Does Toronto, or Indeed Humanity, Stand a Chance Against the Dodgers Rotation?

You can’t win if you don’t score. The Brewers, who scored exactly one run in each game of their doomed NLCS campaign, learned that the hard way. The Phillies scored eight runs in their single NLDS victory — five of those coming as tack-on runs against mopup relievers — and a total of seven in their three losses.

The Dodgers have a 2.45 ERA this postseason. Among 21st century World Series contestants, that’s tied for the third-best mark with the 2012 Tigers, who had three World Series winners in their rotation. The only pennant winners to allow fewer runs per game were the 2001 Diamondbacks (who had a rather famous 1-2 punch at the top of their rotation) and the 2022 Astros, who threw a combined no-hitter in the World Series.

That already-impressive stat actually understates how hard a task the Blue Jays have. See, the criticism of the Los Angeles bullpen remains valid; the Phillies and even the Reds beat the hell out of the Dodgers’ medium- and low-leverage guys.

If you narrow the sample down to the pitchers who figure to be throwing meaningful innings, the monster only gets scarier. I compiled the Dodgers’ pitching stats without Clayton Kershaw and Edgardo Henriquez, leaving only the pitchers whom the Blue Jays could expect to face in medium- and high-leverage scenarios. That includes Emmet Sheehan, who’s been shaky, and the thrillingly inconsistent Blake Treinen. Then I cut the list down further just to the Dodgers’ top four starters and their closer, Roki Sasaki.

Those figures invite some chilling historical comparisons.

The book on the Dodgers is that you have to take your lumps against the big arms, and capitalize against whatever squishy relievers you happen to face: Sheehan, Treinen, and various situational lefties. The Phillies did this, while pitching incredibly well themselves, and won only a single game out of four.

The Brewers didn’t even get that close. Sasaki, Blake Snell, Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto combined to throw 87% of the Dodgers’ innings in the NLCS. That left only 4 2/3 innings for the Brewers to score against Treinen, Alex Vesia, and Anthony Banda. They only managed to do that once.

So, “wait it out and light Treinen up” has its limitations as a strategy. Especially because of one of my favorite fun facts going right now: We’re into multiple years of Treinen looking wobbly in high-leverage playoff situations, but in his career he’s entered 25 playoff games with the lead and exited with the lead every single time.

That means the Blue Jays have two paths to victory. First: Try to white-knuckle out four 2-1 or 1-0 victories in seven games. Seems like a risky move, as it would introduce the baseball world to the concept of a mission-critical Louis Varland.

The second path: Score off the Unhittable Five. Which hasn’t been done to any real extent this postseason. The Phillies tagged Ohtani and Yamamoto for three runs each in the NLDS. The Reds scratched out two off a tiring Snell in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series, and picked up two unearned runs in the first inning off Yamamoto the next night. And the Brewers managed to eke out a run when Sasaki showed up for Game 1 of the NLCS having left his command in his other pants.

That’s it. The starter-Sasaki combination hasn’t allowed more than three runs in any game this postseason. That’s not enough of a margin to win consistently. Toronto’s 4-3 win in Game 7 of the ALCS marked the first time the Blue Jays won a playoff game while scoring fewer than five runs since Game 2 of the 1993 ALCS. Among current Blue Jays position players, only George Springer and Tyler Heineman were alive to witness that game.

So how can these guys break the Dodgers’ scoreboard lockdown?

It all starts with making the right decisions. The essence of pitching is disrupting timing, yes, but let’s not forget the importance of confusing the hitter when it comes to location, as well. It’s easy to forget that the strike zone only exists in the first place in order to compel the pitcher to throw the ball where the batter has a chance to hit it, and to compel hitters to swing at reasonably competitive pitches.

In the past 150 years, pitchers have gradually gotten better at blurring the line between what’s a strike and what isn’t, with the goal of getting the batter to swing at pitches outside the zone and take pitches within it.

The Dodgers’ best pitchers are quite good at this, and have upped their game another level in the postseason. I hope that doesn’t surprise anyone; L.A.’s top four starters are on contracts totaling $1.34 billion before deferrals and other accounting adjustments. It would be an appalling failure of process if they weren’t so good at producing strikes.

The first part of the pitcher deception game — getting hitters to chase — is pretty intuitive. A pitcher throws a breaking ball or an offspeed pitch that looks like a strike and dips out of the bat’s path, or a fastball that looks like it’ll be letter-high before it climbs out of the strike zone.

The best exemplar of this is Ohtani’s splitter. He’s thrown 18 of them; 16 were out of the zone, and the other two were just barely strikes. Bryson Stott lined one to center for a single, and Kyle Schwarber swung through the other. This is the most hittable splitter Ohtani has thrown in two postseason starts.

What about the other 16 splitters, all low and out of the zone? Eight takes and eight whiffs. Stott was the only hitter to even get a piece of the ball. Why are opposing batters swinging at a pitch Ohtani never throws in the zone? Because for the first 40 feet, it looks like a four-seamer, and opponents have a .349 wOBA against Ohtani’s fastball this postseason. Out of 24 distinct pitch types among the Dodgers’ five key pitchers, hitters are getting the second-best results against Ohtani’s fastball.

The inability to distinguish fastball from splitter is another data point to throw on the pile of hitters not being able to read arm angles. Ohtani’s average arm angle on his fastball is 32.8 degrees; on the splitter, it’s 36.5. On the curveball — a pitch opponents have not yet produced a hit off of this postseason — 43.3. It’s harder than it seems to pick these pitches up out of the hand.

Out of those 24 pitch types, the Dodgers starters and closer have an opponent chase rate of 20% or better on 20 different pitches. The whiff rate is 20% or better on every pitch except Sasaki’s sinker, a show-me offering that’s only popped up seven times between the regular season and playoffs combined. Nine pitches are producing whiffs on at least half of opponents’ swings.

The truly scary thing, to me, is what the Dodgers are doing with the other end of the equation: Getting hitters to take pitches in the zone. If you take away Sasaki and Ohtani’s sinkers and Yamamoto’s slider — the three pitches that are getting used less than 5% of the time — 20 out of the 21 remaining pitches are generating either a called strike or a whiff at least a quarter of the time. Seven of those pitches have a CSW rate of 40% or higher.

That’s because four of these pitches — Glasnow’s fastball, and the curveballs from Snell, Ohtani, and Yamamoto — are getting a 50% or better in-zone take rate. Five pitches if you round up Snell’s fastball, which opponents are taking 49.1% of the time in the zone.

I’ll give you an example here from Glasnow’s last inning of Game 4 of the NLDS. Glasnow’s four-seamer has gotten kicked around some this postseason; if you’re going to hit a pitch of his, that’s probably the one. On his last trip through the Phillies’ tough lefties, Glasnow was emptying the tank, going heavy fastball-curveball.

Glasnow works from a high arm slot, and therefore one of the highest release points you’ll find. That technique gives both his four-seamer and curveball fairly little horizontal movement, but the two pitches look similar enough that you pretty much have to pick one and guess while Glasnow’s still winding up. That’s how you get the NL home run leader to take a middle-middle heater that he should’ve hit, conservatively, about 500 feet.

Schwarber, having taken two four-seamers for strikes, could no longer sit back for something good to hit, down 0-2 with the season on the line. So when Glasnow hit the airbrake and threw him a curveball, Schwarber swung over the top of it.

I don’t mean to pick on Schwarber so much. Glasnow did the converse to Brandon Marsh later in the inning. He tripled up on curveballs in the dirt to start the at-bat, getting one take and two swinging strikes. Here’s the 1-1 pitch.

Marsh is neither an inside-corner hitter nor a fastball hitter, but any big leaguer with his power wants to pull a middle-in fastball into the seats. Too bad for him that Glasnow pulled the rug out from under him. Well, at least we know what the curveball looks like, right? Glasnow is ahead in the count, surely he’s not going to give me a middle-in fastball to hit.

Ah, crap.

All of the Dodgers starters, plus Sasaki, have at least one pair of pitches they can tunnel like this. And to be honest, I don’t have any new information about how Springer, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and the rest might get around the fundamental problem of not knowing what’s coming. If I did, I wouldn’t be publishing it here, I’d be selling it to the Blue Jays for $1 million.

So is there reason to expect the Blue Jays to perform better against these pitchers than the Reds, Phillies, and Brewers did?

I actually think so, and not just because the only way to go is up.

For starters, the Dodgers have had some pretty favorable batted ball luck. Ohtani, Yamamoto, Snell, Glasnow, and Sasaki have combined to allow 165 balls in play so far this postseason. They’ve done a terrific job of suppressing contact: Of those, 54 had an expected batting average under .100, and only one of the 54 resulted in a base hit.

That leaves 111 batted balls with an xBA of .100 or better. And up until you get to the really surefire hits, Dodgers opponents have been hitting for a lower average and less power than their exit velo and launch angle numbers would suggest.

Let’s put it another way. Snell, for instance, has been unbelievable this postseason, allowing only two earned runs and 11 baserunners over 21 innings, much of it against two of the better offenses in the NL. But that’s not his true talent level. If Snell were actually a 0.86 ERA/1.18 FIP kind of guy, he’d have eight Cy Young Awards instead of two. Even great pitchers have mediocre starts now and again.

What about the Blue Jays, specifically? Well, let’s look at how each Dodgers opponent has fared round-by-round.

There’s lots of noise in here; the Reds faced a lot of lower-leverage guys after falling down big. The Phillies did most of their damage while running up the score against Kershaw. But in general, the Brewers got completely steamrolled while the Philadelphia offense came within spitting distance of holding its own. That’s in line with the eye test; I’ve been to my share of Phillies playoff games where the offense looked lost or disinterested. This time around they were taking decent at-bats, but the Dodgers were just better.

That’s backwards from how a lot of people think it would work. The Phillies are a bunch of knuckle-dragging hackers, while the Brewers had the highest contact rate in the NL this year and the lowest chase rate in all of baseball. But there’s a danger to being too passive, or worse, not being able to hit the ball hard enough when you do make contact.

Which end of the spectrum are the Blue Jays on?

In the middle, but far closer to the Phillies than the Brewers. That also feels intuitively right. I’ve comped Bo Bichette (who’s expected back for the World Series) to Trea Turner as a hitter this season, and Vladito to Bryce Harper since time immemorial.

The Blue Jays don’t have as much power as the Phillies, but with Guerrero, Springer, and Addison Barger, they’ve got plenty. Crucially, they can hit the ball hard without giving away outs. If the Dodgers’ top pitchers are elite at passing balls for strikes and vice-versa, the Blue Jays might be the best team in baseball at pulling on the other end of that rope.

Toronto had the lowest team strikeout rate in the league this year, along with the only single-digit K-BB% in baseball. Ernie Clement, Alejandro Kirk, and Bichette were all in the top 30 in the league in contact rate, while Springer and Guerrero were in the bottom 20 in chase rate. Among the top nine Blue Jays hitters in plate appearances this regular season, only Barger had a higher-than-average strikeout rate: 24.1%, against a league average of 22.4%. Guerrero, Springer, Kirk, and Nathan Lukes combined a better-than-average strikeout rate with a better-than-average walk rate, as well.

Heading into the World Series, ZiPS has the Dodgers as roughly a 60-40 favorite over the Blue Jays, even with Toronto holding home-field advantage. That’s probably appropriate; as much as I think there’s a lane for the Jays to draw blood against the Dodgers rotation, this Ohtani character hits too, and the Blue Jays have bullpen questions of their own.

But the Blue Jays lineup, newly reinforced with Bichette, is going to make the Dodgers’ best pitchers work harder than they’ve had to in previous rounds. The Dodgers thrive when opponents get themselves out, and the Blue Jays are built not to do that.