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 »

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.

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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 »

The recent flurry of matchups between the Dodgers and Padres have been enthralling. That’s what transpires when two teams of similar caliber go head-to-head – both clubs feature impressive lineups, employ the league’s best starters, and have quality bullpens and bench options to maintain the tension in later innings. They also both possess good front offices. The Dodgers have long been at the sabermetric forefront, while the Padres have strengthened their analytics department over the last few years. They share multiple characteristics, and not surprisingly, both teams excel.

However, the intrastate rivals do disagree on one major aspect of the modern game: infield shifts. Since last year, the Dodgers have applied the shift in 58.0% of opportunities, a league-leading rate over that span. In contrast, the Padres have done so just 21.5% of time. Only the Cardinals and Braves, two teams that are notably shift-averse, recorded lower rates.

What’s interesting, though, is that this isn’t because the Padres dislike the shift. Let’s dig a bit deeper. The Dodgers are what you would call equal-opportunity shifters – that is, they don’t discriminate between left- and right-handed hitters. Of their 6,729 shifts during the aforementioned time span, 3,210 (47.7%) of them were against the former. (Here I should clarify that I’m only factoring in Baseball Savant’s shifts, not strategic alignments, to simplify the analysis.)

Ok, now for San Diego. Their total of 2,608 shifts is much lower, but, and I kid you not, 2,524 (96.8%) of them were against left-handed hitters! And no, the Padres didn’t stumble into this. The gap between them and second place, the Rockies, is about 18 percentage points. There’s clear intent here, which looks even more impressive on a graph:

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The quality of Dustin May’s raw stuff is undeniable. He throws his sinker with the highest average velocity of any starter in the majors and it’s ridiculous tailing action makes it one of the most GIF-able pitches in baseball. During each of his starts, Twitter is flooded with GIFs like this one.

Dustin May, Filthy Two Seamers.

Get out of my head, Joe Davis! (but, yeah, you're right ?) ? pic.twitter.com/gw5ZV2bxGk

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 15, 2021

It’s not just May’s sinker that stands out. His entire arsenal is composed of pitches with elite characteristics. Here’s a look at May’s repertoire and each pitch’s percentile ranks when compared with their respective pitch types:

May’s velocity on each of his pitches obviously stands out; he’s among the league leaders in average velocity on all four of his pitches. On three of his offerings, he has elite movement in one direction or the other. It’s a truly impressive arsenal without peer in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

This picture of Mookie Betts looks like something out of a postseason highlight reel. It looks, in fact, very much like a picture of Mookie Betts from last October, when he made a number of game- and series-saving catches en route to the Dodgers’ World Series championship. It isn’t: it’s from April 17, last weekend, when the Padres hosted the Dodgers for a three-game set. The catch Betts was celebrating did, indeed, save the game — but it wasn’t a game that meant the difference between living and dying. It was a game that meant the difference between being 11-2 or 10-3.

Even though it might not have been life-or-death, the first meeting between the Dodgers and Padres since they squared off in the NLDS last year was a wild ride. At no point over the three games did either team have more than a two-run lead during regulation play. There were critical errors and rapidly-changing leads. There were blown saves. There were extra innings and cleared benches. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, the Dodgers had taken two of three — but none of the three games had felt like a foregone conclusion. Game 1 saw the teams trade runs before the Padres tied it late, forcing extras; it was won in the 12th, with Joe Musgrove in left, Jake Cronenworth on the mound, and David Price at the plate. Game 2 was a pitchers’ duel, with Clayton Kershaw and Yu Darvish exchanging zeroes. The deciding run was a bases-loaded walk with two out — drawn by Kershaw himself. In the ninth, the Padres had the tying runs on second and third before Betts came through with a diving catch. And in Game 3, the Dodgers got an early lead off Blake Snell only for the Padres to chip away at their bullpen, eventually scoring three definitive runs in the bottom of the eighth to put the game away.

It was, in short, must-watch baseball — a worthy followup to the twists and turns of the NLDS. Game 2 of that series, in particular, when Cody Bellinger robbed Fernando Tatis Jr. of a would-be go-ahead homer and the Padres loaded the bases against Joe Kelly in the ninth, seems like a direct precursor to what we saw last week. But it’s not just that recent postseason meeting that has contributed to the burgeoning rivalry. There’s been a long history leading up to this point. Read the rest of this entry »

So far this season, injuries have been just about the only thing to put a damper on the Dodgers’ fun. Even with center fielder Cody Bellinger and second baseman Gavin Lux sidelined by various ailments, and Mookie Betts in and out of the lineup, the team has bolted from the gate with a 14-4 record, giving them the best record in the majors — admittedly, something they were projected to have — and producing a start that places them among the best in franchise history and among defending champions.

On Tuesday, Julio Urías rode the hybrid breaking ball that Ben Clemens wrote about to a career-high 11 strikeouts while allowing just one hit and one walk in seven shutout innings against the Mariners. A third-inning RBI single by Corey Seager gave him all the support he would need, helping the Dodgers to a 1-0 win that snapped a two-game losing streak and bought them another day towards better health.

With Bellinger already sidelined by a hairline fracture of his left fibula after being spiked in a play at first base on April 6, and Lux out due to soreness in his right wrist, the Dodgers were without Betts in the wake of a rather terrifying moment from Monday night. In the ninth inning of their 4-3 loss to the Mariners, Betts took a 95 mph fastball from Seattle’s Rafael Montero to the inside of his right forearm. Despite crumpling to the ground in obvious pain, he remained in the game — which ended two pitches later, on a double play — to run the bases. Thankfully, x-rays were negative, ruling out a fracture. Read the rest of this entry »

Julio Urías is only 24, but it feels like he’s been in the big leagues for a decade. Called to the majors at only 19 in the 2016 season, he’s been a part of the Dodgers’ future and present for a half-decade. When you start that young, much of your development happens at the major league level. In Urías’ case, that means all kinds of changes. Today, though, I want to focus on one: a curveball that has shape-shifted over time before arriving at a tremendously interesting final form.

When Urías came up, he threw a curve with two-plane break, something between a curve and a slurve. As you can see on our handy Pitch Type Splits, it featured 7.4 inches of horizontal break and only 2.9 inches of drop. In his next three seasons, all injury-affected, he turned the pitch into more of a classic curve — more drop than horizontal movement. 2020 saw a return to his original curveball shape. 2021? Well, it’s weird:

Is it a return to his old form? Is it an acceleration of his old form? Is it something else entirely? Let’s delve too deeply into some gifs and math and find out. Read the rest of this entry »

With another full week of baseball on the horizon, let’s set our sights on three intriguing faceoffs. One is riddled with questions about each starter’s ability to become a true ace, another connects two former teammates who have each proven themselves as aces, and the final is between two fellas who haven’t proven much of anything yet this year.

Tuesday, April 20, 6:40 PM ET: Zac Gallen vs. Luis Castillo

For years, Gallen has embodied promise. He was, and in many ways still is, the physical form of “could be.” The Cardinals took him in the third round of the 2016 draft, and his 1.62 ERA and 2.17 FIP at High-A in 2017 showed quick returns on the their investment. Gallen made it all the way up to Triple-A by the end of the year, then was traded to Miami in December 2017 along with Sandy Alcantara and two other players in exchange for Marcell Ozuna. Read the rest of this entry »

To the surprise of no one, the Dodgers are good. They lead all of major league baseball with a 10-2 record. They’ve outscored their opponents by 32 runs. Barring catastrophic injuries or a long run of bad luck, they seem poised to end the season as one of the league’s winningest teams.

You may be wondering where I’m going with this. It’s to introduce the idea that good teams are good by design. In a game whose goal is to maximize runs scored and minimize runs allowed, their hitters launch dingers, their pitchers compile strikeouts, and numerous depth players allow them to deal with injuries. But today, I want to focus on a single characteristic: plate discipline. As of writing, the Dodgers have the lowest in O-Swing% in the league. They’re also second in Z-Contact%, behind only the Astros. Laying off bad pitches, making contact with hittable ones – that seems like a recipe for success. And currently, no Dodger hitter is more emblematic of this approach than Max Muncy.

We haven’t written much about the first baseman here at FanGraphs. One reason might be that he isn’t the flashiest athlete – like Trout, he achieves greatness through consistent production at the plate. Theatrics are kept to a minimum, save for when he feuded with Madison Bumgarner. But another, more relevant reason might be that Muncy had remained true to himself since 2018, his breakout year. Sure, his wRC+ plummeted in 2020, but he sported an uncharacteristically low BABIP in one of baseball’s weirdest seasons. Besides that quirk, nothing much had changed. He drew his share of walks; he hit for power.

That is, until now. Somehow, someway, Muncy has become an even more extreme version of his patient, slugging self. His O-Swing rate of 12.5% is the lowest among all hitters, which is also the lowest of his career. But wait, that’s based on 12 games! How do you know this isn’t some small-sample blip? I wondered about that too, but looking at his rolling O-Swing% tells a different story, one which began in 2019:

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