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 »

With this generation’s Mariano Rivera on the mound last night in Arizona, and the Dodgers holding a three-run lead in the ninth, the game was over, right?

baseball: there are two outs, the Dodgers are up three runs, and Kenley Jansen is on the mound. the game is over

also baseball: nah pic.twitter.com/538JZnNCTe

— Céspedes Family BBQ (@CespedesBBQ) April 3, 2018

Well, it’s baseball and Chris Owings had other ideas.

https://gfycat.com/ForsakenCleanAlbacoretuna

Yes, it’s really early. Alarm on April 2nd is often folly. Perhaps we will look back and laugh at all this hand-wringing. But Kenley Jansen has not looked like Kenley Jansen. And unlike a batter off to a slow start, a pitcher who has a velocity decline, who has changed his release point, who seems defensive in fielding questions this early — that all combines to raise some legitimate alarm.

Jansen didn’t walk a batter until June 25th last season. He began last season by striking out 51 batters without issuing a walk, setting an MLB record. Jansen has already conceded two walks, recording no strikeouts. Jansen allowed five home runs in the 2017 campaign. He’s allowed two in two innings this season.

Jansen seemed invincible for much of 2017, so he’s provided a dramatic contrast early this year. When a pitcher that untouchable struggles to such a degree — even in a small sample — it raises reasonable questions.

Jansen is regarded by many as the best reliever in the NL, an opinion supported by FanGraphs’ projections. So what’s going on here?

Let’s start with the velocity.

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PHOENIX, Ariz. – You are probably aware of Rich Hill’s story.

You are probably aware of his remarkable comeback and the excellent second act of his career. You probably know he is something of a sabermetric darling, having challenged conventional wisdom with his pitch usage. The A’s and Dodgers were willing to invest in his small sample of success in 2015 and 2016 thanks, in part, to spin rate, which has become newly measurable. Hill also appealed to traditional scouting eyes due to the deception of his delivery and his ability to make his curveball look like two or three pitches by mixing speeds, arm slots, and shapes.

This author certainly finds Hill to be of great interest. So when I visited Dodgers spring-training camp earlier this month, Hill was one of the players I was hoping to interview.

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The 2018 season is a big one for Clayton Kershaw. The three-time Cy Young winner isn’t just chasing the World Series ring that still eludes him, he’s trying to remain healthy wire-to-wire for the first time since 2015. At the end of the year, he’ll have the chance to reclaim his spot as the game’s highest-paid pitcher if he chooses to exercise an opt-out clause in the seven-year, $215 million deal he signed in January 2014.

Via the Los Angeles Times‘ Andy McCullough, neither Kershaw nor the Dodgers are tipping their hands as to what might happen beyond publicly agreeing that they’re maintaining an “open dialogue” regarding the soon-to-be 30-year-old lefty’s contract status. If he does opt out, he’ll co-headline a stacked free-agent class alongside Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, with Josh Donaldson, Dallas Keuchel, Craig Kimbrel, and Andrew Miller among the other luminaries. There’s no indication that Kershaw would rather pitch for another team besides the Dodgers, who drafted him with the seventh overall pick in 2006, but he may not get a better chance to hit free agency while so close to the top of his game.

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When we last saw the Dodgers’ rotation, Yu Darvish was being lit up like a pinball machine in Game 7 of the World Series due to a pitch-tipping issue that the organization somehow failed to identify. Though the Dodgers made a serious run at retaining the 31-year-old righty, the team was limited by its financial constraints, and Darvish opted to sign a six-year, $126 million deal with the Cubs instead. With exhibition season now underway, the defending NL champions’ rotation still appears as though it could use fortification.

Darvish, a July 31 deadline acquisition from the Rangers, isn’t the only starter gone from the fold. In a mid-December move designed to give them more financial flexibility, the Dodgers dealt the injury-prone Brandon McCarthy (16 starts, 3.98 ERA, 3.28 FIP, 2.4 WAR) and Scott Kazmir (a mere 12 minor-league innings due to hip and arm issues), two other players, and cash to the Braves in exchange for Matt Kemp. The trade has helped them shimmy under the $197 million competitive-balance-tax threshold, but their subsequent failure to offload Kemp and some portion of his remaining $43 million salary for 2018-19 doomed their pursuit of Darvish.

Nobody’s weeping for a wealthy team that’s lost 25 starts while retaining eight of the 10 members from a unit that compiled the majors’ third-best ERA- (82) and FIP- (88). Compared to 2015, when they used an MLB-high 16 starters, and -16, when they tied for second with 15 starters, that counts as stability, and yet in each of the past two years, just one Dodger has reached the 162-inning threshold to qualify for the ERA title. The Andrew Friedman/Farhan Zaidi regime has actively used the team’s depth and financial might to lighten the workloads of all of their starters. Not only did the unit’s 885 innings rank 10th in the NL last year, but only 742 times did a Dodger starter face a batter for the third time in a game, the majors’ lowest total.

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Trevor Oaks hopes to stand tall on a big-league mound this season. In order to do so, he’ll need to regain his worm-killing ways. The 24-year-old right-hander relies heavily on his sinker, which didn’t do its usual diving last summer. One year after logging a 64.5% ground-ball rate at Double-A Tulsa, Oaks saw that number tumble to 50.8% with Triple-A Oklahoma City.

Oaks is a member of the Royals now, having been acquired by Kansas City from the Los Angeles Dodgers in January’s Scott Alexander deal. He believes that his old bread and butter will be accompanying him to America’s heartland. Not only is he fully recovered from an oblique issue that dogged his 2017 campaign, he was able hit the reset button on his mechanics over the offseason.

And then there are the lessons learned. Despite not having his best stuff, Oaks put up a solid 3.64 ERA in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League — and a veteran teammate deserves some of the credit. When words of wisdom were in order, Justin Masterson was there to provide them.

———

Oaks on Masterson’s influence: “Baseball-wise, Masty talked to me a lot about tunneling and making sure that everything comes out on the same plane. Even though we have different arm slots, the same principles apply. His slider is like a Sergio Romo slider, so that wasn’t exactly in my bag of tricks, but with his sinker… he turns the ball over a little bit more.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the new spring training camp for free agents, return to the topic of why so many high-profile free agents remain unsigned, discuss Todd Frazier’s contract with the Mets, and talk about whether a proposed “Tank Tax” is a solution in search of a problem. Then they preview the 2018 Dodgers (19:54) with LA Times Dodgers beat writer Andy McCullough, and the 2018 Marlins (1:02:11) with Miami Herald reporter Barry Jackson.

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Yesterday, I wrote a post about how the opportunity should be there for some low-spending team to buy a prospect. There are high-spending teams looking to shed expensive commitments, and there are lower-payroll teams who ought to have some nearer-term financial flexibility. The example I leaned on most heavily was the Dodgers and Matt Kemp, since the Dodgers would like to move Kemp if they are to re-sign Yu Darvish and still avoid exceeding the competitive-balance-tax threshold. There’s nothing controversial in here. If anything, it’s all terribly obvious. Of course the Dodgers would like to dump Kemp’s salary, and of course some other teams would be interested in assuming some dead money if it came along with younger value.

The Dodgers have plenty of younger value. Plenty of options, for designing a reasonable Kemp package. This would be precisely the hold-up; other teams want more than the Dodgers have so far been willing to give. Where I ran into some resistance was when I talked specifically about Wilmer Font. That is, Wilmer Font, as a would-be Matt Kemp offset. Font is a 27-year-old righty with seven innings of major-league experience. In those seven innings, he’s allowed nine runs. He’s nowhere high on any prospect list. Even more, I’m given to understand he’s out of options!

Let me quickly try to explain myself. I know that Font seemed like a weird guy to bring up. And I have no idea how many teams might actually be interested in him. But I know for a fact the answer’s not zero. Font has been on few radars, but he’s coming off a truly incredible season.

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The Mets reportedly continue to look for infield help this winter with a view to improving their team for the 2018 campaign. According to Ken Rosenthal, three of the targets for New York are free agents — specifically, Todd Frazier, Eduardo Nunez, and Neil Walker. Pirates infielder Josh Harrison is a fourth. The cost of acquiring any of the first three is pretty straightforward: about $30-40 million, according to our crowdsourced estimates. As for Harrison, the issue of “cost” is more complicated.

According to Rosenthal, the Pirates want Brandon Nimmo in return for their versatile infielder. Superficially, that seems to make sense for the Mets. Nimmo is probably a fifth outfielder after Michael Conforto gets healthy. As for Harrison, he’d probably start. That’s a good trade-off for New York, right?

In one way, yes. But then there’s also that agonizing question every club is compelled to face when pondering the trade of a young player: what could he become? What’s his upside?

One way of answering that question with regard to Nimmo, specifically, is to focus on his process and look at other players who have a similar one. Nimmo is a player with a good eye, a nearly even batted-ball mix, and a certain degree of power. Also, his outfield defense looks decent. Let’s get exact about those facets of his game and look at other players with similar games.

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