No sooner had the Dodgers surged to the NL’s best record with a 14–2 run keyed by the return of Will Smith than the wheels started falling off their rotation. Over a seven-game span that began on May 15, their starters eked out just 25.2 innings, only twice lasting five frames. Not only was the bullpen tapped to the extreme, but Clayton Kershaw also made dubious personal history with a pair of early exits, and both Dustin May and Julio Urías landed on the injured list. The whole mess is forcing the organization to test its depth at a less-than-optimal time.

For starters, this isn’t what you want:

For the week, Los Angeles starters were cuffed for a 5.96 ERA and 5.05 FIP in those 25.2 innings, and the team’s overtaxed relievers were lit up for a 6.99 ERA and 5.73 FIP in 29 appearances totaling 37.1 innings. Because the Dodgers’ league-best offense bashed out 40 runs in those seven games, they managed to go 3–4, but their three-game division lead over the Diamondbacks was cut in half, and at 29–19, they fell behind the Braves (29–17), whom they’ll face for three games in Atlanta starting on Monday, for the NL’s best record. Read the rest of this entry »

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: the Dodgers have the National League’s best record. Just past the one-quarter mark of the season, the team that’s dominated the NL West over the past decade while winning three pennants is back on top with a 27-15 record, that after spending most of April struggling to steer clear of .500. Since April 28, they’ve won 14 of 16, a span that has coincided with the return of Will Smith to the lineup after experiencing concussion-like symptoms.

As he’s been doing so often lately, Smith played a key role in Monday night’s 12-inning win over the Twins at Dodger Stadium. In the first inning, with a man on first, he hit a 398-foot wall-scraper off Pablo López for a two-run homer that immediately preceded a solo shot by Max Muncy. In the third, Smith poked a single to center field and came home on Muncy’s second homer of the night. He didn’t get another hit, but reached on an error in the fifth inning, which prompted Twins manager Rocco Baldelli to pull López from the game. The Twins clawed back from a 5-1 deficit to tie the game via Trevor Larnach‘s three-run eighth-inning homer and send it to extra innings, where they scored first in the 10th. But Smith, serving as the Manfred Man in the bottom of the frame, hustled home on a J.D. Martinez single that re-tied it. The Dodgers won in 12 on Trayce Thompson’s walk-off walk.

Smith has been locked in lately, going 10-for-25 with two doubles, three homers and seven RBIs in his past six games, all wins over the Brewers, Padres, and Twins. In fact, he’s been locked in just about all season save for his time on the sidelines. The 28-year-old slugger started 10 of the Dodgers’ first 13 games behind the plate, but took two foul balls off his catchers’ mask during the team’s April 10-12 series against the Giants. He sat out the first two games of the Dodgers’ subsequent series with the Cubs; before the second one, he told the Dodgers he didn’t feel right but passed a concussion test. “He felt uneasy and foggy,” as manager Dave Roberts explained at the time. Preferring to take a cautious approach, the Dodgers retroactively placed Smith on the 7-day concussion injured list on April 16. Read the rest of this entry »

Senior Quantitative Analyst

Department: Baseball Operations
Status: Full-Time
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Pay Rate: $120,000 – $150,000/year*
Reports to: Director, Quantitative Analysis

*Compensation rates vary based on job-related factors, including experience, job skills, education, and training.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are looking for quantitative baseball researchers to turn data into actionable insights through use of mathematical and statistical models. Senior Analysts are expected to innovate on our core data products, identify future areas of innovation in predictive modeling, identify and implement best practices in developing and deploying code, and provide data-backed opinions to coaches and front office decision-makers on decisions regarding on-field strategy, player development, and player evaluation.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

• Own the development and deployment of our most complex and highest impact predictive models
• Identify, research, and implement opportunities for new models, data sources, and areas of baseball research
• Contribute to high level planning and prioritization of projects within the QA group
• Build internal tooling to make you and your peers more efficient
• Understand the needs of users and evaluate the day-to-day impact of analytics products
• Perform ad hoc data analyses to answer urgent questions from front office leadership and other groups within baseball operations
• Advise executives and coaches on player evaluation, player development, and on-field strategy
• Make public appearances to student and professional groups to aid departmental recruiting efforts
• Provide mentorship to junior analysts, interns, and various members of the Dodgers organization not coming from a technical background.

Basic Requirements/Qualifications:

• Passionate about winning championships
• 5+ years of experience building and evaluating predictive models in industry
• Expertise in model deployment and tools for automating data science workflows
• Experience maintaining a well-organized, well-documented code repository
• Experience mentoring early-career data scientists

Nice to Haves:

• Experience using data to advise decision-making in some domain
• Experience with Bayesian Statistics
• Experience with spatial statistics
• Experience with analysis of time series data
• Experience with machine learning, particularly problems involving computer vision
• Experience maintaining and monitoring machine learning models in production
• Experience with SQL
• Experience doing baseball research

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

Quantitative Analyst

Department: Baseball Operations
Status: Full-Time
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Pay Rate: $90,000 – $110,000/year*
Reports to: Director, Quantitative Analysis

*Compensation rates vary based on job-related factors, including experience, job skills, education, and training.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are looking for quantitative baseball researchers to turn data into actionable insights through use of mathematical and statistical models. Analysts are expected to build and evaluate models, follow best practices in developing and deploying code, and provide data-backed opinions to coaches and front office decision-makers on decisions regarding on-field strategy, player development, and player evaluation.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

• Maintain and make improvements to our core predictive models
• Contribute features to internal tooling
• Understand the needs of users and evaluate the day-to-day impact of analytics products
• Perform ad hoc data analyses to answer urgent questions from front office leadership and other groups within baseball operations
• Advise executives and coaches on player evaluation, player development, and on-field strategy
• Make public appearances to student and professional groups to aid departmental recruiting efforts
• Provide mentorship to junior analysts, interns, and various members of the Dodgers organization not coming from a technical background.

Basic Requirements/Qualifications:

• Passionate about winning championships
• 2+ years of experience building and evaluating predictive models in industry or equivalent experience in academia
• Experience maintaining a well-organized, well-documented code repository

Nice to Haves:

• Experience using data to advise decision-making in some domain
• Experience with model deployment and tools for automating data science workflows
• Experience mentoring early-career data scientists
• Experience with Bayesian Statistics
• Experience with spatial statistics
• Experience with analysis of time series data
• Experience with machine learning, particularly problems involving computer vision
• Experience maintaining and monitoring machine learning models in production
• Experience with SQL
• Experience doing baseball research

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

Junior Quantitative Analyst

Department: Baseball Operations
Status: Full-Time
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Pay Rate: $75,000 – $85,000/year*
Reports to: Director, Quantitative Analysis

*Compensation rates vary based on job-related factors, including experience, job skills, education, and training.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are looking for quantitative baseball researchers to turn data into actionable insights through use of mathematical and statistical models. Analysts are expected to build and evaluate models, follow best practices in developing and deploying code, and provide data-backed opinions to coaches and front office decision-makers on decisions regarding on-field strategy, player development, and player evaluation.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

• Assist more senior analysts in building, evaluating, deploying, and maintaining statistical and machine learning models of baseball data
• Understand the needs of users and evaluate the day-to-day impact of analytics products
• Perform ad hoc data analyses to answer urgent questions from front office leadership and other groups within baseball operations
• Advise executives and coaches on player evaluation, player development, and on-field strategy
• Continue to build your own data science skills and those of your colleagues

Basic Requirements/Qualifications:

• Passionate about winning championships
• Demonstrated experience building and evaluating predictive models. Candidates providing evidence such as a personal GitHub page will be given highest consideration.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience using data to advise decision-making in some domain
• Experience with model deployment and tools for automating data science workflows
• Experience maintaining a well-organized, well-documented code repository
• Experience with Bayesian statistics
• Experience with spatial statistics
• Experience with analysis of time series data
• Experience with machine learning, particularly problems involving computer vision
• Experience maintaining and monitoring machine learning models in production
• Experience with SQL
• Experience doing baseball research

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Cubs signed Cody Bellinger to a one-year deal in December, hoping that the combination of improved health and a change of scenery could help the slugger rebound from a pair of dismal seasons in the wake of injuries to both his left leg and right shoulder. Though the 27-year-old center fielder started the season slowly, he’s since heated up and just completed his most productive calendar month since his MVP-winning 2019 season. He may not beall the way back to his award-winning form, but he’s in a much better place that he was in his final years with the Dodgers.

Though he went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in Wednesday’s 2–1 loss to the Nationals, Bellinger is hitting .291/.364/.573 with seven homers and a 149 wRC+. He finished April with a 158 wRC+, his highest for any month in the past five seasons:

You’ll note the token representation of months from the 2020–22 seasons there (to be fair there were only two from 2020 due to the pandemic); I went to 11 on the list above just to include the last of those, as they’re the only ones in which Bellinger even hit at a league average clip. On the flipside, within the same span he had five months with at least 59 PA and a 72 wRC+ or worse, and three ranging from 83–94 in terms of wRC+. At his worst, he hit an unfathomable .118/.186/.215 for an 11 wRC+ in 102 PA in July 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Muncy’s career has had its ups and downs in recent years… or steps forwards and backwards, depending upon which plane you prefer for directional metaphors. Lately the slugger has been on a home run binge, one involving a mechanical tweak — a slight step backwards with his left foot at the start of his swing — that he adopted last year and then briefly abandoned this spring.

This weekend, Muncy took over the major league lead in home runs with 11. He went yard four times during the Dodgers’ four-game visit to Wrigley Field from Thursday through Sunday, starting the festivities with a solo shot off starter Javier Assad on Thursday night, adding a pair of late-inning blasts off Mark Leiter Jr. and Brad Boxberger on Saturday (the first of those a two-run homer), and capping his weekend with a two-run drive off Marcus Stroman on Sunday. The last of those gave the Dodgers the lead and helped them take three games out of four from the Cubs.

Muncy’s hot streak didn’t just begin last Thursday; it’s been going on for two weeks. After homering just once while going 4-for-33 in his first nine games, he bookended a three-game series at Oracle Park with a pair of two-homer games, then homered in losing causes in series openers against the Cubs and Mets at Dodger Stadium. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, the internet dealt with countless cases of “Is that really who I think it is?” as Twitter removed verification checkmarks for unpaid users. Yet when baseball fans did a double-take, it wasn’t because of a spam account that looked suspiciously like Jeff Passan or Ken Rosenthal. Instead, it was because of a shortstop who looked suspiciously like Mookie Betts.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts teased fans earlier this week, revealing that Betts could play shortstop on Wednesday. Instead, it was Luke Williams who took to the field at game time. Fans got their hopes up for Betts the following day, but once again, it was Williams on the lineup card. Indeed, it wasn’t until the seventh inning of yesterday’s ballgame that Roberts finally made good on his word; he pinch-hit for Williams with Betts, and Betts would stay in the game at shortstop. Williams may have earned the nickname Captain America for his performance with the US Olympic baseball team, but Betts was the superhero – or should I say super-utility player – everyone wanted to see. Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Kershaw didn’t need his 200th career win to burnish his Hall of Fame credentials, but on Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium, in his first start with the milestone within reach, he secured it in brilliant fashion. In an outing bookended by his pitching out of jams, Kershaw tossed seven scoreless innings against the Mets, a team he has utterly dominated throughout his career.

In securing the milestone, Kershaw joined Justin Verlander (244 wins), Zack Greinke (223), and Max Scherzer (203) among active pitchers, and Hall of Famers Don Sutton and Don Drysdale as those who won at least their first 200 games as Dodgers. He became the 121st pitcher in major league history to reach the plateau, and just the 13th to do so entirely with one team:

200+ wins, 1 team.

Clayton Kershaw just joined an exclusive list. pic.twitter.com/yCZYTsEgPw

— MLB Stats (@MLBStats) April 19, 2023

Before we go further, it’s time for the usual caveat about pitcher wins: Regular readers know that I generally avoid dwelling upon the stat, because in this increasingly specialized era, they owe as much to adequate offensive, defensive, and bullpen support as they do to a pitcher’s own performance. While one doesn’t need to know how many wins a pitcher amassed in a season or a career to appreciate his true value — and single-season totals in particular can be wildly misleading — those totals do affect the popular perceptions of their careers and still carry a certain cachet among players. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season is only a week old, but the Dodgers have to be quite satisfied with the early returns from their outfield. Mookie Betts aside, the unit entered the season full of question marks, and those only got larger once manager Dave Roberts had to start moving players around to cover for Gavin Lux’s season-ending ACL tear. Yet through the team’s first six games, rookie James Outman, holdover Trayce Thompson, and newcomer Jason Heyward have each produced some impressive performances that offer hope they can help to offset the team’s notable offseason departures.

Lux was supposed to be the Dodgers’ regular shortstop, and while the team soon traded for Miguel Rojas to be the regular, his loss pulled Chris Taylor into the mix to a greater degree than expected. In turn, the Dodgers have brought Betts into the second base mix; recall that the future Hall of Fame right fielder — you heard me — began his professional career in the middle infield, and spent the last two weeks of his 52-game rookie season filling in at the keystone for the injured Dustin Pedroia.

Given the anticipation that both Taylor and Betts would spend more time on the dirt, the Dodgers found room for both Heyward, a 33-year-old non-roster invitee who was released by the Cubs last year, the penultimate one of his eight-year, $184 million contract, and Outman, a 25-year-old prospect who entered the season with four games of major league experience. Both lefty swingers are on the roster in addition to the righty-swinging Thompson, who enjoyed a nice little breakout in the second half of his age-31 season, and lefty David Peralta, a free agent whom the Dodgers signed to a one-year, $6.5 million deal mid-February. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Vargas couldn’t swing. I don’t mean that in the insulting way that little leaguers sometimes do — “hey batter, you’ve got nothing, you can’t even swing.” I mean that he was medically prohibited from swinging. That didn’t stop the Dodgers from playing him this spring, as Davy Andrews detailed for this very site last month. It did mean, however, that he had to watch every pitch thrown to him, ball or strike, and simply take it. Not exactly the way he expected to enter his first spring training with a big league job nailed down, I’m sure.

The pinky finger fracture that kept Vargas from swinging has healed, but you might not know it from his batting line so far this year, because it seems he took that lesson to heart. Five games into his 2022 season, he’s come to the plate 18 times. In nine of those plate appearances, he’s walked. That 50% walk rate is amazing on its own, and I’ll come back to that, but the way he’s gotten to it is downright stunning.

The key to walking a lot is not swinging at bad pitches, and Vargas is doing that to a fault. Per Statcast, he’s swung at four of the 50 pitches he’s seen outside the strike zone in 2023. That’s the best rate in the majors, which is impressive on its own; 205 batters have seen at least 25 pitches outside the strike zone already this season, and every single one of them has swung at them more frequently than Vargas. We’re talking all the various plate discipline geniuses already enshrined in the pantheon of good eye; they’re all looking up at Vargas’ extreme selectivity. Read the rest of this entry »

The ribbon has been cut on the 2023 season and I wanted to push a few prospect updates live to The Board, including a few tweaks to the Top 100 list. This update also includes publication of scouting reports such that every rookie currently on an active roster now has a current record on The Board, and a few additions the farm systems I’ve already audited during this cycle based on things I saw during spring training.

Let’s start with injury-related updates to the Top 100. Phillies top prospect Andrew Painter has a partially torn UCL and is approaching the end of his four-week shutdown period. Rule of thumb: Among a similarly talented group of players, you’d most want to have the healthy guys. Painter slides from fifth overall to 12th, right behind newly minted big leaguers Anthony Volpe and Jordan Walker, who are comparably talented, healthy, and making a big league impact right now. This is just a cosmetic change to the list; Painter’s evaluation hasn’t changed. If it turns out he needs Tommy John, whether or not I slide him any further will depend on its timing. If rest doesn’t work and his surgery is timed such that he also misses all of 2024, that’s the worst case scenario for Painter and the Phillies. We know for sure that Nationals pitching prospect Cade Cavalli needs Tommy John, so in a similar fashion he falls within the 50 FV player tier, sliding from 63rd overall to 99th, right next to Mason Miller of the A’s, with whom he now shares injury-related relief risk.

Tigers prospect Jackson Jobe, the third overall pick in 2021, is going to miss three to six months due to lumbar spine inflammation. This injury is more novel than a TJ, and Jobe isn’t exactly coming off a great 2022. Unfortunately, this situation merits a more meaningful shift, but I still want to reflect the upside of a healthy Jobe, so he downshifts to the 45+ FV tier, where the most talented of the young high-variance prospects reside. Assuming he comes back late this season, he’ll be one of the higher-priority evaluations in the minors. Read the rest of this entry »