Dave Raymond knows the West. The team he does play-by-play for, the Texas Rangers, not only competes in the American League West, their inter-league schedule this year comprises solely the National League equivalent. As a result, Raymond has been getting regular looks at two of the game’s most talent-rich divisions. In terms of powerhouse clubs and marquee players, the West is arguably baseball’s best.

How would Raymond rank the teams and players he’s seen this season? That was the crux of a conversation I had with the TV voice of the Rangers prior to last night’s game.

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David Laurila: Which is the best team you’ve seen this year?

Dave Raymond: “I’ve been really impressed with the Padres. They looked really good against us [in mid-August]. We may have gotten them right on the way to their peak — and that might have been us headed right to the trough — but they were really impressive. They have so much great young talent. There are guys like Jake Cronenworth who are hardly even noticed in the shadow of Fernando Tatis Jr. I mean, Cronenworth has to be the top rookie-of-the-year candidate right now, and he doesn’t even stand out on that team.

“Even Manny Machado. It looked like the energy of some of the young players is lifting him a little bit. He made some plays against the Rangers that were were pretty neat. You got a glimpse again of that young Manny Machado who won a Gold Glove and was more of the all-round player.

“But here’s my thought about the Padres: if you look at that lineup, find me the homegrown guy. He’s not there. It’s made up of all these pieces that were plucked from different organizations in trades and free agent signings. In kind of a perverse way, it’s really remarkable. I don’t think anybody sets out to build a championship team almost exclusively from other teams, but that’s kind of what they’ve done. And we just saw them, at the trade deadline, going out and aggressively bringing in even more guys from other organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

For the Toronto Blue Jays, it had already been a busy deadline day. In the dying moments of the trade deadline, they made one last move, acquiring Ross Stripling from the Dodgers:

The Los Angeles Dodgers have traded RHP Ross Stripling to the Toronto Blue Jays for two players to be named later.

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) August 31, 2020

Stripling has had a rough go of it so far this year. He’s posted his lowest strikeout rate, highest walk rate, and lowest groundball rate, all while allowing his highest rate of home runs per fly ball. That’s about as terrible as it sounds; it’s good for a 7.23 FIP, tied with fellow Blue Jays acquisition Robbie Ray for the worst such mark among pitchers who have thrown at least 30 innings this year.

The Dodgers are flush with pitching depth — Tony Gonsolin’s solid start was likely to force Stripling out of the rotation, and he was more or less a luxury in relief. They’d already tried to trade him once this year, only to have the Angels back out of the deal. Toronto, on the other hand, was starting Hyun-Jin Ryu, three ham sandwiches, and a near-mint condition Juan Guzman rookie card before their recent acquisition spree. The fit is obvious.

Stripling’s sluggish start this year defies easy analysis. The most startling statistic is his sudden inability to strike out right-handed batters. He’s running only a 14.1% strikeout rate against them, as compared to 22.7% before this year. The culprit appears to be two-fold: righties are swinging less at his curveball, previously a go-to out pitch, and missing less often when they swing at his fastball.

That fastball used to be an analytical darling, not quite the pure backspin ideal but not far from it. It’s lost a bit of vertical movement and gained fade, while his curveball has done the opposite: it now falls more but with less glove-side break. It’s a frustrating development for someone who relies on those two pitches mirroring each other.

If that feels to you like a tiny change for such a calamitous fall in results, all I can say is that I agree with you. He’s simply looked a little bit off on the mound this year, right down to an inconsistent release point; he’s released two thirds of his fastballs further to the first-base side of the mound than any fastball he threw in 2019. Here are his 2019 release points:

And 2020:

The Jays are betting that this is just a blip, or that they can fix him if it isn’t. I think that’s a reasonable move, particularly if the two players to be named later they’re surrendering are long shots. Stripling joins Robbie Ray and Taijuan Walker as new starters, displacing either Tanner Roark or Chase Anderson — unless he moves back into the swingman role where he excelled in Los Angeles. Either way, if he returns to anything like his prior form, he’ll be a key contributor for a team on the postseason bubble.

As for the Dodgers, they’ll be fine. They’d been looking to move Stripling for some time, likely to duck below the luxury tax line. With Mookie Betts signing an extension, they’ll probably do that tax line dance again in 2021, which means Stripling was going to be non-tendered or traded given the pipeline of not-yet-arb-eligible pitching coming up behind him. Given his rough recent form, he might not have made their postseason roster, so the decision to get something in return looks reasonable. But if the Jays fix him, or if he simply fixes himself, they might have found a complement to Ryu atop their rotation for years to come. It’s a smart risk by Toronto and a cost-saving move by Los Angeles.

It’s been a big week for the Seager family. For the first time in the careers of 26-year-old Corey Seager, who debuted in the majors with the Dodgers in 2015, and his 32-year-old brother Kyle, who debuted with the Mariners in 2011, the pair crossed paths in a regular season game. What’s more, they put themselves in the history books by becoming the first pair of brothers to homer in the same game for opposing teams since 2001, and just the ninth to do so in MLB history. Both brothers are off to strong starts this year after solid but unexceptional 2019 seasons.

Bad timing accounts for the fact that the brothers had never played a regular season game against each other until this week. Their respective teams played an interleague series in Los Angeles in April 2015, but Corey, the Dodgers’ first-round pick three years earlier, had just begun his second stint at Double-A Tulsa. When the Dodgers visited Safeco Field in August 2018, he was on the injured list, having not only undergone Tommy John surgery on May 4 of that year but also arthroscopic surgery on his left hip labrum on August 7.

MLB.com’s Ken Gurnick described the brothers’ first regular-season meeting as bittersweet, because the coronavirus pandemic prevented parents Jeff and Jody from making the trip from North Carolina to join them either at Dodger Stadium, where they played on Monday and Tuesday, or Safeco Field, where they played Wednesday and Thursday. The dueling homers occurred in the series opener on Monday, with Corey clubbing a towering 425-foot shot off Justin Dunn with two on in the third inning; dig the looks on the pair’s faces as little brother rounds the bases:

As you can see, an inning later, Kyle countered with a 405-foot solo homer off Ross Stripling, the second of three that the Dodgers righty would serve up in that frame as the Mariners overcome a 6-2 lead. Even so, the Dodgers came back to win the wild slugfest, 11-9. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a lousy time to be the Red Sox these days, running an American League-worst 6-16 record while allowing over six runs per game. Chris Sale and Eduardo Rodriguez are out for the year, Rafael Devers and J.D. Martinez aren’t generating anything close to their usual firepower while much of the lineup wheezes, and 3,000 miles away, Mookie Betts is off to an MVP-caliber start with his new team, the Dodgers.

On Monday, Betts continued his early-season rampage, homering for the fifth time in five games. This time it was a leadoff shot against the Mariners’ Justin Dunn:

That was the 21st leadoff home run of Betts’ career, a total that’s tied for seventh since 2014, his first year in the majors; George Springer leads with 36. It was Betts’ ninth homer of the season, which would have tied him for the National League lead with Fernando Tatis Jr. if the Padres prodigy hadn’t hit two against the Rangers (the second of which broke the Internet and the game’s insufferable unwritten rules). The 27-year-old right fielder is hitting .319/.374/.681 with 1.6 WAR, tied with Brandon Lowe for third in the majors behind Tatis and Mike Yastrzemski (both 1.8).

Last Thursday, while his former team was losing so badly to the Rays that they used both catcher Kevin Plawecki and infielder Jose Peraza on the mound, Betts homered three times against the Padres. It wasn’t just any three-homer game, either — and not just because his first homer, off Chris Paddack, came on a pitch off the plate and away (a rarity Ben Clemens broke down on Friday). It was the sixth three-homer game of Betts’ career, which tied the major league record:

There are some prodigious home run hitters on that list; four of the 17 players above hit at least 600 in their careers, while two more are in the 500s and three in the 400s. Betts, on the other hand, is still two homers shy of 150, and yet there he is at the top alongside Sosa (609 homers in 18 seasons) and Mize (359 homers in 15 seasons, a total suppressed by his losing three prime seasons to World War II). He’s been helped a bit by playing in a homer-heavy era, and by Fenway Park as well, in that he’s the only player with three three-homer games there, as many as Nomar Garciaparra and Ted Williams put together. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d be a liar if I said the Los Angeles Dodgers are struggling. At 16-7, they have been as dangerous as expected and currently hold the best record in the National League while leading in both runs scored and ERA. But the offense still isn’t firing on all cylinders, with Cody Bellinger, Max Muncy, and Joc Pederson all off to fairly slow starts. This is an especially concerning development for Bellinger given that he was responsible for approximately eight wins in 2019, hitting .305/.406/.629 with a 162 wRC+ and 47 homers while besting Christian Yelich for the NL MVP award.

Outside of hitting a couple home runs against the Angels on Friday, Bellinger’s 2020 has been his most forgettable campaign in the majors. A triple-slash of .187/.245/.341 (57 wRC+) has left him hovering around replacement level, and in a 60-game season, we’re only a week away from the halfway point.

Baseball is a game of adjustments, and even during an MVP campaign last year, Bellinger found pitchers adjusting to him with (slightly) successful results. On the morning of June 1, 2019, Bellinger’s OPS stood at an awe-inspiring 1.208; his batting average had fallen below the .400 line just a week before. You wouldn’t call the .262/.372/.561 (136 wRC+) he hit over the rest of the season an actual problem, but it was distinctly below his early-season standards. It wasn’t a complete sea change, but pitchers gradually started throwing him more breaking pitches as 2019 progressed, a trend that has continued in 2020. When Bellinger surged in April and May of last year, only 20.9% of his pitches were breaking pitches, a number which increased to 25.6% from June to September and to 28.7% in 2020, passing the 30% line so far in August.

And pitchers haven’t yet been punished for this approach. Bellinger has swung at 51.6% of all breaking pitches in 2020, compared to 34.2% in April/May 2019 and 41.9% from June on. Swinging at more breaking pitches has resulted in fewer hits than before; after getting 14 hits against the bendy stuff in April/May, including five homers, he only managed 16 over the next four months and he has just two in 2020. Since June 1, 2019 in 122 games, Bellinger has just two hits against curveballs, with none coming in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

When I sat down to watch last night’s game between the Dodgers and the Padres, I was ready for some offense. The Padres jammed their lineup with righties against Julio Urías, and while the Dodgers didn’t do anything special on their side to face Chris Paddack, they’re pretty much always terrifying. But I absolutely didn’t expect what happened, an 11-2 rout complete with a three-homer game from Mookie Betts.

The game was an impressive show of force from the Dodgers. Those are almost a foregone conclusion with such a potent lineup, even against Paddack — you can’t keep this group from the occasional offensive eruption. What impressed me most, however, was Betts’ first home run of the day. Take a look:

Mookie would hit a homer on the night he got his Silver Slugger. pic.twitter.com/bdBFAWvApw

— MLB (@MLB) August 14, 2020

Paddack would have been pleased with that pitch if he didn’t know the result. Betts is a judicious first-pitch swinger, so you can’t throw him something uncompetitive and expect to get a strike. At the same time, he’s Mookie Betts; you can’t toss a fastball down Main Street and expect to get out of it alive. Paddack chose an excellent compromise, just off the outside corner but close enough to draw a swing. He might have preferred it a few inches higher, but it was a good idea for a first pitch.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dustin May is ready for prime time. The 22-year-old righty wasn’t even supposed to be part of the Dodgers’ rotation at the outset of the season, but he’s taken the ball three times thus far, including an emergency start on Opening Day. So far, he’s not only shown why he’s one of the game’s top pitching prospects but why he’s already worth making time to watch, and not just because the 6-foot-6 righty with the distinctive ginger mop top and the high leg kick is one of the most instantly recognizable players in the game.

On Tuesday night against the Padres in San Diego, May delivered the longest start of his young career, a six-inning effort; he fell one out short in each of his first three turns upon being called up last August. He allowed just three hits and two runs, the first in the third inning after hitting Francisco Mejía with a pitch and then surrendering a two-out double to Fernando Tatis Jr., and the second via a fourth-inning solo homer by Jake Cronenworth. At that point, he was in a 2-0 hole, but the Dodgers’ offense bailed him out, scoring three runs in the sixth and seventh innings en route to a 5-2 win.

May collected a career-high eight strikeouts against the Padres, the second of which — against Manny Machado in the first inning — set Twitter ablaze:

Dustin May, Ungodly 99mph Two Seamer. ? pic.twitter.com/uUeINZbKBq

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 5, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

The universe in 2020, it seems, can’t abide happiness—at least not for the Dodgers. Just one day after the team announced a gigantic extension with Mookie Betts, locking up one of the best players in baseball for the next decade-plus, Los Angeles learned that it will be without Clayton Kershaw for a while. Hours ahead of what would’ve been his ninth career Opening Day start, Kershaw instead hit the Injured List with a back strain suffered while working out on Tuesday; per Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, there’s no timetable for his return.

This kind of malady has been frustratingly common for Kershaw, who’s battled his fair share of back pain over the last few seasons. A herniated disc sidelined him for two months in 2016, and back tightness cost him five weeks in 2017 and a month of action in 2018. The 32-year-old lefty managed to avoid further lumbar issues last season en route to a 3.03 ERA and 3.4 WAR in 178 1/3 innings (though shoulder inflammation resulted in an early-season IL stint). But as anyone with a perpetually sore spine will tell you, those problems are often chronic. As such, it has to be worrying for both Kershaw and the Dodgers that his back is once again the source of his woes, and while this strain could be minor, it also could result in a multi-week absence. Read the rest of this entry »

At last, nearly four months after originally planned, the Opening Day of the 2020 season is upon us. It begins this evening at 7 pm ET in Washington, DC, with an impressive pitching matchup that reprises last year’s World Series opener, albeit with one of the principals having changed teams. At Nationals Park — where, in acknowledgement of his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic that caused the delay, Dr. Anthony Fauci will throw out the ceremonial first pitch — three-time Cy Young winner Max Scherzer will take the ball for the defending champion Nationals while Gerrit Cole will inaugurate his record-setting $324 million contract with his first regular season start as a Yankee. The night’s other contest, beginning at 10 pm ET, calls upon one of the sport’s top rivalries, pitting the Dodgers — albeit with Dustin May as a last-minute substitute for Clayton Kershaw, who was placed on the injured list due to back stiffness on Thursday afternoon — against the Giants and Johnny Cueto.

This will be Scherzer’s fifth Opening Day start, and third in a row, all with Washington; a fractured knuckle in his right ring finger forced him to yield to Stephen Strasburg in 2017. Cole has just one previous Opening Day start, in 2017 for the Pirates. Both pitchers lost at least a couple such starts to Justin Verlander, Scherzer’s teammate in Detroit from 2010-14 and Cole’s teammate since late ’17; Scherzer didn’t even get the nod when he was fresh off his 2013 AL Cy Young award. Verlander, who will take the ball in the Astros’ opener against the Mariners on Friday, will move into the active lead in Opening Day starts with his 12th. Kershaw would have taken sole possession of third with nine:

Read the rest of this entry »

According to multiple sources, the Dodgers appear to be on the verge of signing Mookie Betts to a significant contract extension that would keep the star in Los Angeles for at least the next decade. The exact details are still up in the air — Ben Clemens will be back in this space for all that analysis when the deal is closer to final — but it’s going to be a big one:

Including 2020, the new deal is expected to keep Mookie Betts in a Dodger uniform for 13 years at more than $380 million.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 22, 2020

Whatever the exact contours of the final contract, it’s almost certainly going to be the largest commitment of resources in Dodgers history so far — don’t forget, the team had to give up Alex Verdugo, Jeter Downs, and Connor Wong just to get the opportunity to make such a gigantic offer. The Dodgers have always exhibited a bit of conservatism when trading their top prospects and often for good cause; players like Walker Buehler and Corey Seager have turned out to be far more valuable to the team than anyone they would have fetched in a trade. But after a few missed World Series championship opportunities, they proved willing to be more aggressive this winter, giving up guys they really liked in order to get Betts for a single year and first dibs on signing him to a mega-contract. Read the rest of this entry »