Archive for Dodgers

The Best Pitching Matchups of the Week: May 24-31

In past iterations of this column, a combination of pressing narratives and fatigue with certain pitchers and their respective teams, or a straight up lack of interesting matchups have forced us to get creative. Not so this week, where the first three days of the week each feature games with giant WATCH ME signs stapled to their probable pitchers. Beginning with the Padres-Brewers series, the final week of May has gifted us some undeniably fun fixtures.

Monday, May 24, 7:40 PM ET: Blake Snell vs. Brandon Woodruff

In his first year in San Diego, Blake Snell seems to be learning his new city using a method that many non-pitchers find helpful: a lot of walks. Snell has already issued 25 walks in 40.1 innings (13.7 BB%) and allowed hitters to reach base at a clip comfortably above the league average. The former Ray has a .330 on-base percentage against him, while the rest of the league is at .313. Read the rest of this entry »


Daily Prospect Notes: 5/20

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Games from 5/18

Terrin Vavra, MIF/CF, Baltimore Orioles
Level & Affiliate: Double-A Bowie Age: 24 Org Rank: 9  FV: 45
Line:
3-for-3, 2 BB, HR
Notes
This makes five consecutive multi-hit games for Vavra. Cursory video analysis shows no change in his swing or physicality; he’s just on an epic early-season heater and should probably be at Triple-A. The real development here is his defensive movement: After playing both middle infield spots with Colorado, he’s now also getting reps in center field with Baltimore. Those who miss and appreciate all-fields contact will love Vavra, who is very adept at hitting outside pitches to the opposite field. He projects as a good multi-positional role player. Read the rest of this entry »


The Dodgers’ Addition of Albert Pujols Didn’t Make Sense Until…

It’s always a strange thing to see an all-time great donning an unfamiliar uniform at the tail end of his career. Even if the sights of Willie Mays in Mets pinstripes or Hank Aaron wearing a Brewers pullover — to say nothing of Babe Ruth as a Brave — predate your time as a viewer, they probably produce a double-take. Examples such as Ken Griffey Jr. in White Sox garb, Mike Piazza in A’s green and gold (or Padres blue and sand), or Randy Johnson in Giants black and orange might be more recent, but those sights are no less alien. Which brings us to Albert Pujols of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The 41-year-old Pujols, a future Hall of Famer who is one of four players to attain the dual milestones of 3,000 hits and 600 home runs, was designated for assignment by the Angels last week. Not surprisingly, given that he was hitting just .198/.250/.372 while still due the bulk of this year’s $30 million salary, he cleared waivers, thus sticking the Angels for the lion’s share of that amount. After clearing waivers, he reportedly drew interest from three or four teams, but while it was easy to spitball a few possible destinations — the Cardinals given his status as franchise icon, the Reds because they’d just lost Joey Votto to a broken thumb, the White Sox because they’re managed by Tony La Russa, the Marlins because they could use an attendance bump — nobody saw the Dodgers as contenders for his services. Yet on Saturday afternoon, the Los Angeles Times‘ Jorge Castillo reported that the defending champions had signed Pujols to a major league deal for the remainder of the season. They’ll pay him the minimum salary while the Angels pick up the rest of the tab.

In a vacuum, the move was something of a head scratcher, but the Dodgers are amid an incessant wave of injuries that on the offensive side had already claimed center fielder Cody Bellinger, superutilityman Zach McKinstry, and infielder Edwin Ríos, and kept growing over the weekend. On Friday, left fielder AJ Pollock reaggravated a left hamstring injury that had limited him to three plate appearances in a week, and on Saturday, just hours after the Pujols news broke, so too did the fifth metacarpal in Corey Seager’s right hand, via a pitch from the Marlins’ Ross Detwiler. Given all the moving parts among the Dodgers’ multiposition players, the injury opens up a lane for Pujols to get some playing time, but whether he can improve upon his meager production to date is another story. Read the rest of this entry »


No, We Don’t Need to Worry About the Dodgers

On Tuesday night, the Dodgers were only a Gavin Lux home run away from falling to a .500 record. A .500 record isn’t generally cause for panic, but it would definitely have been a disappointment for the reigning world champions, a team that was expected to steamroll most of the rest of baseball this season. Just to match 2020’s regular season record, the Dodgers need to add another 24 consecutive wins to Monday night’s win over the Mariners.

So how worried should the third-place Dodgers be? Not very.

The Dodgers Aren’t Actually Playing Poorly

Okay, this header isn’t true if we engage in an ultra-literal reading, but in losing 15 of the last 21 games, the Dodgers have only been outscored by a total of seven runs in the aggregate. The team’s overall Pythagorean record puts them at a 94.5 win pace, below the preseason projections, but not alarmingly so. The bullpen had a 4.48 ERA over this stretch, and while there is a relationship between bullpen performance and Pythagorean performance, the relationship is fairly loose.

I went back through history to look at the Pythagorean performances of all teams that underperformed their expected record by at least two wins after 36 games. Over the rest of the seasons, those teams fell short of their Pythagorean records by about a tenth of a run on average. In other words, the discrepancy between expected record and actual record in the early season is mostly noise, as opposed to hiding something sinister about a team’s true abilities. Read the rest of this entry »


The Best Pitching Matchups of the Week: May 10-16

All the pitchers in the league seem to have gotten together and decided that someone has to throw a no-hitter each week. One of our best matchups this week involves a guy who already threw one, two guys meeting in LA who are certainly pitching well enough to nab one of their own, and an AL Central altercation between pitchers – and teams – trending in opposite directions.

Tuesday, May 11, 7:10 PM ET: John Means vs. Marcus Stroman

John Means got his 15 minutes of fame last week after methodically tearing the Mariners apart. Means’ destruction of the M’s lineup earned him a no-hitter and the baseball world’s spotlight, but the Baltimore bro has been reliably great all season. He’s allowed just five hits and three earned runs over his last 22.1 innings, striking out 27 hitters along the way. If we zoom out and look at his entire body of work across seven starts, we find that Means has become one of the best pitchers in the game thanks to one little trick.

Like a local magician bringing their act on the road, Means risked letting the secret out of the bag when he performed the trick over and over again in Seattle. The Orioles’ breakout star threw first pitch strikes to 26 of the 27 hitters he faced, elevating his first-pitch strike percentage to a maniacal 73.5%. Not only is this 12 percentage points above Means’ career-high, it’s also the highest of any American League starter. As a predominantly fastball-changeup artist, one would think that Means adheres to the traditional method of fastballs in the zone, changeups just underneath it. While he still utilizes his changeup in that fashion – to the tune of a 33.3% chase rate – it’s actually the pitch he throws most frequently in the zone, per Baseball Savant. Read the rest of this entry »


The Dodgers Are in Purgatory

Within the first Dodgers-Cubs game of Tuesday’s doubleheader was one of the worst-executed plays at the plate that I’ve ever seen in a major-league game.

Let’s not even get into the fact that it was the bottom of the third and Clayton Kershaw had given up four runs in the first inning — after which he left the game, in the shortest start of his career. Here, Kyle Hendricks was up to the plate. Not a pitcher known for his slugging capabilities. There were two out, and Dennis Santana was in an ideal position to strand the two baserunners he had allowed.

Instead, he spiked a pitch in front of home plate. It careened off Will Smith’s shin pad, off into oblivion. Another run came scampering home, and as it did, Smith attempted to throw Santana the ball to make a tag. He did this as he was falling backward, twisting on one leg, and it bounced in the dirt in front of Santana, who was not at all ready to make a play at home. It caromed off his leg, over toward the backstop. Santana tried to avoid the obstacle of the runner, but by the time he got to the ball, the second runner had already scored, and there was nobody there to make an attempt at tagging him out. Read the rest of this entry »


Front Office Conference Call Agendas: National League

Building off of yesterday’s American League conference call agendas, let’s move on to the National League and see what’s on the docket for the teams of the senior circuit.

Arizona Diamondbacks

  • We’re over .500 and we’re banged up. This team is better than people on the outside thought. That said, I don’t think we’ll be exceptionally busy in terms of buying this summer. We’re not catching the Padres or Dodgers, and let’s not forget about the Giants. Let’s stick to the plan and just keep getting better long-term.
  • The rotation has been up-and-down, and Corbin Martin is probably the only minor league piece with a chance to contribute in that area. Let’s get some ideas going as to how we get through 162 games with depth issues in that department.
  • Let’s have some initial talks about draft strategy, as we’re picking sixth. It feels like there is a four-player tier at the top of the draft, so let’s see if there’s a tier-two player we like at six, or if we should be more creative and spread the wealth a bit.
  • The offense overall has been good, but our infield is not hitting. There aren’t any immediate moves to make, but it sure would be nice to see Seth Beer get off to a nice start to gauge whether he can get some at-bats up here as a Christian Walker replacement.
  • We love having the presence of Eduardo Escobar and Asdrúbal Cabrera, but there should be a market for both this July, and we should be listening. Let’s focus on arms in those discussions.
  • The same goes for David Peralta, even though he’s been our second best hitter and is signed for next year as well. That extra year, which is a cheap one at that ($7.5 million), should help generate some interest.

Read the rest of this entry »


Dustin May’s Breakthrough Cut Short by Tommy John Surgery

Through the first four starts of his season, Dustin May looked as though he’d put it all together. The hard-throwing, high-kicking ginger mop top was getting the strikeouts to match his elite stuff, and putting together a performance that fit right in with the rest of the Dodgers’ top-notch rotation. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a long while before May gets to build upon his strong showing. After leaving Saturday’s start against the Brewers in obvious pain, he’ll undergo Tommy John surgery on May 11 and miss the remainder of the season, an injury that comes at a time when the Dodgers’ vaunted depth has already taken significant hits on both sides of the ball.

In the second inning of Saturday’s game, May threw a 2-2 pitch to Billy McKinney that was a couple of feet outside. The 23-year-old righty winced, signaled for the trainer, and then departed, with manager Dave Roberts describing him reporting “a shooting sensation” in his right elbow. An MRI revealed the UCL damage, and he’ll go under the knife of Dr. Neal ElAttrache next week.

As Jake Mailhot documented less than two weeks ago, by mixing his curve and 98-99 mph four-seam fastball into what was predominantly a sinker/cutter mix, May was missing far more bats this year than before with his light-up-the-radar-gun stuff. Updating the stats, where he had struck out 20.8% of batters in his 80.2 innings in 2019-20, he’d nearly doubled that to 37.6% in 23 innings this year — the NL’s fourth-highest rate among pitchers with at least 20 innings behind Jacob deGrom, Corbin Burnes, and Freddy Peralta. Meanwhile, May’s 31.2% strikeout-to-walk differential ranked third behind only Burnes and deGrom. Of the Dodgers’ other starters, only Clayton Kershaw has outdone both his 2.74 ERA and 3.24 FIP, while only Trevor Bauer has the better ERA, and Julio Urías and Walker Buehler the better FIPs. All told, he was hangin’ with the big boys and fitting right in. Read the rest of this entry »


The Dodgers Might Have a Shifting Strategy of Their Own

Last week, I wrote about the Padres and how their usage of the infield shift stands out. To recap: They shift almost exclusively against left-handed hitters to great success, neglecting right-handed ones in the process. This decision is backed up by public research, which casts doubt on the efficacy of shifts against righties.

As a few of the comments noted, though, the Padres aren’t the most interesting subject when it comes to shifts. If anything, they’re conformists! The Dodgers and Rays, in contrast, are the rebels who defy convention by shifting more against righties than against lefties. We still don’t have a clear answer as to why. Leading up to this article, I did take a crack at the problem, and in the process, unearthed something about the Dodgers.

Before that, some context: Much of our discourse regarding the shift is focused on the dynamic between the hitter and team shifting against him. Kole Calhoun has a tendency to pull the ball, so the Dodgers have prepared this alignment. If Calhoun could go the other way, he’d earn himself a free knock, and so on.

But what about a version of the dynamic that includes the pitcher? By the same logic applied to hitters, if a pitcher could alter his approach to induce pulled grounders that are tailor-made for infield shifts, he’d probably be successful. We know pitchers can control the types of batted balls they allow to some extent: Last season, our Alex Chamberlain wrote about the relationship between pitch location and launch angle. As it turns out, a lower pitch will yield a lower launch angle compared to one located higher up, irrespective of pitch type.

Read the rest of this entry »


Jayce Tingler, Successful Meddler

The intentional walk is, in my opinion, the most overused tactic in baseball. If you explained it to someone who had just learned the rules, they’d be confused. “The object of the game is to get runners around all the bases to home plate, right?” they’d ask. “You’re purposefully putting a runner partway around those bases? Does his run somehow not count?”

The run does count, and intentional walks are generally a great way to help your opponent score. Given that “helping your opponent score” is a bad way to win baseball games, intentional walks are mostly bad. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

For decades, managers have intentionally walked dangerous batters. Sometimes it makes sense. Often, it doesn’t. Inevitably, though, the siren call of doing something, doing anything at all, to affect one’s own destiny leads managers astray. It’s an understandable impulse. Who among us, given the choice between doing literally nothing and taking some action to affect the outcome, would pick doing nothing? Since being a manager is largely about purposefully doing nothing when you could instead be doing something, I totally get why over-managing still persists.

Still, not every intentional walk is bad. Not every run is created equal, and there are certainly situations where the tactical advantage of choosing a different batter to face is worth more than the cost of an extra baserunner. Jayce Tingler called for two consecutive intentional walks on Sunday night in a win over the Dodgers, and they actually made sense. That calls for a celebration, as well as an explanation of why these particular walks were sound. Read the rest of this entry »