I understand why the BBWAA announces finalists for awards before it announces the winners — they’re trying to build some suspense, some anticipation, and, okay, that’s fine, even if the finalists don’t tell us much we couldn’t predict. For example, we’ve long known the AL Cy Young was going to come down to Felix Hernandez vs. Corey Kluber. All the non-contenders have been officially eliminated, which does nothing. It’s even funnier when you get a race that isn’t a race at all, like Jose Abreu and the AL Rookie of the Year. Or, say, Clayton Kershaw and the NL Cy Young. According to the BBWAA, Kershaw is a finalist, along with Johnny Cueto and Adam Wainwright. The ESPN forecast is somewhat torn between Felix and Kluber, in one league. In the other league, it’s less torn:

Unanimous, in other words. And this is the way things are likely to play out. Clayton Kershaw ought to get every single first-place vote, because of the gap between himself and the others. You can eyeball the gap if you want, but we can also put some numbers to the idea. What would it have taken for Kershaw to come away resembling Cueto or Wainwright?

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The days of having to rail against runs batted in as a particularly useful indicator of individual offensive value are long behind us. That does not mean there might not be potentially interesting research to do on situational hitting or the like, but simply that the straight-up use of RBI is not something that really needs to be debated.

Nonetheless, it is still interesting to see what sorts of hitters can accumulate high numbers of RBI, something we recognize with an award named for two players who managed big RBI numbers despite less than impressive advanced hitting metrics: the John Carter-Tony Bautista Award.

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Nearly a year ago on these very electronic pages, I wrote a post entitled “The Dodgers And Too Many Outfielders,” investigating the fact that the Dodgers had four starting outfielders — Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp, Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier — for three spots, a situation that would only get more complicated when top prospect Joc Pederson arrived. A move, it seemed, was a necessity, and I counted down six ways it could happen.

A year later, a lot has changed, both in terms of how some of those players are viewed and in what outfield positions they play. But what never did change is that Ned Colletti wasn’t able to move any of his veterans, and now Andrew Friedman, Farhan Zaidi and company are left with an even more constricting situation. Puig, Kemp, Crawford, and Ethier are still Dodgers. Pederson put up the first 30/30 season in the PCL in decades on his way to winning the league MVP and Rookie of the Year awards before making his major league debut in September. Most unexpectedly, lightly-regarded backup Scott Van Slyke became one of the league’s most valuable bench players and clearly deserves more time.

Four outfielders? If only. These Dodgers have six, and if we thought a move last year was a probability, now it seems like more of an imperative. But how is this going to resolve itself? Here we go again.

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Back in September, we announced the creation of the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award, in order to have an outlet to honor the player we felt performed at the highest level of any player in Major League Baseball each season. We wanted to try and avoid a lot of the semantical arguments about the meaning of different awards, and eliminate many of the divisions between leagues or player types, and simply recognize the most outstanding performer of the season.

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Due in large part to Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, analytical baseball ideology has often sold as a necessity for low-revenue franchises to compete with teams who have vastly more resources. The A’s story was written as brains overcoming riches, and a number of teams in smaller markets decided to emulate their success. Over the past decade, the front offices most known for their analytical decision making processes inlucded teams like the A’s, Rays, Indians, Astros, and Cardinals, and because of this, Moneyball was the catch-all phrase for poor teams that used analytics to compete with teams that didn’t need it.

Except that story hasn’t been entirely true for quite a while now. It’s an easy story to tell, because low revenue teams have used these kinds of tools to allow themselves to make up for their revenue deficits, but the notion of analytics being only for small market teams is outdated and now just not correct. The Red Sox were probably the first big market team to really buy into the combination of efficient spending while maintaining a very high payroll, but the Yankees weren’t far behind, with a significant analytical department of their own. And of course, the Dodgers already hired one analytically-oriented GM, with Paul DePodesta running the team in 2004-2005, though that didn’t last.

When the Cubs new ownership wanted to build a sustainable winner, they poached Theo Epstein from Boston, and are now not too far away from being a very scary competitor for the rest of the NL Central. And now, the Dodgers have lured Rays GM Andrew Friedman out of Tampa Bay, making him the President of Baseball Operations for the team with the largest payroll in baseball. With Friedman heading west, arguably the four most historic franchises in MLB — and certainly four of the teams with the highest revenue potential — fit the mold of a Moneyball front office. This kind of structure is no longer the domain of poor somewhat less rich teams, and this transition serves to make the Dodgers an even more formidable opponent in the NL West.

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There was no baseball last night. There will be no baseball tonight. This is the fault of a great many people, too many to list here. The cynical might say some blame falls at the feet of Don Mattingly and Matt Williams. Others insist the entirety of the blame belongs there.

Mattingly tried his best and Clayton Kershaw turned in two starts (or parts of two starts) unbecoming of a presumptive MVP and Cy Young winner. But if you’re looking for the true catalyst of the Dodgers’ demise and the author of a short series win, look no further than Matt Carpenter.

The Cardinals’ third baseman was unconscious during the division series, clubbing a home run and double apiece in the first three games of the series. In the deciding Game Four, he went 0-4 but his mark on this series remains indelible.

All that extra base pop is slightly out of character for Carpenter, who claimed the same high-OBP as his 7 WAR campaign of 2013 only without the extra base power. He hit just eight home runs during the regular season, only one player hit for less power while still producing more than 10% better than league average.

None of this makes Dodgers fans feel any better. How could L.A. let off-brand Joe Mauer beat them so soundly during the Division Series? Carpenter bested the Dodgers in three key ways.

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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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