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Kenley Jansen certainly hasn’t been ignored around here. Back in June, for instance, Travis looked at how Jansen’s reliance on a single pitch compares to Mariano Rivera’s. And yet, I still feel like we don’t really appreciate just how great Jansen really is. Throughout this postseason, so much of the focus seems to go to Clayton Kershaw and Justin Turner. Or if not them, then colorful characters like Yasiel Puig or feel-good stories like Chris Taylor. Often, Jansen feels lost. Now, maybe that’s just a case of me miscalculating the extent of the coverage he receives or just being far too tired to think straight by the time Jansen gets into games, but I feel like the big righty is a little underappreciated. But if he performs the way that he’s been performing, that may change for good this week.

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It would be easy to assume that the Dodgers bullpen is just another part of the club bought and paid for by means of the organization’s massive and unrivaled resources. With the team’s payroll and competitive-balance expenses coming to roughly $250 million this season — itself a substantive decrease over the $300 million outlays of the 2014-16 campaigns — the Dodgers clearly have the capacity to spend with little restraint. And they’ve certainly utilized some of that financial might to the end of bullpen construction: the club, for example, brought back free-agent closer Kenley Jansen by guaranteeing him $80 million over five seasons.

For the most part, however, the Dodgers haven’t built their bullpen on high-salaried free agents or top prospects. Instead, they’ve mostly cobbled it together with a series of low-risk trades and signings, addressing needs in-season when needed without giving up prospects of significance.

Los Angeles opened up this season with a payroll of about $235 million. Close to $50 million of that total was designated for players no longer on the roster. Of the remaining money, half went to the starting rotation. Another 40% was earmarked for Andre Ethier, Adrian Gonzalez, Yasmani Grandal, Yasiel Puig, and Justin Turner. As far as the bullpen, there was Kenley Jansen and his big salary, of course. The second-highest salary in the bullpen at the start of the season went to Sergio Romo, though, who was guaranteed $3 million by the club in February. That figure was the third-highest guarantee the Dodgers have made to a reliever since Andrew Friedman took over operations after the 2014 season. That’s three full offseasons, and the second-biggest free agent guarantee the team has made to a reliever was the $4 million for Joe Blanton a few years ago.

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Please pardon this break from playoff-related content.

Writing for Baseball America earlier this month, longtime baseball scribe Tracy Ringolsby reported there’s “building consensus” that MLB is soon headed toward expansion and a 32-team structure and perhaps a 156-game schedule.

There have been rumblings of expansion for some time.

As a guest in the Rockies’ broadcast booth back in August, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred was asked about expansion. He again suggested that the stadium issues in Oakland and Tampa must first be resolved. But once those situations are put to rest, MLB seems committed to expansion. Manfred has said baseball is, ultimately, a “growth industry.” Manfred then, during the broadcast, mentioned other incentives for expansion that this author hadn’t previously heard the commissioner address.

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Collin McHugh wasn’t consumed with worry, but he was concerned. The Astros right-hander had shoulder/biceps tendinitis in the spring, and then his elbow tightened up during a rehab outing in April. Tests didn’t raise any red flags, but it’s hard not to ponder worst-case scenarios when your livelihood is at risk.

Tendinitis is mostly an inconvenience. Tightness can be a prelude to surgery.

“I wouldn’t say it was scary, but I guess you do get a little bit nervous,” admitted McHugh. “Tommy John is so prevalent that I think everyone thinks about that when they feel some tenderness. I’d never had an elbow problem in my life.”

The relationship between his shoulder and elbow maladies was talked about “ad nauseam,” and while McHugh isn’t sure — “everything is so minuscule in your delivery” — he assumes the latter was related to effort level and trying to come back too soon. Opting for caution over expediency, the Astros subsequently kept him on the shelf until July.

My conversation with McHugh turned to mechanics, and to how many feel that continual max-effort makes a pitcher prone to elbow issues more than does increased velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros are going to the World Series for a number of reasons.

Saturday night marked the culmination of a lengthy, creative, bottoming-out rebuild gone right, a rebuild so extreme it had earned the club the “Disastros” moniker. No one is laughing now.

The Astros are going to the World Series because of the accumulation of hirings, signings, draft decisions, development and strategies executed well. Not everything went perfectly, but this is a game of probabilities, not certainties, and a lot of things went right.

That’s the big picture view. The smaller-sample truth is they needed a Game 7 to win Saturday night to have such a happy narrative be written, to advance to a second World Series appearances in franchise history. The Astros needed to match the moment and they did. Read the rest of this entry »

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Astros, Yankees, Game 7. This should be fun. This has been a pretty terrific ALCS already, and with a winner-take-all contest to decide it tonight, this could end up being one of the best league championship series we’ve seen in a while.

For the Yankees, the plan seems pretty obvious. CC Sabathia is going to start the game, and given how he’s pitched so far this postseason, Joe Girardi will probably ride his veteran until he gets in real trouble. And then the Astros will deal with Tommy Kahnle and Aroldis Chapman, probably for at least a couple of innings each, with David Robertson around to try and redeem his disastrous Game 6 performance if Sabathia-Kahnle-Chapman isn’t enough to get through nine innings. If anyone besides one of those four take the mound for the Yankees, it will probably be because one of the two teams turned it into an early blowout.

The Astros, though, head into a potential season finale without as much clarity.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the home run’s postseason supremacy, Clayton Kershaw’s performance in NLCS Game 5 and the Dodgers’ World Series outlook, the Cubs’ upcoming offseason and long-term future, and the significance of the Tigers’ Ron Gardenhire hiring.

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