Dallas Keuchel and the Dodgers Are Ideological Opposites

I know some of you are disappointed not to be seeing The Hottest Pitcher in the Game (Justin Verlander) face perhaps The Best Pitcher in the Game (Clayton Kershaw) in tonight’s World Series opener.

We’ll have to settle instead for the 2015 AL Cy Young winner, Dallas Keuchel, against the Dodgers’ three-time Cy Young winner.

Many eyes will be trained on Kershaw to see if he can improve the one blemish on his resume — postseason performance — and produce a legacy-building outing on the game’s greatest stage.

But the Game 1 undercard, Keuchel versus the Dodgers, is fascinating matchup in its own right.

For starters, it will largely represent a meeting of strangers. Keuchel has never faced Los Angeles. Of the Dodgers most likely to appear on the club’s World Series roster, only three have ever faced Keuchel, for a total of just 27 career regular-season at-bats versus Keuchel. Logan Forsythe is responsible for 20 of those due to his experience with Tampa Bay. He’s recorded seven hits. Chris Taylor has faced him three times (0-for-3), though as a different player with a different swing, and Chase Utley has one hit in four career at-bats versus the left-hander. (The current Astros squad has 81 collective at-bats against Kershaw.)

There’s something to be said for an element of mystery in leading into the World Series. It’s one reason why this author would like to see interleague play eliminated and coupled with geographic realignment. Some mystery is good.

But the meeting of Keuchel and the Dodgers is interesting beyond just the lack of familiarity. In some ways, they’re ideological opposites squaring off against each other.

No pitcher targets and hits the lower third of the zone — and the borderline, 50-50 area at the bottom of the zone — like Keuchel, according to Baseball Savant’s pitch data. And the lefty control artist’s pitch of choice to throw there is his sinker, which he threw at a career-high rate of 51.9% this season.

Keuchel trailed only Kendall Graveman this season in sinkers and two-seamers as a total percentage of pitches thrown in those lower zones.

We’ve heard so much about air balls and launch angle this season in part because hitters have begun to adapt to the defensive shifts that have proliferated throughout the game — and what had been a trend of pitchers throwing more two-seam fastballs. Teams were valuing ground-ball pitchers more and more. And that made sense: if you’re going to shift as a team, you want ground balls hit into the shift, and there’s never been a ground-ball home run (at least one of which I’m aware).

It’s the uppercut swing path that’s supposed to best combat the two-seam, sinker moment and the low-pitch location.

The Dodgers have a number of air-ball revolutionaries, chief among them being Justin Turner, who has spread the belief and approach in the Dodgers’ clubhouse. Chris Taylor has jumped on the bandwagon, Yasiel Puig has experimented with it, and Turner has encouraged Cody Bellinger to hit more air balls with his aesthetically pleasing but violent max-effort uppercut.

The Dodgers are listening to Turner, as I wrote earlier this year. This author wrote last week about Taylor’s emergence as the latest evidence of Turner’s evidence. In part because of Turner, the Dodgers have decreased their ground-ball rate by 3.5 points this season. Moreover, the Dodgers jumped from ranking 21st in average launch angle last year (10.0 degrees) to 13th this season (11.6).

Here’s where it gets weird. While, in theory, the Dodgers are well positioned against Keuchel, they actually haven’t performed all that well against the sinker down in the zone this year.

The Dodgers ranked 29th in baseball by wOBA (.289) against two-seamers and sinkers in those lower zones, according to Statcast data via Baseball Savant.

Still, the Dodgers might have another advantage in the matchup. The Dodgers could field a mostly right-handed lineup against Keuchel, who has had significant platoon splits this year. He has held lefties to a .191 wOBA while righties have posted a .293 wOBA. For his career, the splits are .259/.313. The Dodgers ranked fifth in wOBA against left-handed pitchers (.342) in the regular season, trailing only the Tigers, Astros, Rockies and Indians.

We know Keuchel likes to throw down and the Dodgers like to swing up.

We know Keuchel is much better against left-handed hitters and the Dodgers are better against left-handed pitchers. (The Dodgers rank 11th in wOBA against right-handed pitching at .333.)

But there’s much we don’t know about this matchup because a meeting between the Dodgers and Keuchel has never happened. And that mystery gives us further intrigue in what should be a fascinating, and worthy, World Series opener.