On Friday night, in just his third major-league start, Walker Buehler delivered on the promise that the Dodgers envisioned when they made him the 24th pick of the 2015 draft out of Vanderbilt. Pitching on a rainy night at Estadio de Beisbol Monterrey, in the opener of the three-game Mexico Series, the 23-year-old righty held the Padres hitless for six innings while striking out eight and walking three. But with his pitch count at 93, one short of his professional high, manager Dave Roberts did not waver in his decision to put the brakes on the kid’s bid for a slice of baseball immortality.

Via the Orange County Register’s Bill Plunkett, Beuhler said that Roberts “told me I was out of pitches and I was out of the game.”

This wasn’t the first time that Roberts pulled a starter who had yet to allow a hit, but it was the first time that his decision paid off in full, as relievers Yimi Garcia, Tony Cingrani,and Adam Liberatore each chipped in a hitless inning, thus completing the 12th combined no-hitter in big-league history and the first in franchise history. Prior to that — and jusy five games into his managerial career, on April 8, 2016 — Roberts had removed Ross Stripling after 7.1 innings of hitless ball against the Giants. The 26-year-old Stripling, who himself was making his major-league debut, had thrown 100 pitches and had walked four batters when Roberts called for the bullpen. Having missed all of 2014 due to Tommy John surgery, he understood the precautionary move, even though it backfired, as reliever Chris Hatcher promptly gave up a game-tying home run to the next batter, and the Dodgers eventually lost.

Things worked out better for the team when Roberts pulled 36-year-old Rich Hill after seven perfect innings on September 10 of that year. Though Joe Blanton surrendered a single with two outs in the eighth, the Dodgers did get the win.

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The Dodgers have not gotten off to the start they would have liked this season. Failing to win even half their games, they’ve seen the Diamondbacks parlay a strong first month into a place atop the NL West standings. The combination of those two developments has allowed the D-backs to turn the Dodgers’ projected 14-game divisional edge at the beginning of the season into a complete tossup.

Injury has played a part in LA’s struggles. The club, of course, recently learned that star shortstop Corey Seager would miss the entire season with Tommy John surgery. In addition to Seager, Logan Forsythe, Yasiel Puig, and Justin Turner have all missed time, as well. Despite all that, however, Dodgers position players rank third among NL teams in WAR. The Dodgers’ depth in the lineup has thus far passed the test.

For much of the the season’s first month, the club’s rotational depth hasn’t been tested in the same way. It’s about to be, however. And a good season out of prospect Walker Buehler — once a luxury in the organizational depth chart — could be necessary for the team to overtake the Diamondbacks in the division.

Before the season started, the Dodgers opted to get under the competitive balance tax to save money. In doing so, they absorbed the contract of the thus-far resurgent Matt Kemp, sending Scott Kazmir and Brandon McCarthy to Atlanta. Kazmir, since released by the Braves, was purely a salary dump, but McCarthy represented some depth for a Dodgers’ rotation that already had quite a few arms. Walker Buehler was foremost among that depth, but after pitching around 100 innings last year in his return from Tommy John surgery, he might have to blow past that mark this year to keep the Dodgers in the race.

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You could almost be convinced that hitting is easy. Or, at least, you could almost be convinced that getting better at hitting is easy. What can a hitter do to improve in this day and age? Aim up. Try to hit the ball in the air. Elevate and celebrate, and everything. So much contemporary analysis is built around identifying a player or players who are hitting more fly balls than they used to. And, without question, for some players, this has been the key. For some players, aiming up has unlocked potential that could never get out. Especially in the era of aggressive infield shifts, a ball in the air is more valuable than a ball on the ground.

But the important equation isn’t so simple. We went through the opposite of this 10 or 15 years ago. There was a time when we all fell in love with ground-ball pitchers, because, after all, grounders can’t be homers. But there are processes that lead to someone getting grounders, and there are processes that lead to someone getting flies, and fly-ball pitchers have their own upsides. Moving to the present, with hitters, it’s not about whether a fly is better than a grounder. It’s about the swing. What specific kind of swing can allow a hitter to become his best self, overall?

The answer isn’t the same for everyone. The answer could never be the same for everyone. Some hitters, for sure, have gotten better by steepening their swing paths. Kyle Schwarber and Joc Pederson are two hitters attempting the opposite.

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Last week, the bell tolled for the 2018 season of the Diamondbacks’ Taijuan Walker. The week before that, it tolled for the Padres’ Dinelson Lamet, and before him, the Angels’ JC Ramirez and the A’s A.J. Puk. If it feels like March and April are particularly full of Tommy John surgery casualties, that’s because they are, at least when it comes to recent history. In early March, just after Rays righty Jose De Leon discovered that he had torn his ulnar collateral ligament, I noted some recent trends regarding everyone’s favorite (?) reconstructive elbow procedure, including the extent to which those early-season injuries are rather predictive of the season-long trend. With April now in the books, and with my nose still in Jon Roegele’s Tommy John Surgery Database, the situation is worth a closer look.

Via the data I published in the De Leon piece, just under 28% of all Tommy John surgeries done on major- or minor-league pitchers (not position players) from 2014-17 took place in March or April, with the figure varying only from 24.8 % to 30.0% in that span. Even expanding the scope to include February as well, which doesn’t increase the total number of surgeries by much but does capture significant ones such as that of Alex Reyes last year — gut punches that run counter to the optimism that reigns when pitchers and catchers report — the range is narrow, with 27.5% to 33.0% of pitcher surgeries taking place in that span.

After my piece was published, a reader pointed out that The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh took an in-depth look at the phenomenon, but intuitively, it’s not hard to understand. Not only do pitchers’ activity levels ramp up dramatically once spring training begins, as they move from lighter offseason throwing programs to facing major-league hitters and therefore place far more stress on their arms, but many pitchers are finally forced to reckon with injuries that did not heal over the winter.

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The Dodgers’ 2018 season has already seen its share of insult and injury, but Monday brought the coup de grâce: Corey Seager will miss the remainder of the year due to Tommy John surgery on his right elbow. His loss means that the defending NL champions, who have limped through March and April with a 12-16 record, will never get a chance to field their best lineup, with Seager alongside third baseman Justin Turner, who’s been sidelined by a broken left wrist since March 19.

Seager has had elbow problems since late August of last season, when inflammation limited him to pinch-hitting duty during an 11-game span that was part of the team’s dreadful 1-16 tailspin. Though he said that the injury bothered him more while throwing than while batting, he struggled at the plate for the remainder of the season and into the postseason; his absence from the team’s NLCS roster was due to a back strain, not the elbow. In the wake of an MRI taken at the beginning of the offseason, TJ surgery wasn’t considered as an option, and Seager spent the winter working on rehabbing and strengthening the elbow. He didn’t play shortstop in a spring-training game until March 7.

Seager aggravated his elbow making a pair of relay throws in a loss to the Giants, and an MRI taken on Monday revealed “a much worse” injury than before. “There was no gray area as to what the right decision was,” he told reporters. Given the typical nine- to 12-month rehab period for a position player undergoing TJ, Seager might have missed the entire 2018 season anyway if his November MRI had been more conclusive.

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The Dodgers aren’t in first place in their division. And it’s not just that they’re further out of first than the Rockies and Giants. They’re further out of first in the NL West than the White Sox are in the AL Central. The Dodgers have sputtered, and the Diamondbacks have been hot, and that’s created a meaningful separation. A seven-game difference on the last day of April is nothing to sneeze at.

But I don’t think there’s been all that much worry, not yet. This morning, by our math, the Dodgers were still favored to finish in first. Certain little things have changed, sure, but remember that last year, the Dodgers had a stretch in which they lost 16 of 17 games, and they still finished with the best record in baseball. They won the NL West by a mile. The Dodgers are one of those teams you give the benefit of the doubt. If the roster isn’t too terribly different, you should expect that the team will find its own level.

Well, the roster is going to look terribly different:

Today, the Dodgers recalled Breyvic Valera from Triple-A Oklahoma City and placed Corey Seager on the 10-day DL with a right UCL sprain. Seager will undergo Tommy John surgery and will miss the remainder of the season.

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) April 30, 2018

Corey Seager is done for 2018, having never fully recovered from the elbow problem that dogged him down the stretch. The team decided to try the rest-and-rehab plan, as opposed to sending Seager into surgery right away, but it didn’t work out. Justin Turner will be back sometime soon, sure. Yet Seager is among baseball’s very best shortstops. Enrique Hernandez is not. Breyvic Valera is not. Chris Taylor might now return to short for all I know, but that’s more shuffling than a solution. There’s no way to lose someone like Seager and not be a lot worse off for it. (Update: for now, looks like Taylor to short.)

Given how the Dodgers have always prioritized depth, I’m sure they’ll try to figure out a way to proceed via internal options. To his credit, Valera has seemingly learned how to hit, and maybe he can blossom out of nowhere. You don’t often see important trades this early anyway, so expect the Dodgers to stay as they are. But of course, one player looms, and that player would be Manny Machado. Machado is good, and the Orioles are bad. I don’t need to explain this to you. It’s not something that’ll happen tomorrow, but it’s something you’re likely to hear about more and more often as the season draws closer to June. Even if the Dodgers never engage in serious talks, writers are going to want them to, so the chatter will be there. It’s too obvious a link to leave alone.

Machado wouldn’t feel like a Dodgers-y move. Squeezing value out of Breyvic Valera or looking toward Alex Verdugo and/or Andrew Toles would feel like Dodgers-y moves. But then, these are special circumstances. The Dodgers are in a hole, and they’ve been substantially weakened. It’s going to be that much more difficult to make up lost ground.

Between injuries that sapped his speed, a monster contract that hasn’t aged well, and a reputation as a clubhouse problem (deserved or not) that has followed him from team to team, Matt Kemp has more often been considered a liability than an asset over the past few years. Improbably, the 33-year-old outfielder is now back where his major-league career began in Los Angeles, one of the hottest hitters on a team desperate for a big bat in the absence of Justin Turner.

Once upon a time, Kemp was a superstar, a homegrown lineup centerpiece on a club teeming with young talent. A sixth-round draft pick out of an Oklahoma high school in 2003, he was just 21 when he debuted with the Dodgers on May 28, 2006. He hit seven homers in his first 15 games before cooling off, and while he was limited to 98 games the next year by a season-opening return to Triple A and a two-month absence due to a right shoulder separation, he hit a sizzling .342/.373/.52. Once the Andruw Jones experiment ended, he took over the team’s center-field job in 2008, and in his first two full seasons, he totaled 44 homers, 69 steals, and 8.3 WAR while helping the team to back-to-back NLCS berths. He even won a Gold Glove in 2009, his only season in center after which both his DRS and UZR were in the black.

Kemp’s game fell apart in 2010, a time during which he later conceded he lost focus amid the temptations of Tinseltown. As the Baseball Prospectus 2011 annual summarized, “He incited the ire of Joe Torre and his staff by giving up at-bats, failing to hustle out of the batter’s box, blundering on the basepaths and in the field, and showing a general lack of intensity.” Then came a 2011 turnaround in which he more than lived up to the hype, with an NL-leading 39 homers and the league’s second-best wRC+; he fell one steal shy of the fifth 40-homer/40-steal season in history. He won another Gold Glove, finished second in the NL MVP voting, and in November of that year, signed an eight-year, $160 million extension — which, at the time, was the largest contract in NL history and the seventh-largest overall.

Then came injuries, an endless litany: both hamstrings, a torn labrum and rotator-cuff damage in his left shoulder, a severe left ankle sprain. And surgeries, too: two for the shoulder, plus one for the ankle, including a microfracture procedure. Over the 2102-13 seasons, he played just 179 games, and the Dodger outfield, which now included Yasiel Puig and (occasionally) Carl Crawford, as well as Andre Ethier, learned to get along fine without him. Though Kemp returned to hit .287/.346/.506 with 25 homers and 141 wRC+ in 2014, his defensive woes (-22 DRS, -13 UZR) spelled the end of his time in center field and limited him to 2.5 WAR.

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Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared at FanGraphs on April 17, 2018 to mark the 71st anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking major league baseball’s color line.

Sunday was Jackie Robinson Day around the majors, commemorating the anniversary — the 71st, this year — of the fall of baseball’s color line via Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. But just as Robinson’s immeasurable courage in confronting racism and the immense talent he showed while playing at the highest level deserve more than a single day for paying tribute, so too is it worth remembering the black players who bravely followed in his footsteps and ensured that baseball’s great experiment would not be a one-off. In the two decades following Robinson’s arrival, the influx of talent, first from the Negro Leagues and then the sandlots and high schools whose players previously could not have dreamt of such an opportunity, radically transformed the National League, in particular.

Led by president and general manager Branch Rickey, the Dodgers, of course, got the jump. During Robinson’s major-league career, which lasted from 1947 to 1956, the Dodgers won six pennants as well as their lone Brooklyn-era championship in 1955. In addition to becoming a pioneer of tremendous importance, Jackie himself was the game’s third-most valuable player over that span according to WAR (57.2), behind only Stan Musial and Ted Williams. While the Dodgers had a great supporting cast of white players such as Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider, those teams also got great work from two Negro Leagues graduates whom Rickey had signed before Robinson even reached the majors — namely Roy Campanella, who debuted in 1948 and went on to win three NL MVP awards, and Don Newcombe, who debuted in 1949, won Rookie of the Year honors that season, and would later win a Cy Young and an MVP award.

Though Rickey lost a power struggle to Walter O’Malley and was forced to sell his share of the team following the 1950 season, the Dodgers furthered their dominance over the NL in part by continuing to sign talented black players. Under Buzzie Bavasi as general manager and Fresco Thompson as director of minor-league operations, the organization added right-hander Joe Black (1952 NL Rookie of the Year), infielder Jim Gilliam (1953 NL Rookie of the Year), outfielder Sandy Amoros, second baseman Charlie Neal, catcher John Roseboro, shortstop Maury Wills (1962 NL MVP), and outfielders Tommy Davis and Willie Davis (no relation), among others.

Amoros, Black, and Gilliam would augment the Dodgers’ Robinson-era core, and the latter remained a vital lineup cog through the transitional phase that included the franchise’s 1957 move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and their return to powerhouse status behind the one-two pitching punch of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Neal, Roseboro, and Wills would each spend at least half a decade in the minors and/or as understudies awaiting their shots before contributing to the team’s 1959 pennant and championship, with the latter two becoming more central alongside the two Davises as the team won championships in 1963 and 1965, and added one more pennant in 1966, Koufax’s final year. Tommy Davis, a left fielder, won back-to-back NL batting titles in 1962 and -63, while Willie Davis, a center fielder, was the position’s best defender this side of Willie Mays (his three errors in Game Two of the 1966 World Series to the contrary).

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After losing on a 14th-inning walk-off home run by the Giants’ Andrew McCutchen on Saturday, the Dodgers found themselves one swing of the bat away from falling to 2-7 to start the 2018 season — a pit that few teams escape, even in this age of expanded playoffs — during the 10th inning of Sunday’s game at AT&T Park. Fortunately, Kenley Jansen was finally able to tap into the mojo that’s made him one of the game’s best closers, striking out the Giants’ final two hitters to preserve a 2-1 victory, the Dodgers’ first win in a week. Even so, at 3-6, the defending NL champions are off to the worst start of any of the presumptive preseason favorites. How worried should they be?

The Dodgers entered 2018 just about as heavily favored to win their division as any team. But because Major League Baseball insists upon games being played on the field instead of on paper or pixel, things haven’t gone as planned, and they’ve matched the franchise’s worst start of the Wild Card era.

Now, nine games is a small sample size, obviously — just 1/18 of a season, in fact. While such a hiccup wouldn’t raise an eyebrow anywhere else in the schedule — each of last year’s 10 playoff teams went through at least one skid of 3-6 or worse, with the Dodgers themselves (in)famously losing 16 of 17 late in the year — it gets late early out here, as Yogi Berra allegedly said. Since the start of the 1995 season, 114 teams have begun the season 3-6, of which just 18 (including the 1996 Dodgers) made the playoffs. That’s 16%, which sounds high until you consider that, in the period during which two clubs from each league have qualified for the Wild Card, one-third of all teams makes the playoffs. Since 1995, 29% of all teams have done so. With apologies to the post-2001 Mariners, the dance just isn’t that exclusive.

Historically speaking, the real point of inflection through nine games is at 2-7, where just two Wild Card-era teams out of 37 (5.4%) have made the playoffs — namely, the 2001 A’s and 2007 Phillies. It’s four out of 54 (7.4%) if you count the two teams that began 1-8 (the 1995 Reds and 2011 Rays). Prior to the Wild Card era, just seven teams that started 2-7 made the playoffs, including two often referenced in the context of miraculous comebacks, the 1914 Braves and 1951 Giants. But these Dodgers aren’t in such dire straits yet.

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Zack Godley threw 34 curveballs on Tuesday in a 96-pitch effort that saw him hold the Dodgers to four hits and one run over seven innings. The defending NL champs knew to expect a goodly amount of them. The Diamondbacks’ right-hander went to his signature offering 35.6% of the time last year, the second-most hook-heavy ratio among pitchers with at least 150 innings, behind only Drew Pomeranz’s 37%.

The results support the frequency of usage. Per our friends at Baseball Savant, opposing hitters went just 33 for 218 (.151), with a .248 SLG, against Godley’s bender in 2017. Deception was a big reason why. Everything Godley throws looks the same coming out his hand.

“Especially the curveball,” opined D-Backs catcher Jeff Mathis. “It’s coming out on the same plane. With a lot of guys, you’ll recognize curveball right away. With Zack, you’re not seeing any keys, any little tips, when the ball is being released. On top of that, he’s got good stuff.”

Arizona’s newest backstop had yet to catch Godley when I asked for his perspective, but he had good reason to concur with his colleague. Read the rest of this entry »