Dodgers Thump Braves 15-3 To Take Game 3
Well that got out of hand quickly, eh?
It took all of two pitches for the Dodgers to stake an early lead in Wednesday’s NLCS Game 3. Mookie Betts legged out an infield single (replay correctly overturned a bang-bang play at first) and then Corey Seager continued his torrid hitting with a double in the left center field gap to plate the leadoff man. After two quick outs, it looked like Braves starter Kyle Wright would be able to wriggle out of the inning with minimal damage.
Then the barrage began in earnest: A double and a walk preceded back-to-back jacks from Joc Pederson and Edwin Ríos. Another walk chased Wright, but all Grant Dayton could do was throw more fuel on the fire: Walk, double, HBP, grand slam. Just like that, the Dodgers — who were an overturned call at first from getting nothing in the frame — had an 11-0 lead, and a new record for runs in a single postseason inning.
From there, it was academic. Los Angeles added in the second and third and Atlanta managed a few runs of their own. The only real remaining highlight was Cristian Pache’s first major league home run, a no-doubter that stayed just fair on its way past the foul pole.
The obvious parallel here is Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS, when St. Louis’s 10-run first inning explosion all but ended Atlanta’s season eight and a half innings before it became official. But tonight’s lopsided contest actually reminds me of a game from all the way back in 2001.
After winning 116 times during the regular season, Seattle barely survived its ALDS bout with Cleveland and then fell behind the Yankees two games to none in the ALCS. The Mariners were too good to not wake up eventually, and in Game 3 they did. Stifled for 2.5 games, the Mariners bats erupted over the final five innings, and they ultimately trounced the Bronx Bombers 13-2. For one glorious afternoon, all was right in the world for the Mariners and their fans.
Like the Mariners, this Dodgers club is brimming with talent. Both teams won more than 70% of their games. Each was solid up and down the order, with strong rotations, deep bullpens, and multiple Hall of Famers on the roster. And each club’s regular season dominance meant nothing when they smacked into the headwinds of a short series.
There’s no reason to think these Dodgers are especially vulnerable to echoing the 2001 Mariners and bowing out two days after winning a Game 3 laugher. Heck, given Atlanta’s upcoming starters, I think I’d still pick Los Angeles in this matchup if I had to wager. But baseball’s a strange game. Just because today felt a lot more normal for Dodgers fans doesn’t mean that order has been restored. It’s anyone’s series.
***
Ever since José Bautista shed his fourth-outfielder skin and emerged as one of the game’s preeminent sluggers, the search for the next big breakout has been something of a pastime among baseball scribes; I’m certainly guilty of it. Baseball people have been doing this forever, of course. But it’s only in the last 10 years or so of advanced analytics, the ubiquity of baseball on television, and the growing prevalence of swing changes and velocity development that these breakouts have become so common, and so easy to identify as they occur.
The risk in always being on the lookout for a breakout is that you set yourself up for a false positive. To a small extent, I wonder if this happened with Wright.
Wright, the No. 5 overall pick in the 2017 draft, and a top 100 prospect every year since, has mostly struggled to translate his impressive raw stuff into sustained big league success. In a year Atlanta desperately needed starting pitching, they demoted Wright to the alternate training site midway through the season.
Upon his return, he was better. He struck out 10 and allowed only two runs in his final two regular season starts, then fired six innings of shutout ball against Miami in the NLDS. In part, he credited his success to the increased use of his two-seamer, and to moving his plant leg toward the first base side of the rubber. All told, his last three starts nurtured optimism that he’d turned a corner.
One bad start isn’t definitive, but tonight L.A. was able to expose a starter still honing his stuff. The Dodgers mashed his fastball, and Wright had a very hard time spotting his breaking balls in competitive locations out of the strike zone. The result was an ugly line: two-thirds of an inning, two walks, two homers, five hits, and seven runs allowed. Wright may well turn into an impact starter, but he’s not there quite yet.
***
In the third inning, Austin Riley settled under a routine fly off the bat of Max Muncy. Or, he thought he did. Soon after stopping his pursuit he realized the ball was going way, way over his head. It ultimately landed on the warning track, a good 25-30 feet behind where he originally camped.
Riley is not a left fielder by trade. He played third base almost exclusively as a minor leaguer and only stood in left four times this season. He started the first seven games of this series at his usual post on the left side of the infield. He probably felt a little rusty in the outfield, and Arlington’s modest, if not quite stiff, breeze made his job a bit trickier than normal.
But man, big leaguers just don’t misjudge flies like distracted Little Leaguers all that often. It struck me as the latest in a long line of plays that suggest the ball is, yet again, flying further than normal. I don’t have drag coefficients, unwound cowhide, an admission from the league, or any other smoking gun to prove my hypothesis (Rob Arthur at Baseball Prospectus thinks that suspiciously high exit velocities seem to be a factor). But after seeing Riley’s play and another six-homer game, it seems pretty obvious that something’s up. Take a look at this table:
| Year | HR/9 |
|---|---|
| 2014 | 0.86 |
| 2015 | 1.02 |
| 2016 | 1.17 |
| 2017 | 1.27 |
| 2018 | 1.16 |
| 2019 | 1.40 |
| 2020 | 1.34 |
| 2020 WC Round | 1.09 |
| LDS/LCS Rounds | 1.92 |
If it feels like we’re averaging four home runs per game lately, that’s because we are. If that seems like a lot, you’re right again: Even in 2019, a year in which the league broke its own home run record in August, batters hit fewer than three dingers per game. (My colleague Jay Jaffe took a longer look at postseason home run rates and scoring relative to the regular season – among other trends – here.)
I don’t have a satisfying answer to what’s going on or why. It seems likely that such a dramatic change in the ball’s composition from literally one week to the next was intentional, but who can say. It’s worth mentioning that the Wild Card round, MLB’s most transparent attempt to annex the public’s attention span for the purpose of making money, drew far fewer eyeballs than expected and that the ratings have been down all postseason. But whether the league is trying to gin up offense to stoke ratings, or simply can’t regulate a fundamental part of its product, I don’t know.
What I do know is that if, halfway through the playoffs, the NBA ordered wider hoops or the NHL larger goals, we’d treat it as a farce, perhaps even a scandal. I don’t see why MLB should escape similar scrutiny.
***
Clayton Kershaw, a late scratch for Game 2, will start for the Dodgers tomorrow. While he’s had a few postseason highlights — his save in Game 5 of the 2016 NLDS in Washington particularly stands out — the prevailing image of Kershaw in the playoffs is of him conceding something, whether it be a lead against Houston in 2017 or Washington last year, or an inexplicable homer, like the one he surrendered to Matt Adams back in 2014.
Kershaw’s career needs no redemption. But to the extent that there’s work left for him to do, he’ll find himself in an unusual situation tomorrow: a chance to pitch the Dodgers back into a series they’re losing. He’ll face Bryse Wilson, a largely untested rookie who has been hit around in his brief major league career. Down 2-1 in the series, the famously competitive Kershaw will surely relish the chance to help pull his side level.
Brendan covers prospects and the minor leagues for FanGraphs. Previously he worked as a Pro Scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
To me it seems like the balls are even different game to game. I think today the roof was open, which could explain a lot. It would go from a pitchers to a hitters ballpark likely by just opening the roof…. But iirc Verlander and Darvish accused them of changing balls during the postseason prior, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they did that again. Some games earlier this postseason seemed suspicious. Which at the minimum seems screwed up.
The roof has been open all series.
Literally every ball is different. I assure you that MLB is not capable of successfully implementing anything complex.
Based on what evidence?! They successfully carried off a scheme to suppress wages for decades. Getting the SUTVA right on a few balls is trivial in comparison.
This park definitely seems to play somewhat differently based on the roof being open or not, but also part of what’s going on is that batters are just getting to absolutely eradicate the baseball. None of these home runs tonight got out because of an extra 10 feet of carry; they were mashed – Bellinger’s ball was the only Dodger HR of this game hit at less than 105 mph, and his was 97 at the optimal HR angle (27 degrees). The HRs went 419, 422, 435 and 442 feet. That’s not the result of a small reduction in drag or the like.
What I think the theme of this playoffs is showing us, other than a few situations where we’ve seen parks outside their normal states (like all warm weather day games at Dodger Stadium in the A’s series) is how exposed bad pitching is against playoff offenses. The story of the Astros, Yankees, Braves, etc are all depleted pitching staffs relying on people who would normally not be allowed to throw postseason innings. The A’s are less a depleted staff than a mismatched one: they were one of the highest fly ball rate, lowest HR/FB teams in MLB, and it resulted in a league average HR/9 allowed. That FB heavy staff, designed to play it’s games in the Oakland-Alameda County Mausoleum, instead had to play Dodger stadium day games – a park that plays neutral overall but is very favorable to HR in normal circumstances, and normal circumstances involve playing almost exclusively night games in significantly lower temperatures and usually with the presence of the marine layer (the Dodgers play 1-4 non-Sunday day games in a normal 162 game season, and those games start 2-3 hours later than Astros/As was getting played). Dodger Stadium in the setting the As and Astros played in is one of the most generous HR parks in MLB, and the As, with their staff of flyball pitchers, got wrecked by that reality. One should think about that Astros/As series in terms of the teams having played all the games in an environment that is more like a July at Camden Yards than what you’d normally associate with Dodger Stadium.
There are sooo many pitchers playing in this postseason who would simply never participate in normal circumstances: between many teams being injury-ravaged and the no-offdays format, we’re seeing meaningful starts from Kyle Wright and Bryse Wilson this week, and so many pitchers similar to them before them. Almost every team (except the Dodgers, ofc) has lost significant arms to injury: Soroka, Verlander, Paxton, Severino, Burnes, Lamet, Clevinger; the Rays have like 6 relievers on the IL right now. The staffs are depleted, and then on top of that put in a situation that would have stretched their depth anyway.
Then you add in 6 more playoff teams that largely didn’t deserve to be there, and with few exceptions (the Reds) they mostly also are filled with pitchers who didn’t belong.
On the other hand, lineups are in really good shape. The Astros have their full position player group, that has produced historic offense. The Dodgers have a fully healthy group, that had a 121 wRC+ with Bellinger, Muncy and Pederson hitting poorly – and now they’re not hitting so poorly. The offenses these poor pitchers are facing are very good.
I anticipated before this series started that this stretch would be pivotal. The Dodgers got Wright out early and while the Braves didn’t use any significant relief pieces, the guys they did use to eat these inning are extremely unavailable tomorrow (Dayton threw 70 pitches, Ynoa nearly 100). Tomorrow is a Bryse Wilson start that’s probably not actually a Bryse Wilson start but a bullpen game, and he’ll only have Josh Tomlin (20 pitches on 10/13) behind him for depth. If those guys can’t jointly eat 5-6 innings, the Braves are going to have to start using their important bullpen pieces just to pitch the game, running up pitch counts that will ensure they’re not available for all remaining games in the series. Teams don’t just not throw guys 3+ days in a row or 4 out of 5 games or the like due to injury risk: they do it because those pitchers are less effective.
That’s why this stretch looked so impossible for the Braves to start with: It’s one thing to need a bullpen game. It’s another to need 2 or 3. Even if the Braves bring back Fried and Anderson on short rest for 5 and 6, they almost certainly can’t expect full length out of them while doing so, and neither pitched all that deep to begin with – and doing that still lines up, uh. Kyle Wright for game 7.
It’s the successive nature of these bullpen games that makes this so incredibly difficult. I think I said on my comment to the overall series preview that it seemed to me that the Braves might need to go 4-0 or at least 3-1 in Fried/Anderson starts to win this series. Even after going 2-0 in the first go-round with those guys, you can really see how that is the case, and the bullpen game problem has been exaggerated by Kershaw being pushed back to this game: Now your bullpen game doesn’t have to outpitch Tony Gonsolin and a bunch of relievers, but Clayton Kershaw and probably less relievers. The Dodgers used several RP tonight that they almost certainly didn’t want to use in any major leverage situation in the rest of the series anyway; they’re going to take a relatively rested bullpen into a Kershaw game and hope to come out the back with a fairly similarly rested bullpen for the final 3 games.
I think you hit on it. During the season with a few days off sprinkled here and there and expanded rosters, you can have a starter give you 3, 4 innings here and there. With these bullpens being badly taxed night after night after night, it’s unreasonable to expect your 2-3 best relievers to take the hill every night, so we’re seeing some downright shaky, unreliable arms being called upon in big spots. Starters are rarely if ever stretched out to 7-8 innings anymore and we’re seeing the effects of that. If you pull a “B-grade” starter at the first sign of trouble to go to your “A-grade” arm out of the pen, that may get you out of a jam but eventually you’re tossing some “D-grade” cannon fodder out there.
This has always been the reason that quality starting pitchers have been valuable. They are a dying breed because of an insistence on using bullpens more than is in anyone’s best interest.
The thing is that in the normal playoffs your 5th starter is irrelevant and your 4th starts 0 games in a 5 game series and 1 in a 7
This format makes them critical, because you have to use a full rotation.
I have been on this trail since I saw the Braves NLCS roster. The only time that Ynoa, Webb or Dayton were ever going to see action was in a game like last night. Tomlin doesn’t belong in a game either and couldn’t even handle a very low leverage situation in Game 2. Why, I ask again, are these guys on an NLCS roster? . Even last night Ynoa could have carried the game farther than he did. Four worthless mop-up men is ridiculous. I cannot understand the present approach to starter usage and I mean the good starters. If a manager insists on yanking his best pitchers after 4 innings, Anderson in Game 2, then it is obvious that the decent bullpen arms are going to be overly used and, sooner rather than later, begin to lose their stuff. What is the reasoning behind this diminution of the value of quality starting pitchers? It is clear that coddling pitchers does nothing to prevent injury. Just look at the state of the pitching staffs in these playoffs and after a season of only 60 games. Only Tampa seems to be able to put their best men out there. I do not believe that today’s pitchers exert more effort in their deliveries than Seaver, Gibson, Roberts, Drysdale and so many more who threw 250+ innings and did it well into their 30’s. The game will be more enjoyable if the great pitchers would be given more of a chance to be great.
It is strange that you’re asking why they’re on the roster immediately after a situation where it clearly doesn’t matter how good they are. and where they spared the arms of pitchers who were actually good. With no off days, you got to save your ammunition.
Yeah, those guys were on the roster to do this. Ynoa even pitched fine – I bet the Braves wish that he was now this game’s starter and Wilson had thrown last night, if they’d known Ynoa would be able to get through 4 clean innings vs the Dodgers.
I mean, we see the same on the other side. Alex Wood was not good this year and was only added to the roster for this series to pitch low leverage. i was a little surprised he only pitched one inning, but they used the other innings to try and get a couple guys right in game situations and see how they looked, knowing that if they didn’t look good they are mostly there for low leverage anyway (Jansen).
That’s why it’s not the single bullpen game that is decisive but the succession of them. I think it’s ludicrous to think Wilson’s going to go 3 times through the Dodger order, and even the 2nd sounds like a bad idea. Lineups are out, and another advantage the Dodgers seem to have now is that they’ve actually gone all-on on the platoon advantage because they know the Braves don’t have the pitching depth to pull a 2018 Wade Miley switcheroo on them now; Wilson’s one of only 2 guys who might give them more than 30-40 pitches tonight, so the Braves can’t burn him on that kind of game. So the Dodgers have lefties 4-7 in their lineup tonight, arranged so that Pollock and Smith can be dropped in to the 5 and 7 spots when the Braves try and follow Wilson with a lefty. It also makes me wonder if the Dodgers see some kind of specific platoon edge that matters against Wilson, letting them load up hard to try and capitalize and maximize their odds of cutting him short.
It’s going to take a Ynoa-like performance from Wilson tonight for the Braves to get a good outcome from this game. We’ll know if that’s in the cards very quickly, I suspect.
Well, Wilson can’t be much worse than Wright was! I had been using the heuristic of “to win the series, Fried and Anderson must go 5-6 innings while only giving up 2-3 runs” in games 1 and 2, in order not to fry the bullpen for later but set the bullpen up for the win. But part of the reason that was important earlier was because it’s pretty much guaranteed Wilson is not going for more than 3 or 4 innings. If Wilson goes 3 innings and gives up 1 run–or 4 innings and gives up 2–the Braves have a shot to pull this out. If not, good luck to them–they’re going to need it.
I would be hilarious if the Braves decide to use Wilson as an opener. It won’t happen, but maybe it should?
I thought about this because of the lefty stack but if they do that they have only Mike Tomlin for any kind of length, and I don’t think they can afford to play games with it
They also only have 2 lefty relievers to attack the lefty stack.
The Braves have announced that game 5 is a bullpen game, no short rest Max Fried.
If the Dodgers can limit Wilson and Tomlin to 4 IP or less combined I think they’ll be in fantastic shape
Well, I take that back about Bryse Wilson–5 innings and going strong. Take that, sadtrombone!
About as good as the Braves could hope for.
There are no restrictions on using position players on the mound this post-season. Any team that was being mauled could do what the Yankees did in their 16-1 thrashing by the Red Sox and use a player, Austin Romine in that instance. Falling behind by that much that early in the game was a situation that was completely unforeseen, since it had never happened before, and should not be used to defend having useless pitchers on the roster in a series like this.
Isn’t it funny that the team in good shape, isn’t? Who are the Dodgers going to use in any role?
You are going John Smoltz-ish in giving pitching more credit that they are due. The idea that only mistakes get mashed is wrong as is the idea that good pitches just shut down an offense. What you are seeing is that baseball is not consistent or predictable. Agreed that this is really bad baseball and the pitchers are not up to snuff overall, but the box-score doesn’t indicate bad or good pitching necessarily. Most games are decided on a bunch of weirdness. For example, some ball that was smoked right at a SS for a double-play or some flyball that just finds some grass. There have plenty of scrubby pitchers getting outs all through the playoffs.
This should be an article. Hell of a comment.
The difficult for LA will be the next three games: Kershaw, May (who already appeared in this series), and Buehler (dealing with blisters).
While Mike claims the pen is “relatively rested”, I’m not so sure LA has enough rested pen arms to give them 4-5, 5-6, and another 4-5 innings over the next 3 days. If you consider the recent performances of those three starters, I think that is a reasonable expectation of what sort of inning workload the pen will need to shoulder in those games. Do they really have enough relievers who are both rested and reliable to handle that?
They are probably looking at 13 – 16 innings from bullpen guys in the next three days. How will that break down? Maybe 2 each from Treinen, Graterol, and Gonzalez. At the *very best*, another 2 each from Kelly and Jansen (even that seems like playing with fire at this point). Then they are looking to get 3 – 6 innings from the combination of Floro, McGee, Baez, and Kolarek. Considering the heavy workload and relative ineffectiveness of the latter 2 recently, that seems pretty dicey to me.
Early in yesterday’s game, I was thinking that Atlanta was getting pushed into a situation where they would be screwed pitching-wise for the remainder of the series, but after Ynoa gutted out so many innings and Snitker avoided any good relievers yesterday, I am really not so sure the Atlanta pithing situation is much worse than the one in which the Dodgers now find themselves.
If Kershaw’s back is OK, I think you are wrong. If it is causing some problems you could well be right.
The Dodgers have real concerns but I think the Braves have less margin for error. Starting with the BP game today, if the Dodgers tax Atlanta’s 2 remaining mop up men, the Braves will be forced to start spending good arms just to finish the game. That becomes a mess if Fried gets tagged, like against the Marlins, or Anderson can’t go more than 4. Even if all goes well, should there be a game 7, the Dodgers have a huge pitching advantage, even with all their caveats.
Buehler’s blister issue at this point is more about rust and lack of work, as he’s been hitting 90+ pitches (and the Dodgers literally don’t let guys go over 100; even when he went 8 IP vs the Brewers, Kershaw threw only 93 pitches. A Dodger starter has not thrown over 100 pitches since 2019.
But Buehler’s not going deep into games because of inefficiency. He’s wasting a lot of pitches and putting up 95 pitches/4 IP sorts of results. It’s that last refinement of his command that’s a bit off from having not pitched in hardly any game situations prior to the postseason for several weeks.
Clayton’s missed the occasional start due to back spasms without really missing a beat afterwards. If that’s the only reported condition, I don’t expect that there’s a strong reason to believe he’ll be compromised during the game itself, and he’s had a number of days to recover: The problem occurred over the weekend, and he was pushed back because he was no longer able to complete his pre-start routine and be prepared to pitch. He’s been completing that routine during the week.
The Dodgers didn’t tell us Kershaw was scratched until the day of Game 2, but that was gamesmanship: They knew about the problem on Saturday.
Don’t get two wins for scoring 15. Series is still 2-1 and Braves need to get 2 wins from a bullpen game, a Fried start, and an Anderson start. There’s a lot of series to go
Totally agree Braves are up, but have a couple of games without proven SPs. So it really feels like a 50-50 proposition right now. And this assumes that Kershaw is healthy.
If you assume the Dodgers are the favorites over 3 games at 2-2, which I think most folks would, probably in the 60/40 range (that’s how favored they were in the 7 game series, and the Braves pitching disarray likely cancels out the increased variance from the fewer games), the Dodgers need to be pretty enormous favorites w/ Kershaw vs bullpen in order to actually be favored to win. I don’t think it’s actually 50/50, but I’d guess that it’s not worse than 45/55, either.
This stretch always loomed as a huge problem for the Braves in this series, and while Kershaw being pushed back helped them win game 2, it’s also made this situation much, much worse, because your bullpen game is now going up against a much stronger pitcher.
Before the game I thought the Dodgers were, relatively speaking, in some of the best shape you could be while being down 0-2 because of the combination of the braves starting depth and Kershaw now pitching one of those games.
Sportsbooks still gave dodgers as favorites
2 bullpen games, a Fried start and an Anderson start.
The problem is Clayton Kershaw vs bullpen game is one of the more lopsided matchups you’ll see in postseason pitching, and since Ynoa/Dayton ate so many innings today, you’re down to only Wilson plus whatever length Tomlin’s capable of before you start having to use real relief pitchers to fill innings even in a blowout scenario, and the cascading aftereffects that follow; neither Fried or Anderson pitches particularly deep into games, and there’s a solid likelihood they can’t go as deep if you start them on short rest – but you probably have to, because 3 consecutive bullpen games is untenable. Anderson only went 4 IP using 85 pitches in G2, and I doubt you can realistically expect more than that from a short rest start.
The first bullpen game is survivable, the 2nd or the 3rd becomes increasingly less so. It will take heroic outputs by some pitchers, whether that’s Wilson tomorrow or Fried and Anderson down the line, to prevent that cascading usage problem. Ynoa threw 92 pitches; Dayton 62, and he’s not even a reliever known for his length. They won’t be available for days.
Imagine a situation where the Dodgers get to Wilson early tomorrow, not like they did today but for 4-5 runs enough to get him out of the game, Tomlin pitches 2 or 3 innings and it’s the top of the 4th and the Braves, down 5 runs, have to start trotting O’Day, Minter, Martin, Smith etc out there just to complete the game.
That’s not a particularly unreasonable scenario.
the expectation is that Wilson goes out and gets 5 innings. It is fine if he gives up a few runs. But he needs to get 5 innings, he is a starter. So this is not planned as a bullpen game.
Right. Why think Wilson’s start is such a problematic pen game, Mike?
I don’t know him from Adam, but based on his gamelogs, it looks like his typical IP/G is around 3 or so.
If he gave Atlanta 3 – 4 innings today, would they really be in such a bad position considering none of Melancon, O’day, Smith, Martin, Minter, Matzek, and Tomlin were used yesterday? I’d think it is reasonable to expect that Snitker will be able to get through Game 4 using just Wilson and his 5 best relievers (none of which look to be too bad).
Meanwhile, Roberts is looking at needing Kelly, Jansen, Baez, Floro, and McGee to give him innings in must-win games.
While I thought LA had a significant pitching depth advantage coming into this series, as it stands at this moment, I am wondering if things might be pretty close to even on that front now.
I still can’t believe Roberts used 4 relievers in 4 innings of a blowout where Snitker used 4 relievers for 8.1 innings.
Maybe their playoff performance warrants it, but that sure seems like an under-rating of the Dodger bullpen.
The names you mentioned and their 2020 ERAs:
Joe Kelly 1.80
Kenley Jansen 3.33
Pedro Baez 3.18 (he’s pitched last 2 days so probably not him anyway)
Dylan Floro 2.59
Jake McGee 2.66
That is without mentioning Brusdar and Treinen and Victor Gonzalez. This is at least on par with the Brave pen on paper. Again, any or all of them could perform much worse in the playoffs, but I don’t think the Brave guys are immune to that as well.
Citing ERA for Kelly and Jansen definitely misses important points with each of them.
Kelly’s walk rate has been pretty poor (walked 9 of 46 batters he faced across regular and postseason in 2020). That can be survived if he continues to K guys and generate grounders like he has in recent years (his second half of 2019 was amazing; I was hugely in favor of him going 2 IP in the 2019 LDS G5). But the Atlanta lineup isn’t the type you want to be giving free passes to. They’ll make a pitcher pay for that sort of thing by knocking an XBH with two men on.
Have you paid any attention to Jansen since September 1st? Maybe I follow these things too closely because I am a Dodgers fan, but his velo has been so low recently and his movement worse (vertically especially) that citing ER-based data over the entire season is really not the best way to evaluate him as he is today. While he could very well give the team a scoreless inning against weaker batters, his stuff isn’t what anyone should want to be throwing to a potent lineup in a must-win game.
Baez’s usage is exactly why I wouldn’t want to be relying on him in a big situation today or tomorrow.
I am a big fan of Floro (nice GB%), but his lack of Ks and wacky reverse platoon splits give me pause.
I am also a big fan of McGee and his sky high K%, but everyone keeps saying his single pitch repertoire can’t be trusted, and LA hasn’t really used him much in tight spots lately, so I assume I am wrong about liking him and a team knows a reason not to trust him.
‘It seems likely that such a dramatic change in the ball’s composition from literally one week to the next was intentional, but who can say.’
I really hope you meant to say unlikely.
Because this is a pretty big accusation you are making and you are basing this on the evidence of… 20 LDS/LCS games.
To state the obvious, HRs are one of the noisiest data in baseball and you can find far more dramatic changes in HR/9 going by 20 game bundles.
I meant what I wrote.
Look, the most homers ever hit in one day is 62, set back in 2002. In the DS/CS rounds, the league has essentially been a whisker from that pace over 20+ games, and that’s over a stretch with far fewer balls in play.
Is it possible that this kind of outburst could happen without a juiced ball? Sure, theoretically, and I’ll take the L on this if I’m wrong.
But are we really supposed to believe that it’s just a coincidence that the game’s best pitchers are surrendering way, way more homers overnight? And not just homers, but REALLY LONG homers? In a league that has shown time and time again that it can’t (or won’t) produce a uniform baseball from one moment to the next?
They aren’t the games best pitchers who are giving up massive amounts of dingers. it’s Kyle Wright and Grant Dayton and Jose Urquidy and so many others. They’re just not pitchers normally allowed to pitch meaningful postseason innings.
Here’s a savant search of every postseason home run this year. You see some big names, because dominant pitchers increasingly have the Verlander/Hader profile of ‘almost no contact, but when you do hit it you destroy it’, and HR are more common parts of postseason run scoring, but mostly this list is composed of guys who aren’t great. Chris Bassitt? Zack Davies? Josh James?
These dudes wouldn’t pitch in a normal postseason.
https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/statcast_search?hfPT=&hfAB=home%5C.%5C.run%7C&hfBBT=&hfPR=&hfZ=&stadium=&hfBBL=&hfNewZones=&hfGT=PO%7C&hfC=&hfSea=2020%7C&hfSit=&player_type=pitcher&hfOuts=&opponent=&pitcher_throws=&batter_stands=&hfSA=&game_date_gt=&game_date_lt=&hfInfield=&team=&position=&hfOutfield=&hfRO=&home_road=&hfFlag=&hfPull=&metric_1=&hfInn=&min_pitches=0&min_results=0&group_by=name&sort_col=pitches&player_event_sort=api_h_launch_speed&sort_order=desc&min_pas=0#results
The pitcher, after all, has far less influence over the EV of the pitch than the batter. The pitching is depleted and overly stressed by the format, and the offenses are almost entirely lacking major injuries and are incredibly good.
Heck, there’s even a degree to which increased velocity improves EV, and postseason pitches tend to be harder.
Josh James has pitched in each of the last three postseasons.
Josh James was also really, really bad this year; do you really think the Astros wanted to use him in any kind of high leverage scenario?
Dude exploded to almost a walk an inning, he was truly awful.
That kind of pitcher only gets used when you run out of options.
The Braves and Dodgers hit a combined 221 homers in 60 games each, which also includes several 7-inning games. The seven game, seven day format with no roster changes means you aren’t getting a real skew towards the better arms. I mean, look at the homers hit in this series. Many have been off the back halves of the bullpens.
I don’t necessarily doubt you, but HR/9 variance is always around 1 and a quarter (game by game). North of a 40% increase in 25 game stretches (we will assume for statistical significance it’s league-wide given breadth of playoff format and relative strength of playoff teams’ power hitting vs. pitching) produces t-values well above 2 no matter which way you slice it. Can you prove otherwise?
I’m not saying it isn’t possible for teams to hit this many homers in a 25 game sample. I’m saying, knowing what we’ve observed from the league and what we’re seeing with our eyes, it seems far more likely that this is being caused by a screwy ball than random variation. All the more so given Rob Arthur’s piece on how something weird is going on with exit velo.
Its worth noting that Rob found only about 2 mph unexplained, and that Alan Nathan jumped in on Twitter to point out that the CoR has historically been incredibly stable and manufacturing has tended to be considerably tighter than the official tolerances allowed, and the amount of increase necessary to add that much EV to the ball would require a substantial and probably intentional manipulation.
It’s a serious accusation and the occam’s razor solution of ‘worse than normal playoff pitching, great batters’ goes a long way.
Like you cover the extent to which the Dodgers hit 5 HR today off guys who no team wants pitching postseason innings for them in any normal circumstances, but truly go out of your way to avoid just blaming them for sucking.
The pitching is so badly exposed by how damaged all the non-Dodger pitching staffs are and the no-rest-days format forcing the utilization of 15 pitcher staffs where everyone is participating. 5th starters usually aren’t on postseason rosters, and the Braves just started one in game 3 of an LCS.
Like in addition to walking a million dudes, Kyle Wright had given up extremely hard contact on balls in play, to the extent that he was actually massively over-performing his statcast expected stats despite his awful results. Maybe he has fixed the walks to some extent, but clearly the hard contact problem remains.
“but clearly the hard contact problem remains.”
Sorry, I’m confused. Didn’t you just disclaimer a comment by (correctly) pointing out a pitcher’s relative inability to influence EV? Perhaps I’m misreading one of your comments.
relative, yeah, not absolute; the batter has more influence on EV, but there are players w/ consistently softer contact than you’d expect and consistently harder contact than you’d expect. I also pointed out the Hader/Verlander profile: the one that’s top in the league in everything and dead last in barrels, because the few things that are hit are crushed.
When you combine high EV pitchers and high EV batters, then you get some real silliness.
I don’t know the exact breakdowns off the top of my head, but we have a lot of skills like that where we can see that it’s a shared influence from pitcher and batter, but one has more influence than the other. Someone did an article here on FG in the last year or two breaking down and showing how high/low K batters and pitchers opposing each other, and walk rates and others, demonstrate which factor has more influence, and I know I’ve seen similar work for exit velocities and hard-hit rates.
Relatively less and ‘has no impact’ aren’t the same thing.
You’re right to point out that the pitching is a little worse this year than normal. But if you carry your argument — that bad pitchers get pulverized when they face a good lineup — to its logical conclusion, than we’d expect to see the Yankees crushing four homers per game against the Orioles, or the Dodgers doing the same against the Rockies, or the Astros against the Twins, etc. And that doesn’t happen.
I mean except that we do? I mean, 2019 Yankees/Orioles was notorious for the absurd home run rates: remember 2019 Gleyber Torres? Dodgers/Rockies makes less sense since the contemporary Rockies club is built around pitching!
I’d also point out that for as good as scouting is in the normal MLB season, it’s much better in the playoffs and we see repeated examples of guys having swing flaws and holes and tendencies exploited at length (remember how the Astros attacked Seager and Bellinger in ’17 with the exact same pitches over and over to great success? or look how the Dodgers attacked Tatis and Machado this year with a very consistent philosophy). Those kinds of holes are discovered and exploited much more aggressively in postseason series, and worse players are far more likely to have them to exploit. There’s no reason to think that scouting advantage only plays for the pitcher half of the matchup. In discussing this future game back at the start of the series, someone pointed out how Wright had achieved his brief run of success via moving his location on the rubber, and how that had changed the angle of attack of his 2-seamer and allowed him to actually cause it to go for strikes consistently on the inside part of the plate instead of being off the plate inside to righties/away to lefties, making it useful. I pointed out that with 3 or 4 games of data showing that, the Dodgers would now know that pitch was going to be a strike and attack it accordingly, the response was ‘Well why didnt the Marlins do that!?’
Wright managed to get 3 sinkers in that general vicinity in this game. 2 went for called strikes, and one was eradicated by Corey Seager. Other sinkers that stayed more towards the other half of the plate produced both the Smith double and the Betts single. A slider to that same spot (outside to LHB) was hit for Pederson’s home run.
The Dodgers were ready for exactly what Wright was doing since he’d made his changes. They attacked those pitches aggressively, expecting strikes – and got them. Did Wright pitch less effectively than he had in his previous outings since his relocation on the rubber, or were the Dodgers just better prepared for what his ball was now doing than previous opponents? (probably, it was both).
At the time of this post, Game 3 won’t show in this search result but it will in the morning. You can examine Wright’s sinker location charts by game since the start of September and see the improved clustering to that half of the plate (as well as an overall decline in usage rate).
The Dodgers were all over that portion of the plate – in addition to Seager’s and Pederson’s hits, Rios’s HR was on a 4 seamer off the plate in that direction (Wright apparently has both fastballs, but doesn’t throw his 4 seamer much, at first I wondered if it was a mis-categorized sinker)
The Dodgers were keyed on that half of the plate, middle height, and enjoyed great success doing so.
https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/statcast_search?hfPT=FT%7CSI%7C&hfAB=&hfBBT=&hfPR=&hfZ=&stadium=&hfBBL=&hfNewZones=&hfGT=R%7CPO%7C&hfC=&hfSea=2020%7C&hfSit=&player_type=pitcher&hfOuts=&opponent=&pitcher_throws=&batter_stands=&hfSA=&game_date_gt=2020-09-01&game_date_lt=&hfInfield=&team=&position=&hfOutfield=&hfRO=&home_road=&hfFlag=&hfPull=&pitchers_lookup%5B%5D=657140&metric_1=&hfInn=&min_pitches=0&min_results=0&group_by=name-date&sort_col=pitches&player_event_sort=api_h_launch_speed&sort_order=desc&min_pas=0&chk_stats_pa=on&chk_stats_bip=on&chk_stats_k_percent=on&chk_stats_bb_percent=on&chk_stats_woba=on&chk_stats_xwoba=on&chk_stats_wobadiff=on#results
I just imagine a litany of these mediocre to bad pitchers being forced into the postseason, guys who are mediocre to bad specifically because they often can only succeed in a specific way and struggle to adapt to adaptations against them (which is often what makes baseball players struggle), only in an environment where the teams remaining are extremely savvy about quickly identifying and reducing their greatest exploitable holes and disseminating it to their players much more effectively than they are in the regular season.
The defining trait, IMO, of an average to below average MLB players is that they often have 1-2 carrying tools and lack the ability to adapt to new angles of attack. Even great players can take considerable time of struggle in doing so (see Bellinger, C), but the reality of most 2nd-division type players is that they have a weakness they’ve never figured out how to overcome. In postseason baseball, opponents get to relentlessly and vigorously exploit those weaknesses in ways they usually don’t bother to do in the regular season; they have days to read scouting reports and prep, days for the scouts to be working in advance during previous playoff rounds, etc.
You’re more than likely correct on Wright and I never meant to insinuate I was in the ‘has no impact’ camp if I did do so. And yeah the Yankees hit 61 HRs in 769 vs. BAL PAs last year. LOL.
One of the things I took away from the piece on K/BB and other factors influence between the pitcher and hitter is that the extremes tend to carry thru a bit more often; in general, batter walkrate is more influential than pitcher walkrate, but if the pitcher walkrate is extremely high or extremely low, the reverse is true. And so on
I think this also holds true for batted ball data; the batter generally has more influence on batted ball EVs, in particular because his raw ability defines the maximum, but extreme low EV/high EV allowed pitchers subvert that to a certain extent.
Hm, yes. So what of the Riley anecdote then? You would say inexperienced outfielder who can’t read a swing, yes?
That and/or the ball had crazy backspin so it carried better than you’d expect.
The Astros/A’s series accounts for a lot of those home runs. They were playing in Dodger Stadium in the middle of the day in 90+ degree heat every single game. Remove that series and I’d bet the HR rate normalizes a fair bit.
About 1.6/9, so still very high.
90 degrees and hot…so very low on the moistmeter.
That’s what she said
Aaaaaand now we see why it was so important for the Braves to maximize their chances with Fried and Anderson, no? And also, why it was so important to have some not-so-great relievers to mop things up when things get out of hand? You don’t want to blow your good relievers on a game like this.
That was just brutal. Complete destruction. It’s funny because there was always this “did Kyle Wright actually fix his problems or was he just playing against bad offenses?” question. I can’t say I’m sure that this “proves” he is no good, since the Dodgers lineup is very good and (historically, at least) seems to destroy right-handed pitching thanks to all of the lefty mashers in the lineup.
Also shows that they should really, really want to wrap things up in no more than six, because if they trot out Fried in G5 and Anderson in G6, G7 may be….decidedly lacking in good options.
I don’t know why they would do that. If the thinking is you need to win Fried and Anderson starts, you are better off having both on full rest. Also, if you do somehow win games 5 and 6 (assuming a game 4 loss here, as I assume your post also assumes), you at least have a rested Anderson for WS game 1.
You could actually game this out. Let’s say the Braves lose the game with Bryse Wilson (not a guarantee or anything, but it’s more likely than not). That leaves you with Game 5/6/7.
You could make a pretty good argument that on normal rest, starting Fried or Anderson gives you a 50/50 shot against the Dodgers (maybe a little more for Fried, a little less for Anderson?). On short rest, that drops to…45/55? Maybe more, maybe not as much? Of course, the bullpen game also drops the likelihood of the Braves winning the Fried and Anderson starts because your relievers are gassed, so maybe we’re down to 45/55 no matter what? The only way that wouldn’t happen is if you’re really committed to letting Tomlin and Ynoa pitch their way out, results be damned.
So then there’s the actual question of Kyle Wright on short rest in Game 7 vs. the bullpen game, and how likely you are to win it. I don’t like either of those if I’m the Braves, but I suppose you could send Kyle Wright out there, hope he handles himself for 3 innings, and then do a bullpen game that day instead.
I would have to actually calculate it out to be sure but just looking at these probabilities I think sending them out on short rest is probably your best bet, conditional on the Braves losing Game 4.
You don’t play anyone on short rests. You need two wins and starting Fried and Anderson on regular rest looks like a right thing to do.
You may play Wright in the 5th game though. Not as a starter, but as an inning eater.
And probably you want to find some injury in Dayton to call another arm in case you need to eat innings today.
The only way the bullpen is actually gassed for games 6-7 is if the Braves are in both games 4-5 and then most likely they win at least one; or long extra innings. These things would gas the Dodgers pen, too, probably. Short rest means lower quality and quantity unless you are also contemplating Fried coming back for some action game 7. It makes no sense. Fried is guaranteed his shot in game 6. You don’t throw a diminished Fried in game 5 unless you are down 3-1 and that is impossible now.
The other problem with this analysis is assuming the bullpen game would severely hurt the Fried/Anderson starts. I don’t think so. I count at least five very high quality Braves relievers and six if you include O’Day which is not unreasonable. So if you are doing a bullpen game for game 5, you are either not using nearly all these guys or you are spreading the usage thin which means at least several will be available game 6. I don’t get the overconcern about bullpen usage just because it is seven straight games. Teams play seven straight games all the time. And now you even have extra arms out there. The Braves could easily lose this series. Wilson could get blown up. Whoever they throw out there game 5 could as well. The bats could go cold against good Dodger pitching. “A tired bullpen” just doesn’t seem likely at all to be why the Braves lose. If they have to throw so many pitches that the whole stable of good relievers is too gassed, it probably means the Dodgers are scoring 10+ runs a few more times and then it doesn’t really matter.
You have to consider short rest because 3 consecutive bullpen games is not possible
To be fair, the guys who pitched last night were all pretty bad, so no one would want to use them in a game that was close or you had a lead to protect.
But then again, two consecutive bullpen games are also brutal, because you are going to need some relievers for Games 6 and 7.
I find this puzzle–whether you pitch guys on short rest or not–to be endlessly fascinating. You’re seeing the same questions play out in the ALCS as well. A seven game series with no off-days is really fun from a strategy perspective.
“The Dodgers mashed his fastball, and Wright had a very hard time spotting his breaking balls in competitive locations out of the strike zone. ”
I think this is the key and one reason why Fried and Anderson had success against the Dodgers. The Dodgers mash anyone’s fastball and are typically looking for one early in the count. Fried and Anderson were able to spot their breaking pitches consistently to get ahead early in the count putting the Dodgers constantly in unfavorable counts. I don’t have any analytics to prove this, but I just remember watching curveball after curveball dropping in to steal a strike and the Dodgers just let them go by.
From pitchfx or statcast or whatever the feed is, Wright wasn’t getting anything called on the edges. He’s real bad when he’s not throwing strikes, but when he’s not getting calls he’s awful. The biggest thing his mechanical changes did was, I think, just getting him to throw strike one in the first pitch.
Yeah, this isn’t correct. I just went back and reviewed all the hitters per mlb.com which I think is pitchfx. Only Bellinger had 1 or 2 pitches on the edge called balls that might should’ve been called a strike. Heck Taylor had a pitch that was out of the zone called a strike so it all evened out. Also, 3 of the 9 batters Wright saw hit the first pitch.
Umpire strike zone errors don’t always even out, and in that game, it really didn’t even out. @UmpScorecards tweeted that Jim Reynolds missed 6 true strikes, 6 true balls, and the calls had a net effect of decreasing Atlanta’s run expectancy by 0.42 runs and increasing Los Angeles’s run expectancy by 0.44 runs, for a 0.86 run expectancy shift towards Los Angeles.
These effects snowballed throughout the first inning. The Bellinger at-bat in the first innings had two pitches that should have been called strikes. Didn’t get the strike called for the second pitch (the high strike), didn’t get the strike called on the fourth pitch (the outside strike). Bellinger strikes out there, that’s the end of the inning with three runs scored. BTW, the pitch to Taylor the first inning was correctly called a strike on the outside corner.
Other blown calls from my review of the pitches:
1st inning: Ball 4 to Betts (outside corner strike)
2nd inning: Ball 1 to Bellinger (outside corner strike)
2nd inning: Strike 2 to Riley (high ball)
5th inning: Ball 2 to Muncy (inside strike)
5th inning: Ball 4 to Muncy (inside corner strike)
5th inning: Strike 3 to Smith (outside ball)
6th inning: Ball 1 to Pederson (high strike)
6th inning: Ball 3 to Taylor (high strike)
7th inning: Strike 1 and 2 to Bellinger (low balls)
7th inning: Strike 1 to Riley (high ball)
8th inning: Strike 1 to Barnes (outside ball)
9th inning: Strike 3 to Swanson (inside ball)
That’s 11 blown ball-strike calls in favor of the Dodgers, and 4 in favor of the Braves. Jim Reynolds had a frustratingly inconsistent strike zone all night. Sometimes he’d call the high or low strike, sometimes he’d call the inside or outside strike, but hell if anyone knew when he’d call it.
And the biggest miss that Reynolds made was when he messed up the Justin Turner kicking the ball play in the first inning. Turner kicked the ball. At that point the ball is dead, it’s a ball, and the at-bat continues. Instead, the Braves have to challenge that, and Turner gets rewarded with first base because of the stupid broken challenge rules which still got the call wrong, just in a different way.
Just a bad night behind the plate for Jim Reynolds, much like many others he’s umpired this postseason.
Ok. I just looked at the pitchfx data when Wright was pitching since that is what duke commented on. There may have been other pitches throughout the game and other sources may disagree.
I do agree the call for Turner was a bad one though.
I wonder how Fried and Anderson will effected by pitching on short rest, assuming that’s Atlanta’s plan.
Really no need to overanalyze things.
Just look at this season’s numbers.
Fried ERA 2.25 FIP 3.10
Anderson ERA 1.95 FIP 2.54
Wright ERA 5.21 FIP 5.90
Fried and Anderson are great/good pitchers.
Wright is not.
Yeah, my comment was really more about why Fried and Anderson were successful than really why Wright wasn’t. They all have great stuff but Fried and Anderson can control it.
Also it really isn’t very interesting to just say one is good and the others aren’t.
It is kind of interesting to think of why a guy with a Wright’s toolset is bad though. For me anyway.
Atlanta path to victory remains unchanged. Win two of first three games. Sneak a win in either game 4 or 5. Be well positioned with your rested aces for game 6 and 7, needing only one win. Dodgers are very good. Braves are right where they wanted to be at this point in the series. No serious person thought Atlanta would be 3-0 right now.
The Braves have the arms to be competitive in both games if the situation warrants it. None of the top bullpen arms pitched yesterday and none were especially taxed games 1-2. I would be aggressive in throwing the kitchen sink at the Dodgers in game 4 unless it is well out of hand early. Getting cute with saving arms could easily turn out as a regrettable mistake.
And yes, if anyone said the Braves would be up 2-1 with all of their important bullpen arms well rested going into game 4, you would say that is about as good an outcome as you could reasonably expect. I think even on Fangraphs there is a psychological bias (momentum!) to view the better team as now somehow nearly unbeatable.
I’m not sure they love having already burned Ynoa since reports were he might start game 5. That definitely is going to create some tough decisions. But maybe Wright can come back and pitch multiple innings without getting bombed again.
The Dodgers completely burned up Urias and used their closer in game that was out of hand immediately. If they used Urias for maybe an inning or two, then he would have been available for game 6 or 7. They better hope that they don’t need Kenley say three or four more times. Certainly not smart usage but they have the talent to win with or without good decisions.
Kenley Jansen is not the Dodgers’ closer and will not pitch any high leverage innings in this series unless it’s an extra inning game and everyone else has been used. His appearance in the game was simply mop up duty. We still may see Urias in a short role, where he has been effective, in Game 6 or 7.
I agree w the first part of what Dobbs said though, I personally would of used urias for 2ip once game was out of hand
Totally agree with the first part. Urias should have been pulled after the second, would then have been able to start a game 7 or relieve later in the series. Having one of your most effective pitchers this postseason throwing 100 pitches in an already decided game was mismanagement.
Yep. It could of just been a bullpen in between starts and bring him back out in a couple days. Urias has been babied forever, now for some reason they throw him 100 pitches in a game that was decided in the top of the 1st? It was odd. Robert’s is notorious for pulling his pitchers too early too..remember Rich Hill? Just all seems so odd. Hate both teams pitching decisions that game. Doesn’t the front office have a “hey wtf are you doing phone line?” Both teams could of used it.
Austin Riley should never play outfield. He is lucky that he didn’t get someone hurt on that play where he let Camargo catch what was his ball – he even went low just to make sure that he was a complete liability. That is the state of baseball though… players playing positions where they have no business has become common. The outfield in particular has become a clown show. It reminds me of watching children where the most interesting plays are really about how badly the balls are misplayed. Ironically, this is why we “needed” defensive metrics and here we are far more lost than when we started.
Back to talking about balls again? I enjoyed the break. How baseball illiterate do you have to be to not understand that there are a lot of environmental variables? The obvious answer is that they are not micromanaging the balls – its time to stop embarrassing ourselves talking how the balls differ from day to day. When there was a conspiracy this community blindly said that there was not despite the evidence- failing to understand that a real baseball game is not a simulation is not indicative of a ball conspiracy.
Apparently some sportswriters predicted the Dodgers’ breakout due to their ninth inning rally the day before, and were made fun of by stats-minded fans on Reddit’s baseball thread (the sportswriters of course were right in this case). The announcers thought there was a connection too. I’ve seen this a few times with the A’s when they hit really well the next day after losing a game despite a ninth-inning rally. Do people believe momentum exists or is this purely a function of Wright’s pitching and random sequencing?
Do not fall down the “academics get into fights over momentum” hole.
I think momentum exists though (hint: hidden Markov model of events captures the dependence)
Any discussion about the Dodgers losing momentum because they were shut out the last 6 innings? I can guarantee you that if the Braves and Dodgers roles were reversed here, no one would have been talking about momentum after game two. It would have been “they missed their chance.” This is simply a plug and play analysis for when the better team does what the Dodgers did games 1-2. They are better, so the story follows any narrative supporting them coming back.
I’m actually genuinely interested in the question to see if there’s dependence in the distributions of hits across games. Hot hand fallacy is not a dead debate- I think Gelman’s reanalysis shows it might be a thing.
I tried to get a reply moderated that included two pertinent links, but not luck. If you are interested, search for “Baseball’s ‘Hot Hand’ Is Real” from 538 and “He’s heating up, he’s on fire! Klay Thompson and the truth about the hot hand” from ESPN. While the latter is about the NBA, it includes underlying mathematical details that the baseball piece glosses. In short, there is evidence for momentum in sports being real, though how strong that evidence is is very much a matter of debate. No idea if there is a carryover effect across games, though.
Can a team forfeit once a game has begun? Down 11-0 they had no chance at winning and would ruin their bullpen.
And if they can’t/won’t, why not pitch Culberson/Panda yday? They ended up using pitchers that they probably are going to need in order to win this series… And used them for a lot of pitches. I don’t know why they wouldn’t just have punted early. Who cares how many more runs they give up if they have a chance at winning the series?
I would argue that the Dodgers uses more useful resources from the second inning on than the Braves. I really don’t think the series will turn on not having Grant Dayton until game 5 (maybe 6) and not having Ynoa except maybe an inning in game seven where you’d think you wouldn’t pitch Ynoa anyway.
If another game just gets totally away from the Braves, I’d bet Culberson and Panda pitch. It’s not like they didn’t contemplate it. They just decided against it. And now they *only* have 9-10 bullpen arms that are well rested for the next four games. Somehow I think they will manage.
Snitiker’s use of scarce pitching resources has been pretty impressive across series so far. Really raised my estimation of him.
I don’t think there is a ball conspiracy. I think 15 runs is what happens when a world class lineup faces Triple A quality pitching.
Even as a Braves fan, I actually like the idea of 0 days off (or at least fewer) in the playoffs moving forward. They play 5 days in a row all year, allowing teams to pitch their ace 3 times in a series fundamentally favors top heavy teams and punishes teams with a deep roster (the kind that would win 10+ games).
Maybe in the future the format is 2 games at lower seed, 1 travel day, then 5 straight at the higher seed.
I agree. Why make the playoffs schedule easier than the regular season? Make them fly after the game and play the next night.
This series exposes how the Braves may compete with the Dodgers at the front of the roster, they don’t at the back. And that should be a meaningful advantage
It also allows for more strategy. I mean maybe expand the rosters a bit to avoid injuries through over use? But I like the no breaks thing (even as a Braves fan)
Oh well, that’s baseball!!
Despite scoring 15 runs in one game, the Dodgers now find themselves down 3 games to 1 in the series. I am sure Atlanta can stand being “embarrassed” in one game if they are still able to pull out the series victory. Bryse Wilson definitely surprised a lot of people.