Noah Syndergaard is still taking aim at the Dodgers years after his Los Angeles stint went sideways, and he made that clear in a new GQ profile that found the former Mets phenom sounding as frustrated as ever.
Syndergaard, who is 33 and last pitched in the majors in 2023, arrived in Los Angeles on a one-year, $13 million prove-it deal. The Dodgers were buying into the idea that they could get something useful out of a once-electric arm whose breakout 2016 season was already fading into memory.
Instead, the move unraveled fast. Syndergaard made 12 mostly disastrous starts and posted a 7.16 ERA before being traded to the Cleveland Guardians for Amed Rosario.
Los Angeles was so eager to move on that it sent cash with him.
At the time, Syndergaard didn’t exactly sound eager to be coached back into shape. After the trade, he said, "For the last two years I’ve had a lot of cooks in the kitchen, a lot of people thinking they can come out and fix me.
[...]. I just think (I should) go out there and not really listen to what people think I should and should not be doing, but just do what feels good and natural to me."
His Cleveland stop didn’t last long, either. He made five starts for the Guardians, finished with a 4.94 ERA, then was DFA'ed and released in late August.
The new profile goes beyond baseball, touching on what Syndergaard has been doing in quasi-retirement. He hasn’t ruled out another MLB comeback, even though a tryout with the Chicago White Sox last year didn’t get him back in the door. The piece also notes that he’s become politically active and has leaned hard into health-conscious living.
Still, the baseball part of the conversation hangs over everything. Syndergaard comes off as someone who believes his career should have gone differently, and he keeps circling back to the Dodgers as the place where things went wrong. In the profile, he says, "I would be the first player in history that the Dodgers made progressively worse."
It’s a sharp line, but it also fits the larger picture of a pitcher who never really recovered after Tommy John surgery and, at least in this telling, still wants someone else to carry the blame.
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