Cody Bellinger Wasn’t Clutch Until He Was

Postseason baseball has not come easily to Cody Bellinger. After setting an NL rookie record with 39 home runs in 2017, the then-22-year-old endured ups and downs last October, coming up big in the Dodgers’ Division and League Championship clinchers but going 4-for-28 with a record setting 17 strikeouts in the World Series. Those struggles had continued this fall, in the form of a 1-for-21 skid through Game Four of the NLCS and a spot on the bench for Game Four, as lefty Gio Gonzalez started for the Brewers. Nonetheless, in a five-hour, 15-minute slog that he didn’t even enter until the sixth inning, Bellinger played the hero, first with a diving catch on a potential extra-base hit off the bat of Lorenzo Cain in the 10th inning and then a walk-off RBI single in the 13th, giving the Dodgers a 2-1 victory.

The hit was actually Bellinger’s second of the night. His first came in the eighth inning, when he countered the Brewers’ defensive shift with an opposite-field single off the nearly unhittable Josh Hader, a Nice Piece of Hitting.

Bellinger, despite his pull tendencies, ranked ninth in the majors on grounders against the shift during the regular season, with a 98 wRC+. His 111 wRC+ overall on balls in play against the shift ranked 24th among the 123 hitters with at least 100 PA under such circumstances, which is to say that he’s fared well in this capacity — among the many other ways he’s fared well — despite this October slump.

Paired with Max Muncy’s leadoff single earlier in the inning, it was the first time all year that the Brewers’ fireman yielded multiple hits to left-handed batters in the same outing. The Dodgers couldn’t convert there — more on which momentarily — but Bellinger would only come up bigger.

Here’s Bellinger’s catch off Cain’s liner, which led off the 10th inning against Kenley Jansen. According to Statcast, it had a hit probability of 94%:

Keep in mind that Bellinger was in relatively unfamiliar territory. He played just 11.1 innings in right field during the regular season and had shifted from center field as part of a seventh-inning double-switch.

And here’s the game-winning hit off Junior Guerra, which scored Manny Machado from second base just moments before he’d nearly been picked off and while the bad taste of the Dodger shortstop’s egregious contact with first baseman Jesus Aguilar’s right foot on a 10th-inning ground out still lingered.

The hit gave the Dodgers their first postseason win without benefit of a home run since Game Two of last year’s Division Series against Arizona, a span of 12 victories. What’s more, it was just the third postseason win by any team without benefit of an extra-base hit in the last four Octobers, after the Indians’ 1-0 win over the Cubs in Game Three of the 2016 World Series and the Astros’ 2-1 win over the Yankees in Game One of the 2017 ALCS. Getting some thump, somewhere along the way, is a basic necessity to win postseeason baseball these days, and yet the Dodgers, much maligned for their reliance upon home runs, did so anyway. They collected just seven hits in 13 in innings, but then the Brewers managed just eight.

On both sides, the night belonged to stifling bullpen work and failures with runners in scoring position. The Dodgers, who lost Monday night’s Game Three in part because they went 0-for-10 with six strikeouts with runners in scoring position, failing both early and late, did manage to break their o-fer against Gonzalez in the first inning of Game Four. Leadoff batter Chris Taylor walked, David Freeze was hit by a pitch soon after, and then, with two outs, Brian Dozier singled sharply to bring home Taylor.

But that was it. Gonzalez retired Enrique Hernandez on a fly ball in the second, then suffered a high ankle sprain while trying to field a hot shot off the bat of Yasiel Puig that he had previously deflected. From there, the Brewers’ bullpen — Freddy Peralta, Corbin Burnes, Joakim Soria, Hader, Corey Knebel, and Guerra — combined to limit the Dodgers to just three hits and four walks over the next 11 innings, with 17 strikeouts out of 44 batters faced. Between the RBI singles of Dozier and Bellinger, the Dodgers went 0-for-7 with five strikeouts with runners in scoring position.

On the other side, Rich Hill gave the Dodgers five strong innings, allowing just three hits, including a Domingo Santana double in the fifth that evened the score at 1-1. Santana was pinch-hitting for Peralta, a 22-year-old rookie who delivered three hitless innings in his postseason debut under emergency circumstances. The lineup turned over, and Hill recovered to retire Lorenzo Cain on a ground out and then Christian Yelich on a strikeout; he fell behind the latter 3-0 and then threw three straight curveballs. The presumptive NL MVP looked at the first two of them for called strikes and then swung and missed, and it was celebration time on Dick Mountain.

After Hill, a parade of eight Dodgers relievers — Pedro Baez, Kenta Maeda, Caleb Ferguson, Ryan Madson, Jansen, Alex Wood, Dylan Floro, and Julio Urias — held the Brewers scoreless for eight innings on just five hits and one walk, striking out nine of the 30 hitters they faced. With runners in scoring position, the Brewers went 0-for-5 with two strikeouts, both inning-enders by Jansen, against Travis Shaw in the ninth and Aguilar in the 10th. It was the first time since July 27 that the Dodgers’ closer pitched more than one inning and just the second time all season that he completed two; the second came against Cain, Yelich, Ryan Braun, and Aguilar. That’s why they pay him the big bucks.

As I noted somewhere in midgame, after both the broadcast both and my Twitter feed harped endlessly about the Dodgers’ failures with runners in scoring position, this is a actually a problem that has plagued both teams in this series:

NLCS Offenses Struggling
Team RISP Other Overall
Brewers .100/.152/.200 .265/.333/.444 .231/.296/.395
Dodgers .200/.233/.200 .202/.260/.298 .201/.277/.278
SOURCE: MLB.com

The Dodgers are 6-for-30 (all singles) with five walks with runners in scoring position, while the Brewers are 3-for-30 with two walks and an Arcia excuse-me home run off Walker Buehler. Elsewhere, the Brewers have outhit and outhomered the Dodgers, the latter by a 4-2 count.

As I noted in my NLCS preview-of-sorts, one of the few major similarities between the two teams during the regular season was their reliance upon power. The Dodgers led the NL with 235 homers, while the Brewers ranked second with 218. The Brewers led the NL in the percentage of runs scored via homers (46.5%) while the Dodgers ranked fourth (42.3%); the latter had the lower percentage because they also led the league in scoring (4.93 runs per game) while the Brewers ranked a modest seventh (4.63). Neither team was exceptional when it came to hitting with runners in scoring position. The Dodgers hit .253/.349/.412 for a 103 wRC+ (fourth), the Brewers .247/.337/.424 for a 99 wRC+ (seventh). Here’s how that sits among all 30 teams:

Such was the arc of the Dodgers’ season that they had an 88 wRC+ with runners in scoring position through the first two months — when they were largely without Justin Turner — and a 112 mark the rest of the way, fifth in the majors. Nonetheless, even with their uptick, the RISP improvement felt like less than the sum of its parts because the team struggled mightily on that front in high-leverage situations

That’s them at the wrong end of the chart, next to the cautionary-tale Nationals. As Jeff Sullivan noted in late August, the Dodgers, for all of their firepower on both sides of the ball, were remarkably unclutch, not just in the popular notion of the term but by our objective Clutch score, which on an individual level measures “how much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment” by using win probability and leverage index to compare each player to himself — does he hit or pitch better in higher-leverage situations than overall? It does a good job of describing the past but not of predicting the future.

As it was, the Dodgers finished with the third-worst offensive Clutch score since 1974 (as far back as our WPA-based splits go):

Worst Offensive Clutch Scores Since 1974
Rk Team Year Clutch
1 Twins 2016 -9.48
2 Indians 2005 -8.18
3 Dodgers 2018 -7.83
4 Rays 2016 -7.77
5 Orioles 2004 -7.69
6 Indians 2017 -7.52
7 Reds 2015 -7.40
8 Giants 2002 -7.39
9 Twins 1978 -7.32
10 Rangers 2001 -7.31
11 Astros 2015 -7.11
12 Tigers 1990 -7.05
13 Yankees 2017 -7.05
14 Mets 2017 -6.83
15 Astros 1997 -6.82

I stretched the leaderboard to 15 to illustrate that this isn’t necessarily an impediment to reaching the postseason, or playing deep into it. The 1997 and 2015 Astros both made the playoffs, the 2002 Giants came within one win of a championship, and the 2017 Yankees came within one win of a pennant, that after ousting the Indians (they of the 22-game winning streak).

Bellinger, who hit 25 homers and wound up with a 120 wRC+ during the regular season, nonetheless had the majors’ second-lowest clutch score at -2.17. The only player worse in that regard? Mike Trout (-2.22). Whatever.

This is stuff that happened, sure, but the temptation to impose some narrative of these teams’ undoings — i.e., none of them won or will win the World Series because, ultimately, they weren’t or aren’t clutch and couldn’t manufacture a run when they needed to — on their shortcomings is ever-present. Note that the 2001 Diamondbacks (43rd at -5.65), 2007 Red Sox (75th at -4.87), and 2016 Cubs (-3.73) are among those who managed to free themselves of the shackles of this dumb stat that none of them had heard of to wind up in championship dogpiles.

Both the Dodgers and the Brewers are teams whose offenses pack a mighty punch, and whose pitching staffs have shown themselves to be more than capable of neutralizing those offenses. The teams in this series are averaging just 3.13 runs per game on batting lines straight out of a middle infield from 1968. The Brewers have scored five of their 14 series runs via homers (35.7% and 40.7% for the postseason), the Dodgers three out of 11 (27.3%, and 54.8% overall), and yet the teams are level. It hasn’t always been pretty, unless you’re a fan of shutdown bullpen work, but it’s been pretty compelling and plenty dramatic. Each of these teams has failed in the clutch countless times until they didn’t — and there’s no moral failure attached to that. Good pitching will beat good hitting, except when it doesn’t.

Now we’re guaranteed that the series will go back to Milwaukee, and before that we get to see if either Clayton Kershaw or Wade Miley — the latter on three days’ worth of rest, but then with a 5 pm ET start time, we’re all on short rest — can give their gassed pitching staffs a much-needed break. Buckle up.





Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jay_jaffe... and BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.

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Bobby Ayala
5 years ago

Can we talk about Machado with 2 dirty slides on Monday and kicking Aguilar last night? The kick on Aguilar is the dirtiest play in an MLB game since Machado tried to throw a bat at the opposing pitcher in 2014. He’s the Vontaze Burfict of baseball.

Smiling Politelymember
5 years ago
Reply to  Bobby Ayala

What Machado did was wrong, but it pales in comparison to what Utley did last year, and Chase was given a hero’s farewell all year. If I were Yelich, I’d say what he said, but from a broader perspective, I really do wonder if the judgment is harsher due to his skin color/name than his actual play…

Daniel Goldmember
5 years ago

What did Utley do last year? Are you talking about his slide from 2015?

Bobby Ayala
5 years ago
Reply to  Daniel Gold

Kicking Aguilar was a pre-meditated attempt to hurt someone. He looked right down at Aguilar’s foot, continued to run on the inside of the base path, and dragged his own foot to ensure contact. Throwing a bat was a pre-meditated attempt to hurt someone. Can’t find anything Utley did except a hard slide that was legal at the time.

When you force this into a skin color argument you discredit every instance of real racism that happens everyday. Machado is judged harshly because of an established and unequaled pattern of being immature and dangerous on the field. No other active player has committed the on-the-field offenses he has. One has to go back to Delmon Young throwing a bat at a minor-league ump in 2006 to find anything as reckless as Machado’s offenses.

Cole
5 years ago
Reply to  Bobby Ayala

Hard to discern whether the instance I’m about to bring up was premeditated or not, BUT let us not forget that Manny in game 1 or 2, after Grandal had the worst inning of his life, came up to bat and extended his follow through on a swing extra hard smashing Pina’s hand. Did he turn around to apologize? No. He swiftly walked away without looking back leaving Pina writhing in pain. The dude is still an ass, he can be a great player, but he’s an ass. People need to be able to compartmentalize that.

CL1NT
5 years ago
Reply to  Cole

Yep.. him not even having the decency to check on Pina just shows who he is. He ain’t worth it. I’ll take Dansby Swanson!!

weezymember
5 years ago

Right there with you, Leinhorn (albeit with the Utley slide in question being in 2015, not 2017). Not only do I wonder how a player’s perceived “morality” or “dirtyness” is impacted by race, I also wonder how much is influenced by the focus and conversation of announcers. I listened to radio and TV about 50/50 last night, and both national play-by-plays could not stop talking about Machado and his perceived motivations. I know announcers need to keep talking and overstate events for 4+ hours and that’s their jobs, but it got to be a little much. As a listener, it’s impossible to have that intake happen for that long and have it not influence the way we view the actions in the game.

RonnieDobbs
5 years ago
Reply to  weezy

If you think Utley and Machado have much in common… well, I have a feeling that you don’t know much about what you are commenting about.

david k
5 years ago

Utley may have been given a hero’s welcome by SOME, but I think many DID judge him harshly due to his style of play (particularly in at least one borough of NY!). Yes, it may have been technically legal, but it was definitely reckless

steelehere
5 years ago

What Machado did was wrong last night but the way Aguilar positioned his foot on first base instead of on the side was like a six year playing little league for the first time. You have to wonder if he was doing so to annoy Machado since they go way back.

CL1NT
5 years ago

” I really do wonder if the judgment is harsher due to his skin color/name than his actual play…”

Really? You have got to be kidding me, right?

This kind of thinking is exactly what is wrong with society right now.

People’s judgement of Machado is harsher because he acts like a spoiled brat on the field! Anytime something doesn’t go his way, he sulks and talks shit to the opposing team (like a 12 yr old). The dude has got issues, and honestly I hope he signs with LA, cause I don’t want him in Atlanta. The guy has talent, but I would rather do without his bat then Acuna or Albies even remotely taking after him.

RonnieDobbs
5 years ago
Reply to  CL1NT

You raise an actually interesting point. Who is really going to make a push for Machado? I don’t think he has helped himself a whole lot in this series. Not long ago, we were murmuring about 400 million dollars or more. Hard to imagine a top 3 (probably) most hated player in the game getting a mega-deal. He will – but it is tough to imagine. It would be a nice twist to see nobody willing to buy a 10 yr deal. If there was ever a guy that looked like he could end up being a bust over a decade, he has to fit that model. Nothing wrong with using him as a 3B for the next 4 though!

RonnieDobbs
5 years ago

A fine trolling attempt. Well done!

Bobby Ayala
5 years ago
Reply to  Jay Jaffe

Thanks Jay, sorry to hijack your post.

johansantana17
5 years ago
Reply to  Bobby Ayala

Machado’s slides were not dirty at all. They were against the rules because the rule is insanely over broad. It was obvious that neither slide came close to injuring a Brewer.

Bobby Ayala
5 years ago
Reply to  johansantana17

I see his fist up in the crotch of Albies on one, and both his arm and foot attempting to take out Albies on the other. I would define sliding at a defenseless player with your fist, arm, or foot aimed at striking them, now that it is against the rules, as “dirty.” If he did those on the backyard softball field there would be a fight.

johansantana17
5 years ago
Reply to  Bobby Ayala

Like Dodgerfan711 says below, the second slide was a rule violation because Machado lightly touched Arcia’s leg after he threw the ball. Attempting to “take out” the fielder is not prohibited or dirty, it’s what runners are supposed to do within the rule.

On the first slide, Machado put his arm up so his face wouldn’t slam into Arcia’s leg.

david k
5 years ago
Reply to  johansantana17

johansantana17, what a bunch of BULL. It was a clear violation of the rule, and was called on it, and was therefore dirty because he deliberately violated a rule he hoped he’d get away with. On he first slide, that is NOT what happened AT ALL. I can’t see how ANYONE would view it that way (with at least one functioning eye anyway)

RonnieDobbs
5 years ago
Reply to  david k

They are all cheaters! I am boycotting the rest of the series!

RonnieDobbs
5 years ago
Reply to  johansantana17

Love the user name. I think that dirty and prohibited/illegal should be clearly separated. They are not the same.

RonnieDobbs
5 years ago
Reply to  johansantana17

Agreed. The slide rule needs help badly. It isn’t that far from the QB rules that the NFL has selectively decided to not enforce mid-way through the season. Arcia makes zero effort to protect himself – absolutely poor technique – and he still wasn’t contacted – Machado wasn’t being dirty. Machado’s thing he did at first base was dirty though. If that didn’t happen, then nobody is having any of these conversations. For me, I think I can tell a bit by the non-verbal communication that I see. I am sure that a lot of people just get rubbed wrong by watching everything Machado does. For example, his lousy, lazy feed (from a knee) on the front-end of what should have been a double play in game 6 or when he backed out of the box clearly knowing that he didn’t get time and watching strike 3 – then having the gall to throw a fit about it or the way he sits back and gets eaten up on every ground ball hit at him. When a guy goes about his business like he does, everyone is just waiting for him to mess up. Funny to see some folks trying to play the race card. If it makes anyone feel any better Harper is my least favorite player to watch… well, most frustrating is probably more accurate, but Machado is close.

Dodgerfan711
5 years ago
Reply to  Bobby Ayala

If you want to rip Machado for last night go ahead. But to say mondays slides were dirty is a mega reach. The first slide was straight into the bag. The 2nd one that got overturned was because he touched the fielders leg. In sorry but lightly touching someone on the leg is not dirty. Rule violation sure. Dirty, no

david k
5 years ago
Reply to  Dodgerfan711

Dodgerfan..no bias there! Yeah, you’re clearly wrong. He was trying to take out the player in an illegal dirty way. It doesn’t matter if he intended to injure the player or just pull on him to affect the throw, it’s still DIRTY.

Dodgerfan711
5 years ago
Reply to  david k

Did you even read what i said?

RonnieDobbs
5 years ago
Reply to  Dodgerfan711

I also would not call them dirty. They were weird. They were both ineffective in breaking up the double play (Arcia did that on his own and it was going to be a tough turn), yet also involved a strange amount of late contact. I would call them dumb or bad, but not dirty. Either go in hard and try to break it up, or make sure not to make excessive contact and stay within arms reach of the bag. Machado didn’t really go out of his way to do any of those things…

DF, it is easy to forget the times that we live in. This is a day and age where people need to sensationalize everything as much as possible. A lot of people have little interest in the truth as opposed to making things into the most outrageous claim that a creative imagination can come up with. A lot of people seem to embrace a lack of understanding or accuracy. Everything is black and white and everyone else is wrong, etc…

RonnieDobbs
5 years ago
Reply to  Bobby Ayala

Don’t forget when he hit Derrek Norris in the head with a back-swing intentionally.