of how he could help us win games. It's not just a case of assessing his talent and seeing if he could help us. It was also about finishing off some development but also the workload and how to manage that going forward."