The use of through-thickness reinforcement in the form of short rods has been proposed to improve the interlaminar properties of laminated composites in the recent years. Compared to a fibrous short rod, which is often referred to as z-fiber, a metallic rod, referred to as z-rod in this paper, has reasonably high capability to carry transverse loading, i.e., a z-rod can provide both axial and transverse bridging tractions to the delamination crack. Therefore, a new analytical model is proposed to study the bending effect of the z-rods on mode I delamination toughness of laminated composites. In this new model, both the axial pull-out and the transverse bending are considered simultaneously. New bending moment and displacement relationships for a single z-rod are established by modeling the z-rod embedded in a linearly elastic and rigid-perfectly plastic matrix using the classical beam theory. By using an approximate expression for mode I fracture toughness of double-cantilever-beam (DCB) specimen, a parametric analysis of DCB specimen reinforced by the z-rods is conducted. The present numerical results show that the bending effect should not be ignored when stiffer z-rods are employed to reinforce the laminated composites.