Kershaw Dominates in World Series Opener While Dodgers Lineup Gets Its Kicks
On the opening night of the 2020 World Series, a puzzled nation watched a flagging starter get lit up as he passed the 100-pitch mark and asked, “Why are they leaving that guy in there? He’s cooked!” To the relief of Dodgers fans, the subject in question wasn’t Clayton Kershaw. The three-time Cy Young winner with the rocky postseason record pitched at the top of his game on Tuesday night, dominating the Rays while the Dodgers lineup waited out opposite number Tyler Glasnow and erupted for eight runs in the middle innings. The Dodgers cruised to an 8-3 victory.
Kershaw’s three previous starts of this postseason had offered a classic case of diminishing returns. After spinning eight innings of three-hit shutout ball while striking out a career postseason-high 13 Brewers in Game 2 of the Wild Card Series, he allowed three runs in six innings in Game 2 of the Division Series against the Padres, the last two via back-to-back solo homers by Manny Machado and Eric Hosmer as they faced Kershaw for the third time. In his NLCS Game 4 start against the Braves, which had been pushed back two days due to back spasms, Kershaw allowed just one run and four hits over the first five innings and 61 pitches, but when the lineup turned over, the dangerous Ronald Acuña Jr., Freddie Freeman, and Marcell Ozuna all reached base — the last two via balls hit at 105 mph or higher — opening the floodgates to a seven-run inning in what became a 10-2 rout.
From the Dodgers’ side, this outing was hardly as fraught. While Kershaw allowed two of the first three Rays he faced to reach base via a Yandy Díaz single and a Randy Arozarena walk, he struck out Hunter Renfroe on a curveball in the dirt — his only swing and miss from among his 20 first-inning pitches — and made a good defensive play on a Manuel Margot dribbler to escape. That began a run of 13 straight Rays retired; he didn’t need more than 14 pitches in any of his other five innings, and three times needed 11 or fewer. His 92.5 mph first-inning fastball velocity boded well; it was just 0.1 off his season high, set in that Wild Card Series start, and matched his Division Series start. By comparison, he was at a season-low 90.7 mph in the first inning of his NLCS start.
Kershaw got just one swing and miss from among the first 10 sliders he threw, that for strike three against Willy Adames to start the second. He proceeded to establish the slider in the third inning, getting five swings and misses on the pitch while using it to strike out both Mike Zunino and Brandon Lowe, then whiffing Arozarena and Margot with the pitch in the fourth, and Adames again in the fifth. That last strikeout was the 200th of Kershaw’s postseason career, moving him past John Smoltz (who sent his congratulations from the Fox booth) into second place behind Justin Verlander, with 205. No sooner had that happened when Kevin Kiermaier ended Kershaw’s streak of 13 straight batters retired with a 382-foot solo homer to right field. By that point, however, the Dodgers had the lead thanks to a two-run fourth-inning homer by Cody Bellinger, his fourth of the postseason. More on that momentarily.
Through the first three innings, Glasnow had matched zeroes with Kershaw, working around a one-out walk of Corey Seager in the first inning, a two-out single by Chris Taylor in the second, and a two-out walk of Seager in the third. His fastball popped as high as 100.8 mph, and he’d rung up five strikeouts, three via his curve and two via heat that left Mookie Betts shaking his head:
there should be a special award for making Mookie Betts shake his head and look back at the plate in disbelief pic.twitter.com/oq1FwUD0xW
— Hannah Keyser (@HannahRKeyser) October 21, 2020
You Aren't a FanGraphs MemberIt looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member. 1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other. 2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off. 3. Dark mode and Classic mode! 4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them. 5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects. 6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.) 7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only. 8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO. 9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members. 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features! We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. In case you didn't read all that, here's the short version. Membership includes:✓Ad-free browsing✓Unlimited FanGraphs & RotoGraphs articles✓Historical & platoon projections✓Leaderboard & player-page stat heatmaps✓One-click data exports✓Customizable player-page dashboards✓Dark & Classic site modes✓Weekly Members-only mailbag✓FanGraphs Walk-Off, your year in review✓Optional homepage photo removal✓Gift articles to non-Members✓Full postseason coverage
But oh, those bases on balls. Glasnow walked Max Muncy to lead off the fourth, the slugger’s 16th walk in 13 games. One out later, Bellinger pounced on a 98.2 mph first-pitch fastball — that after I noted his postseason struggles with high velocity on Monday — and launching a towering blast, 107.8 mph off the bat but just 378 feet thanks to its steep 36-degree launch angle. A nice souvenir for the Dodgers’ bullpen:
The 25-year-old slugger, who had managed to dislocate his right shoulder while celebrating his NLCS Game 7-winning solo homer, came up with a new way to get his kicks:
The Dodgers continued to threaten, as Taylor walked, then took second on a wild pitch, and had third base stolen thanks to a great jump, only to have Joc Pederson foul off the pitch. Glasnow recovered to strike out both Pederson and Austin Barnes, but by the time the inning ended, he’d thrown 86 pitches. Even with the Dodgers’ lead trimmed to one run by the time he took the mound in the fifth, his troubles were just beginning. He walked Betts on five pitches, and Betts proceeded to put on a baserunning show. He stole second, and after Seager walked for the third time, led a double steal; that made the Dodgers the first team to steal three bases in a single World Series inning since 1912, when the Giants did so against the Red Sox in Game 6 (one of those was also a double steal). Betts then scored on a Muncy chopper to first base, eluding Zunino’s tag:
By this point, Glasnow had thrown 106 pitches, 40 more than Charlie Morton threw in his scoreless ALCS Game 7 start before manager Kevin Cash gave him the hook in a move that raised plenty of eyebrows at the time. The question of why Glasnow, whose six walks represented the most in a World Series game since the Cardinals’ Edwin Jackson walked seven Rangers in Game 4 in 2011, was allowed to continue lingered when Will Smith dunked a single into center field, scoring Seager and widening the lead to 4-1.
The answer might have had something to do with the three-batter rule and the way that the Dodgers had ordered their lineup: R-L-R-L-R-L-R-L-R, making it difficult for any pitcher to maintain a platoon advantage for long. Cash’s choice of lefty Ryan Yarbrough, whose 2020 and career platoon splits are basically even, made sense in that light, but the move — after Glasnow had reached 112 pitches, not only a career high but also the highest total by a Ray since 2018 — didn’t stop the bleeding. After getting the lefty-swinging Bellinger to pop up, Yarbrough gave up an RBI single to the righty-swinging Taylor, then another to righty Enrique Hernández, pinch-hitting for Pederson. All six runs were charged to Glasnow’s room; while he struck out eight and allowed just three hits, his overall pitching line was as ugly as the 6-foot-8 righty is handsome.
Such is the nature of Kershaw’s postseason track record that even a rally to support him leaves cause to fret. As the Dodgers sent nine men to the plate in the fifth, he’d sat for around 35 minutes. Would he be rusty? Should he be pulled? Shouldn’t somebody at least be warming up behind him given his recent third-time-through-the-order troubles? Before anybody could dial the bullpen, Kershaw mowed the Rays down on nine pitches, highlighted by Justin Tuner throwing out Díaz out at first from his knees.
The Dodgers’ offense wouldn’t quit. Betts pummeled reliever Josh Fleming’s first-pitch sinker for a solo homer to right-center, and two batters later, Turner nearly homered as well, settling for a double off the top of the center field wall. Muncy followed with an RBI double to deep right center, by which point Dodgers manger Dave Roberts decided that Kershaw’s night was done at 78 pitches.
The Rays didn’t go down without a fight, mind you. Righty reliever Dylan Floro allowed a one-out single to Margot, and then a double to Joey Wendle, and then lefty Victor González gave up back-to-back RBI singles to Mike Brosseau and Kiermaier, trimming the lead to 8-3. Zunino, with four homers from among his eight postseason hits, represented a legitimate threat to get the Rays back into the game, but instead he hit a 105.6 mph rocket right back to González, who doubled Brosseau off second base for an inning-ending double play. From there it was all over but the shouting, give or take the Dodgers loading the bases in the eighth inning to no avail and Bellinger adding to his highlight reel with yet another home run robbery, this time against Austin Meadows:
Even with the catch and the homer, Bellinger had to settle for second banana next to Kershaw, who struck out eight while allowing just the two hits and one run. He netted 19 swings and misses, tied for his third-highest total of the season (he had 24 against the Brewers in the Wild Card Series). Eleven of his swings and misses came from among his 35 sliders, five from among his 31 four-seamers, and three from among his 12 curve. His final four-seam average velocity of 91.4 mph tied for eighth among his 14 starts this season.
This was the 10th time in 29 postseason starts that Kershaw allowed either zero or one run, and the second of this fall. In terms of Game Score — and here I’m using the Bill James original, via B-Ref’s Stathead — it was his eighth-best postseason start:
| Rk | Year | Series | Opp | IP | H | R | ER | BB | SO | HR | GSc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2020 | NLWC g2 | Brewers | 8 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 13 | 0 | 88 |
| 2 | 2018 | NLDS g2 | Braves | 8 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 81 |
| 3T | 2016 | NLCS g2 | Cubs | 7 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 0 | 78 |
| 2017 | WS g1 | Astros | 7 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 11 | 1 | 78 | |
| 5 | 2013 | NLDS g1 | Braves | 7 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 0 | 76 |
| 6T | 2015 | NLDS g4 | Mets | 7 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 8 | 1 | 74 |
| 2018 | NLCS g5 | Brewers | 7 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 9 | 0 | 74 | |
| 8 | 2020 | WS g1 | Rays | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 8 | 1 | 71 |
| 9 | 2013 | NLCS g2 | Cardinals | 6 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 0 | 70 |
| 10 | 2013 | NLDS g4 | Braves | 6 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 0 | 67 |
Note that Kershaw’s high score as far as this particular metric is concerned is also from this fall. Though his overall playoff record (12-12, 4.22 ERA) still won’t impress many, in 25 innings this postseason, he has a 2.52 ERA, 2.63 FIP, and 31-to-3 strikeout-to-walk ratio, which looks pretty Kershaw-like. He and the Dodgers have been in this exact position before — note his 2017 World Series-opening start above — but now they can throw memories of what transpired after that in the trash can and write a new ending.
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 BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.
Love these write-ups! Also, way to work that banging scheme zinger in the final line. Bravo.
You could really see in this game why I thought this was a good matchup for the Dodgers (and preferred to see the Rays beat the Astros). The Rays lineup is good, but it’s not the same threat as the Braves team they just played. On the other side, the Rays pitching staff is filled with filthy, swing and miss stuff. But that filthy stuff is often outside the strike zone, and the Dodgers are good at laying off it. Even the first trips through the order, you could see the quality of each AB improving and guys chasing less and less at even close pitches. I expected the Dodgers to have success the 3rd time, though they had more than I expected.
The Rays have so many pitchers with a similar profile: Snell’s much the same from the left side, and so many of the filthy relievers are the same way. The Dodgers are so good against that kind of approach. Very few Rays pitchers succeed the way Kershaw did today: with swing and miss inside the strike zone. That’s really what you need to beat the Dodger hitters consistently, over multiple looks.
The run scoring felt inevitable the whole way, even when Glasnow had some good innings – they just took so many pitches, you knew he wasn’t getting much past 5 innings (though he still threw 15-20 more pitches than I expected him to be allowed to throw, that remained true). The Rays are in a real tough spot in these early games where they are not going to want to expend their best relievers if they’re behind, and the Dodgers against both Glasnow and Snell have a pretty good opportunity to run up the pitch count early, possibly get a run or two, and put the Rays in a position of having to decide whether they want to give the Dodgers looks at their best guys in losing situations.
Sticking with Glasnow seems crazy but I like it. It was not the high percentage play. But I think the thing about this series for the Rays is that they’re a considerable underdog. If both teams make the highest percentage play all the time, and those plays work out, the Rays are going to lose. They need to take some calculated risks they think will help them down the line, and hoping Glasnow could find a couple Ks to get out of that spot was a reasonable risk to take – he’s one of your best pitchers. It didn’t work out.
If you’re not willing to take a calculated risk like that, you’re hoping for the opponent to botch it for you and make some bad plays. I understand why you might want to hope for that against Dave Roberts, but its a slim hope to pin your series on, as sometimes the games can play out in a way (as they did tonight) where those decisions aren’t important or don’t influence the game enough to matter.
If the Rays’ internal evaluation of their own circumstances looks more like the series odds offered by the FG playoff odds or the BP Pecota odds (ie in the 68-72% win range for the Dodgers before game 1), rather than the nearly 50-50 series the ZIPS game-by-game projections see, then the decision to take some high-upside, low-percentage plays makes sense. The Rays had a 20% win probability after Seager walked – that’s a reasonable time to roll the dice. It didn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean it was wrong to take the shot. It probably lead to more series-winning scenarios than some of the others.
I’m surprised that your series previewing comment was the only place I’d seen this point made. It significantly undermines the advantage the Rays pitching was supposed to provide, according to some, and reinforces the bullish odds the Dodgers enjoy.
What is your prediction for the outcome of this series? I thought Dodgers in 5 or 6 were most likely, leaning towards 5.
I would have said Dodgers in 6 is just the most likely outcome up front, with a win in the bank now I would have to guess that that remains true but 5 is probably pretty close. If they win tonight, I think the sweep starts to be a real possibility, because the Dodgers will have Buehler vs Morton and then Urias vs Yarbrough, and I’d like them in both those games. This Gonsolin/May game that is coming is gonna be the toughest one for the Dodgers, but that will be buttressed a bit by Snell being a pretty good matchup for them – they were really good vs left handed starters this year, and it will put a bunch of their right-handers plate discipline on even more display than it was last night (like Betts and Turner and Taylor). Muncy maintains his excellent eye vs lefties. Bellinger and Seager aren’t quite the same, but the rest of the lineup will be all right-handed vs Snell, and of the righties I think only Pollock chases, and usually more against righties than lefties.
Morton’s the pitcher on the Rays side who should be the hardest for the Dodgers, but Walker F Buehler in a postseason game is a bet I’d pretty much always take, and it’s pretty nice for the Dodgers they are lined up against each other. The Dodgers also prefer to give Buehler extra days of rest whenever possible in the regular season, and the timing of Game 6 and the series off day means he’ll be on one extra day’s rest for Game 3.
I haven’t yet dug enough into the Rays to see how they seem to match up with Gonsolin’s stuff. He’s been really effective as a MLB starter but probably unsustainably, with extremely low HR rates that I don’t think any pitcher could sustain. In Globe Life, though, where a few extra homers don’t make it out, he’s in a good spot.
I’ve seen the Dodgers like this before, and while it’s true that momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher and all that, the reality is that baseball teams wax and wane in focus and performance around a mean of their true talent. I’ve seen this team when it is on the wax and they are out going 42-8 over 50 games or the like, and they’ve looked like that since Game 5 of the Atlanta series. It’s going to be hard to knock that offense off it’s game, and the Rays hopes for a competitive series probably lie in figuring out how to score. Their team seems to be built to win a lot of 3-2 games, and I don’t think that strategy’s gonna work against the Dodger offense.
I know the Dodgers tied (well, +1 runs) with the Braves for total runs scored, but the Braves had a 30 run game. The Dodgers didn’t; they just legit scored 5.8 runs per game for 60 games. When those players are in a good spot – and for some of them, like Bellinger and Muncy, they’re probably performing the best they have all year – I don’t think you’re gonna keep them down.
It’s well summarized in a fun fact: the Dodgers have not been shut out this year. Not in the regular season, and not in the playoffs. In every game they have scored, and they’ve been held to 1 run only twice. If the Rays don’t figure something out offensively, this series is going to be like life: nasty, brutal and short.
Great commentary and a Hobbes reference too! Awesome.
brutish but point taken otherwise
I thought about that but only once it was too late to edit the post, ahh well.
I feel like this aged reasonably well, as the Rays got a fantastic outing from Snell, used all 3 of their best relievers, and the Dodgers scored 4 runs anyway. Fortunately for them, every reliever the Dodgers used except the guys I thought were here exclusively to pitch in the lowest leverage games allowed a run, and they were able to score more than 4.
Alex Wood and his like 2.13 career World Series ERA are mortally insulted that I thought he was just here to pitch in 15-3 and 10-2 baseball games, I guess.
What. this… can’t be right. seriously?
You can check out the team page on baseball reference. Times shut out: 0 Times opponent shut out: 5.
They played relatively few 7 inning games as the covid outbreaks for the west divisions were pretty minimal; in fact, the only 7 inning games they played were due to the protest cancellations.
But yeah, the Dodgers score.
I respectfully disagree with some of the points you made–despite that you got so many upvotes!
I don’t think it’s likely that sticking with Glasnow is “crazy” or “not the high percentage play.” The Rays seem to consistently make optimal decisions for winning each series, and I don’t know why that would be different against the Dodgers.
You say that the Rays are a “considerable underdog,” and if “both teams make the highest percentage plays, the Rays are going to lose.” I think the Dodgers have something like a 55% chance to win this series, and if both teams make the highest percentage plays the Dodgers will win 55% of the time. It’s only if the Rays start taking risks and make suboptimal decisions, that the Dodgers will have greater than 55% chance to win.
The Rays are successful exactly because they make counterintuitive decisions that actually maximize their chances of winning.
Virtually every projection system disagrees with you, the Dodgers opened between 67% and 72% in the FG playoff odds, BP’s PECOTA, and a whole host of other projection systems prior to Game 1 being played.
Only the zips-single game projections showed a closer series, and IMO that approach has some problems, because it doesn’t model pitcher availability (IE it assumes that Anderson, Fairbanks and Castillo can pitch in literally all 7 games, which isn’t reality, it’s simulating 7 independent games w/o consideration for their interplay on each other).
And certainly even if the Dodgers were a close favorite and not a big one, when you have a 10-20% win probability in game 2, your series win odds have already dropped. In a coinflip scenario, the team that wins game 1 will win the series 65% of the time, so if the Dodgers were any kind of favorite, their odds to win the series at that point were already approaching 70%. At that point, making some underdog plays makes sense.
One thing the Rays have shown is a willingness to punt games they’re losing instead of investing resources because the odds of return on the games is low. This is the World Series, though, so instead of just punting, it makes sense to instead make some high-risk, high-reward low percentage plays in that situation, because the cost of failure is low (you’re already losing the game a vast majority of the time) and the payoff is high (getting the game back to even or even a probable victory).
With that said the point of discussion and upvotes isn’t to be correct 100% of the time, but to offer worthwhile things that people may not have considered. People who upvoted my comments may not have agreed with all of it, but likely I pointed out some things they had not previously considered that weighed in their opinion of the series in a way they found useful. That doesn’t make everything correct; it’s my opinion, and I’m human.
However, I think it’s worth considering the Rays actions through the lens of the information we have. One of those pieces of info is that most player projection systems considered them a substantial underdog. One did not. The Rays have their own internal projection systems. There is, therefore, a good chance that the Rays internal projections also show them as an underdog (because it appears most methods of projecting this series show that), and that would explain their behavior.
That doesn’t mean that is the case – but there’s a reasonable reason to consider that possibility, and their actions make a lot of sense within that framework.
Glasnow went from looking completely unhittable in the first three innings–painting the corners with that wicked, nasty stuff–to being completely out of whack in the fourth inning. You could see it immediately. And I thought “oh, Cash has a pretty quick hook, especially with Glasnow. He’s all out of whack; it’s time to go to the bullpen.” And then he didn’t. And I waited. And waited. And then it was too late.
I’m not sure that would have changed the end result because who knows, maybe Yarbrough would have been hammered just as hard if he had come in at a different time. But it was an utterly baffling decision from Cash, because not only was it bad strategy but it ran counter to everything we had seen him do up to this point. Someone in the chat said “are we sure that Cash and Roberts didn’t switch bodies?” and I had to wonder if that was true.
That said, it was an awesome performance from Kershaw, just masterful. Loved watching it (especially the first few innings when Glasnow was on fire too).
I dunno, it felt like the Dodgers were having successful ABs against Glasnow most of the game. The bottom of the lineup the 1st time thru the order looked pretty bad, but everyone else was working deep counts and laying off of pitches that are supposed to get swung at. I thought they’d crack through for something on the second trip (and they did), and I expected more on the 3rd, though they exceeded my expectations. The Dodgers were managing to lay off the pitches that were Glasnow’s hope of a deep and effective offering – the early count pitches intended to induce a whiff or get a ball in play for an out. Glasnow’s got some pretty extreme splits on ahead vs behind in the count, and a lot of that comes from guys having to offer at things they shouldn’t when they have 2 strikes. A lot of Dodgers manage to not offer at that stuff anyway. When I saw all those guys running back to 3-2 from 0-2 holes, even without getting anything on the board, I knew they were going to get him eventually.
In the first the Dodgers did okay mostly because they’re really good; those were really good matchups because it was guys at the top of their game on both the mound and at the plate. But Glasnow was ridiculous in the early part. The stuff is so nasty, and he was hitting the corners of the zone so well. And in the second and third inning Glasnow was utterly dominant–absolutely no one could have hit those, not even Bryce Harper in 2015.
And then in the fourth inning he absolutely fell apart. He just completely stopped hitting the strike zone, and a lot of those pitches I seriously wondered how Zunino was catching them. Take a look at the pitch locations for Muncy, Smith, and Taylor in the 4th–they were all awful. Somehow he got lucky by striking out Pederson, and I guess he looked okay versus Barnes, but Barnes was the only PA where he really put it in good spots. The 4th and 5th were awful and the Dodgers are really good hitters; you don’t necessarily have to be like Glasnow in the 2nd and 3rd but you do have to at least need some idea where the ball is going.
To my eye the difference was that in the 2nd inning the lower part of the Dodger order, who as I mentioned had the worst PAs really that first time, swung and missed a bunch at pitches outside the zone, which the Dodgers otherwise really did not do in this game.
The thing that differentiated the 2nd and 3rd was both that the Dodgers swung and missed (both in and out of the strike zone), and that because of that Glasnow was ahead in the count. In the 1st, 4th and 5th, they did much better laying off and taking those pitches, putting Glasnow behind and making him use the fastball.
Glasnow’s got pretty pedestrian numbers in his fastball, really. It’s an effective pitch, but it’s also the one that he gives up damage on when he’s forced to use it to get back into counts and people are looking for it. The curveball is the core of his effectiveness, generating insane swing and miss rates (usually on balls that don’t end up in the strike zone) and generating almost uniformly bad contact when guys do hit it. Glasnow has huge ahead/behind in the count splits, even moreso than is typical, because with only 2 pitches in his mix, being behind makes his fastball a lot more predictable, and guys can get to it for damage.
Glasnow’s location was better in the 2nd and 3rd, and that’s part of why guys swung, but also they just made their worst swings of the game in the 2nd inning (he had 4 whiffs in the 2nd, which was nearly half his total for the entire game: 0 4 2 2 2 by inning).
Contrast that with Kershaw, who had a spotty 1st inning because his best pitch was being spiked 5 feet from home plate, but thereafter was exactly himself, effective and efficient and getting swings and misses inside the strike zone. Glasnow, for all the easy outs Joc Pederson and pals handed him there for a little bit, always had less margin for error and a leash on his outing length that you could feel right from the getgo when the Dodgers worked so many pitches out of him successfully.
The Dodgers chase on absurdly low percentages of pitches outside the zone; once they were picking his ball up again, he didn’t have a chance. He made a lot of pitches that were balls close to the zone that would have gotten him outs against almost any other team, but the Dodgers kept taking them. It was only a matter of time.
When the Dodgers are getting wrecked, they look like they did against Bryse Wilson in the NLCS: they start getting aggressive, go after a lot of early pitches, and make a bunch of efficient outs early in the count or get themselves behind 0-1. Corey Seager’s always like that, but the rest of the team isn’t, and that kind of discipline is a horrific matchup for high K pitchers who also walk 3-4 guys per 9 innings.
Imo the quietly decisive thing in this game was illustrated the way it often is in a Dodger win that never feel super close: They drew 6 walks and issued 1.
Another angle to look at: Glasnow got 10 whiffs in his outing. 4 were by Joc Pederson; 3 were by Will Smith. Justin Turner had two, and Betts had 1. The Betts whiff and 2 of the Turner whiffs were on balls inside the strike zone.
Other than Turner whiffing once on a high fastball, only Pederson and Smith chased outside the strike zone against Glasnow .. even once. That is remarkable, and a guy built around the pitch Glasnow is – that diving curveball that is mostly used to dive below the zone for swinging strikes – is not going to succeed if guys don’t swing at balls outside the strike zone. The Dodgers mostly didn’t, and therefore the Dodgers were successful.
Here’s the Glasnow whiffs if you want to see what I mean. He was only really fooling 2 hitters out of 9, and that’s not gonna get it done.
https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/gamefeed?game_pk=635925&game_date=2020-10-20&type=away_pitchers&chart_view=pitch&chart_type=description&inning=&count=&batter_hand=&pitcher_hand=&filter=Swinging%20Strike&player=home-pitchers_477132&view=Umpire&coloring=Pitch%20Type
Honestly, I think you need to take off your Dodgers hat for a minute and just take a look at where the pitches were located. The reason he’s so good is because the look is so weird–as Ben explained last year, he throws hard, with a ton of extension, and a very low release point, which means much of the time all he has to do is hit the strike zone to beat hitters. But last night for 2 innings (and mostly in the first two) he was painting the corners, something which he almost never is able to do. That’s how he shredded both Betts and Turner–two of the most disciplined hitters in the league–in the 3rd (and Smith and Bellinger aren’t too shabby either).
It really is okay that someone on the opposing team did well, and it was only for three innings. Really, it’s okay.
FWIW, I never said Glasnow didn’t pitch well. Glasnow pitched well! But you can look and see that Glasnow threw many, many other pitches in the same spots as those swinging strikes, and they were balls, because guys did not swing at them.
Tyler Glasnow’s a pretty darn effective pitcher (though not as much this year as last), and does so in a pretty unique way. The upside of that is that a lot of players will be ill-prepared for it. I watched a 2-pitch arsenal guy on the Dodgers myself for many years (Rich Hill). Hill and Glasnow have a lot of similarities, even though their velocities, handedness, and the like vary quite a bit. Both run the high four seamer and the insane curveball that plays off of it for swinging strikes and weak contact.
And Hill, for all his effectiveness, was often beaten the same way when he was beaten – by guys laying off and getting ahead in the count, and then doing damage to the fastball when he had to use it to get back into the count. Glasnow has certain advantages (Velocity and the like as you mention), but he also has a disadvantage: Hill usually used his curve as a drop-in pitch, like Kershaw’s curveball, which meant he could throw it for a called strike a lot, and guys who laid off it and didn’t whiff would often end up taking a called strike anyway. For Glasnow, if guys lay off those pitches they’re often balls (the upside is that they’re much harder to damage, which is why Glasnow allows next to nothing good on contact with the curveball).
I think Glasnow pitched very well, and his command/clustering in the 2nd/3rd are indeed somewhat tighter than the other innings. But what he did in the other innings is pretty consistent with his normal spray pattern; he just usually gets a lot more swings at those same pitches than he did last night, and it’s no surprise that the guys who did swing at those made outs in those plate appearances.
Glasnow executed his normal plan of attack pretty well, IMO. It is, unfortunately, a very difficult plan to have success with against the Dodgers.
Here’s the same filter of Glasnow’s spray chart with the balls added in along with the swinging strikes. Look how many balls are clustered in the same locations where he was getting his swinging strikes out of the zone. He threw those pitches a lot of times, and got bites a lot less frequently than he usually does
https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/gamefeed?game_pk=635925&game_date=2020-10-20&type=away_pitchers&chart_view=pitch&chart_type=description&inning=&count=&batter_hand=&pitcher_hand=&filter=Ball,Swinging%20Strike&player=home-pitchers_477132&view=Umpire&coloring=Pitch%20Type
this should also highlight how extreme it is that the Dodgers did not swing and miss on anything that was not quite to the edge; the few swinging strikes in the zone were on very borderline pitches. Most of the strike zone is empty; they at least fouled off every one of those swings. That’s not a good time for a curveball pitcher, in my experience.
The Dodgers swung at 13 of Glasnow’s curveballs and missed 3 times. Over the last two years, Glasnow’s whiff rates on curveballs were 52.8% and 43.9%.
(and those 13 were less than 1/3 of the 42 curves he threw them)
It was amazing to see the Dodgers actually look like the Dodgers in the playoffs instead of, as usual, some collection of bums randomly picked up by the side of the road.
It was amazing to see Clayton Kershaw actually look like a real pitching ace instead of the godawful choking 5+ ERA loser he almost always is in the playoffs.
It was worth watching the game just to be able to shut other Dodger fans up about the Mookie Betts trade. His performance last night was amazing. He may not be Mike Trout, but he sure looks like the next best thing.
I’m sure that now the Dodgers have teased us by showing us what they’re capable of when they try they will now proceed to give up, choke, and lose the World Series to a lesser team yet again. On the other hand, perhaps they are finally playing an opponent this season who isn’t totally corrupt and isn’t a part of a an actively cheating organization, so maybe they have a chance.
But was quite nice to watch them be the real Dodgers for one night, even if Joe Kelly is always a truly terrible choice as a reliever.
Not a single Dodger world championship since 1988 (and I was there for that one) remains a damning indictment of the team as slacking playoff chokers. I kept hoping that I would live to see the Dodgers win another one, but they choked and choked and choked and choked and choked. I gave up on that hope two years ago, so perhaps finally they will actually man up and do it.
“This was the fourth time in 29 postseason starts that Kershaw did not allow a run, and the second of this fall.”
I do believe he gave up a run.
Nice line with the trash can. What are Kershaw’s lowest game scores, and how many came against the cheating Red Sox and Astros?
Jon Weisman maintains a chart of all Kershaw’s playoff apperances, categorized by quality, and updates it after every start. Here’s the most recent tweet:
https://twitter.com/jonweisman/status/1318764608987951104
So you can see that 2 of his worst starts were in those WS appearances (along with one of his best and one of his best relief outings). You can also see the games where he was pushed too far and a great start was turned to ash, and the ones that just weren’t great.
His ERA and FIP are now 2.88 and 3.15 unless I’m missing something. What really impresses me is the 30.1% K-BB and 0.84 WHIP, which is 0.52 without the five infield singles he’s given up by my count. I really wish Roberts let him go one more inning.
I think the plan was for him to go one more until they pushed the lead. Floro and Wood are on the roster to pitch in lopsided games, so once you’re at the point you would use them there’s no reason to ask Kershaw to continue.
And even those numbers are misleading because of that game against the Brewers, a team that normally would have been nowhere near the playoffs. Against the Padres, Braves, and Rays, his ERA is 4.24 and his FIP is about 4.50 (not sure what the constant is this year).
https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/jfg8nf/oc_breaking_down_kershaws_sliders_in_his_4_2020/
Kershaw’s slider was the differencemaker last night compared to his bad start vs. Atlanta.
In his 2 good starts, vs. MIL and vs. TB, he released it 1.44 ft and 1.42 ft on avg from the center, and generated -0.35 ft and -0.51 ft of horizontal break on it, generating 63% and 52% of swing & misses and getting a total of 21K out of 14 innings.
In his worst start vs. ATL, the difference is stark. He’s released the slider closer to his body horizontally, at 1.29 ft (so the difference is about 0.15 ft or 1.8 inches) – and the result was that his horizontal break was at -0.09 a whole 0.26-0.42 ft difference, while there was MUCH less “drop” compared to the usual sliders – at 1.02 ft V-mov, it dropped 0.36 ft less than the season avg.
To me that failure to extend screams that his balky back was affecting him, even if somewhat unconsciously.
I agree, and fatigue definitely was an issue last night as well as his FB velo dropped by a full mile by the time he hit the 5th inning too
In my experience from watching him over the years, Kershaw often tires faster in playoff starts. In fact, many pitchers do – Buehler was clearly gassed at 90 pitches in his outing against the Braves. Guys use adrenaline to find another level, and the result of that is that they tire more quickly.
I don’t see it anymore, but for many years earlier in the decade there was a pattern where Kershaw would have a little bit of a rough first in a playoff outing because he’d come out hot, 1-2 mph higher than average, and sometimes that would give him some command issues. He’d then settle in, be good for a number of innings, and have his velocity dip at the end before you’d expect it to because he’d exerted more energy than usual in that extra-high velocity first inning.
The best example of this trend I can think of off the top of my head is Game 1, 2017 NLDS vs Arizona. If you pull that game up in BaseballSavant, you will see Kershaw sitting 1-2mph high in the 1st, walking a couple dudes and throwing 25 pitches, then dominating for 5 innings. He was then sent out for the 7th, came out with his velocity low, and gave up back to back solo dingers to Ketel Marte (before Marte hit for any power) and Jef Mathis (no seriously).
No one remembers this, because the Dodgers were leading 7-2 at the time and won the game 9-5. But it’s really a microcosm of that effect.
In recent years he hasn’t come out hot that same way in terms of velocity, but pitchers tiring faster in October is common, and that’s why watching velocity to know when to remove guys is important – and why he should have been out after 5 vs the Braves (and somehow, Roberts made that mistake, but made the opposite decision with Buehler, when it was also the correct action, in game 6)
Kershaw pitched extremely well last night. But I’m not sure I would call it an “ace” performance. Ace performance is Bob Gibson striking out 17 Tigers in a complete game shutout. Ace performance is Sandy Koufax pitching two shutouts in thee days. Ace performance is Christy Mathewson pitching three shutouts in five days. Ace performance is Jack Morris pitching a 10 inning shutout in game 7. Ace performance is Madison Bumgarner coming in relief in game 7 and pitching five innings to close out a one run game. Kershaw pitched just six innings and only threw 78 pitches.
Different era, different “aces”.
Madison Bumgarner pitched in a different era? I have a hard time believing than an “ace” today cannot pitch beyond the 6th inning and only 78 pitches. This is the World Series were baseball legends are made. Kershaw pitched a fine game. But it will be forgotten by next year.
Different era as in different philosophies around pitcher usage. As for Kershaw’s game 1 performance, can and should pitch past 6 ip & 78 are different questions – esp with a 99.3% win expectancy and having recently missed a start w back spasms.
It was absolutely an “ace” performance, he just voluntarily stopped at 6 innings. He had plenty of pitches left by any modern standard if they needed him to. I don’t see why a manager’s decision to pull him for strategic reasons should take anything away from Kershaw. This is, of course, unless your standard for “ace” is “all-time historic” like the examples you gave.
Geez why do people love criticizing the guy so much?
I guess it’s because when you’re on top, there’s nowhere to go but down. The “Kershaw can’t pitch in the playoffs” is the most unfair sports narrative I can think of. His playoff SIERA (3.00) is actually better than in the regular season (3.09) and also better than Madison Bumgarner’s in the playoffs (3.16). And don’t even get me started on Jack Morris …
People also bring a lot of mentality from other sports where what happens in the playoffs is the near-exclusive lens through which a player’s evaluated, and where playoff success is necessary to be viewed as an all-time great. There’s a lot of similarities between the narrative around Kershaw and the Dodgers as a whole team and the narrative around Peyton Manning for most of his career, for instance.
There’s a lot of sports fans who view a player who is historically great in the regular season and does not succeed in the playoffs as a fraud, an impostor who is exposed by real competition and does not deserve his accolades, whereas Real Legends always get it done in clutch time like Tom Brady and Derek Jeter
This defies certain understanding of how team sports operate, but it’s something a lot of people engage in. Winners win and losers lose, and if you’re a loser you can’t be great, and if you’re great when it doesn’t matter and lose when it does, you’re a fraud.
This is kind of the same mentality by which people convince themselves that if someone’s rich they must be successful, regardless of the mechanism by which they became rich. They view the guy who built his own company from scratch and the guy who inherited his wealth through the same prism of rich = success, even though those two people are almost certainly not equally successful in any realistic sense.