During the regular season, the Dodgers went 23-4 in games started by Clayton Kershaw, and 20-1 since the beginning of June. Kershaw and the Dodgers started to feel invincible, so, naturally, with Kershaw in the playoffs the Dodgers went 0-2, their year ending on a Tuesday in St. Louis. Plenty of things happened in Game 4 that played a role in determining the outcome, but this tells an awful lot of the story:

Kershaw’s final pitch of 2014 was a home run that turned a two-run lead into a one-run deficit. Under ordinary circumstances, that would just be a thing that happened. However, Kershaw had gone beyond 100 pitches, on short rest, in the playoffs. Despite consensus opinion, the Dodgers did have a bullpen, and a loss meant their season was over. So a tremendous number of people now believe Kershaw shouldn’t have pitched in the seventh, that Don Mattingly hung on a few minutes too long. And, certainly, we here have talked an awful lot about the need to be aggressive with bullpen usage in October. To talk this particular case through, from both sides, I’ve enlisted the help of my own brain. Usually it likes to sit my posts out, but this is a special circumstance.

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On Tuesday evening, Clayton Kershaw gave up a home run to Matt Adams. It was a big home run. Wanna know how I know it was a big home run? Because Matt Adams did this:

The graphic which appears during that replay is annoying, but also helpful, because it shows the real reason why Adams’ homer was a big homer. It was a big homer because it gave the Cardinals a 3-2 lead late in an playoff game with the opportunity to eliminate a team that had the best pitcher in the world on the mound. The Cardinals went on to win, of course, and the Dodgers’ season is now over.

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In Game 1 of the NLDS, Don Mattingly left in Clayton Kershaw to absorb a beating in part because he didn’t trust his bullpen. In Game 2, he lifted Zack Greinke, only to watch veteran J.P. Howell give a lead away. In Game 3, he rode Hyun-jin Ryu as far as he felt was realistic (given that Ryu had missed weeks with a shoulder injury), then saw Scott Elbert kick it away. In Game 4, a short-rest Kershaw was outstanding up until the moment he wasn’t, with Mattingly trying to push Kershaw through that seventh inning in order to turn it over to Kenley Jansen.

Each of these decisions were defensible in some way. And each one blew up in Mattingly’s face. The manager is getting pummeled for that, because that’s how sports work, and there’s a non-zero chance he doesn’t survive the winter, fairly or not. But the focus on Mattingly’s choices perhaps overlooks a more crucial problem: Man, how bad was that bullpen? How does this even happen? Read the rest of this entry »

In the Dodgers/Cardinals game Monday night, Dale Scott served as the home-plate umpire, and when the game was over Matt Kemp couldn’t help but complain to the media that Scott had been terrible. Umpires have had better games, and umpires have had worse games, but one could at least understand Kemp’s frustration, given what happened to him in the top of the ninth. And what happened to Kemp in the top of the ninth really captures the whole problem with the human-called strike zone. Nothing you’re going to read below is going to be new to you, because this has been the problem forever, but the specific sequence with Kemp was too incredible not to acknowledge. In not writing about Kemp’s situation specifically, I’ll begin by writing about Kemp’s situation specifically.

This post might have my favorite-ever .gif. At least, it’s my favorite .gif so far of the month. I love it because of how much I hate it.

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The story of last night’s NLDS Game 3 is almost certainly going to be about how the Dodger bullpen, which was known to be awful, was awful. After Pedro Baez in Game 1, and J.P. Howell in Game 2, it was Scott Elbert’s turn in Game 3. Other than Kenley Jansen, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is literally nothing Don Mattingly can do that isn’t going to blow up in his face. He could be the best manager in the world (well, probably not) or the worst, and we might never know, because the relievers he has at his disposal just keep on failing. (Yes, it was the right call to take out Hyun-jin Ryu, in his first start back from shoulder issues, when he did.)

Somewhat lost in that is the reality that if the Dodgers had merely managed to put up more than a single run against John Lackey and friends, they might not have needed to actually rely so heavily on the leaky pen. There’s a not-small part of that which is on umpire Dale Scott, but you can also only put so much on questionable umpiring. There’s a whole lot more you can put on things like… wow, did Yasiel Puig strike out seven times in a row? Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Kershaw seems like a virtual lock to win the 2014 National League Most Valuable Player award. Even though he missed a handful of starts at the beginning of the year, he more than made up for that over the remainder, and below, observe a plot of how Kershaw has distributed his runs allowed.

Kershaw’s made 28 starts, and in seven of them, he didn’t allow a run. In another ten, he allowed but a single run, so you can see why Kershaw’s MVP case has so much support. But I should note that Kershaw made 27 regular-season starts, and he’s made one postseason start. The postseason start is included in the plot above, and it’s something that kind of needs to be explained.

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What do you know about the Los Angeles Dodgers? We know they’re the glamor franchise in baseball right now. They have the enormous TV deal and the largest payroll in the league. They just won their second straight National League West crown. They’re good, as one expects such an expensive club to be.

Expensive teams tend to employ well-known players, and the Dodgers don’t want for names. But the way they go about their business is, in my mind, something of a mystery.

The Dodgers have a great rotation and sort of a terrible bullpen. Their offense is good but is it best in baseball good? According to wRC+, that is exactly where it ranks. Their non-pitching offensive players put up a 116 wRC+, tied with the Pirates for best in baseball.

Despite playing a ballpark that is actually favorable to home runs, the high-output Dodgers offense didn’t hit many bombs. They don’t have a prototypical power bat in the middle of their order, until you remember Adrian Gonzalez slugged 27 home runs this year and Matt Kemp put up a 140 wRC+ this season. As a team, they hit 134 home runs, fewer than the Mariners and just two more than the Giants, a team they outscored by almost 50 runs.

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How many players per team would you say you know? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Even if you can easily rattle off 20 players per team, 600 of the 750 players on a normal active roster, the last five that you couldn’t name would probably include some relief pitchers. Unless you’re a first-round draft pick (like the Royals’ Brandon Finnegan) or the team’s closer, it’s hard for a reliever to gain much notierity — they’re rarely voted to All-Star teams, and very few people like the Hold statistic (I like Shutdowns and Meltdowns, but they’re not universally accepted stats). So, rookie relievers can sneak up on you when the postseason starts, just like Francisco Rodriguez did in 2002.

In case you’re too young to remember 2002, or are conversely too old to remember things that happened way back in 2002, Rodriguez came up as a 20-year-old on Sept. 18. In his five games, his leverage increased, until his pLI hit 1.54 in his final regular-season appearance, when he struck out five batters of the seven Mariners’ batters he faced across 2.1 innings on Sept. 27. Overall, he struck out 13 batters and walked two in 5.2 scoreless innings, which was good for a FIP- of 1. As in, 99 percent better than league average. A tiny sample, no doubt, and not even worth paying attention to. That is, until the now-famous loophole came into play.
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A friend of mine who dropped out of a chemistry PhD program would describe the experience as getting to know more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. There’s a lesson in there about the nature of limits, but there’s also the comparison between general knowledge and specialization. I feel like my writing has taken me on something of a PhD course, where I used to write about simpler things, and now I have to keep digging deeper and deeper to find new deposits worth mining. One of my current fascinations is the interplay between pitcher and batter, the strategy of sequencing, and I just wrote about that for Fox. In that piece, I talk about players who’ve been pitched differently in 2014, relative to 2013.

As a natural follow-up, I figured I’d look at players who’ve been pitched differently within 2014, say, splitting the first and the second halves. I did all the research and I generated all my numbers, but when I evaluated them, I decided I’d focus on one player in particular. You’re already aware that Matt Kemp is experiencing a major resurgence at the plate. Mike Petriello wrote about him earlier this very month. And how have pitchers responded to Kemp’s incredible rebound? Relative to the season’s first half, no player in baseball has had a bigger drop in his rate of fastballs seen in the vicinity of the strike zone.

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Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball, and I’m not even going to waste your time backing that up with evidence. It’s true. You know this to be true. We’ll accept that and move on. There’s no shortage of reasons why Kershaw is so good, but a pretty good shorthand is that there are four things a pitcher can do that are of the utmost importance, and he’s great at all of them. He gets strikeouts (first in K%), limits walks (seventh in BB%), avoids the longball (third in HR/9), and keeps the ball on the ground (14th in GB%). If you can do all that, the rest of it doesn’t really matter.

It helps, of course, that has three dominant pitches. His fastball ranks second in baseball in our pitch values. His slider is the best. His curveball is fifth-best. This is completely unfair, and that’s part of the reason his walk rates are so low. Since he’s got three pitches that are basically unhittable, he has little reason to nibble around the corners. Only three pitchers have a higher Zone%; only three pitchers have a higher first-pitch strike percentage. (Unsurprisingly, Phil Hughes leads both lists.)

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