The Dodgers Have a Hidden Strength

Those of us alive and aware today might end up being the last people on Earth to have seen the Dodgers lose a baseball game. Somehow, they’ve lost Clayton Kershaw and played even better, and they have a chance to set the all-time record for wins in a season. They’re playing so well it’s as if they don’t have a flaw, and while every team looks flawless during a winning streak, it’s obvious the Dodgers have officially become a juggernaut. They’ve been building toward this, and I don’t know when it’s going to stop.

Like any good dominant baseball team, the Dodgers have been excellent across the board. I’ll grant they look below-average by our baserunning metric, but the offense has been tremendous, and the defense has been strong. Turn to the pitching staff, and the Dodgers rank first by WAR. Look at things differently, and they still rank first by RA9-WAR. The Dodgers are more than just great — they could become an *all-time* great, which might feel more remarkable if the same couldn’t have just been said of the 2016 Cubs.

I’d like to highlight something about the pitching staff. It’s something we’ve had trouble analyzing, even in the recent past. The staff has one particular quality that might be going under-appreciated. I mentioned the Dodgers rank first by both of our pitching-staff WAR measures. Unsurprisingly, they also rank first in terms of wOBA allowed.

It’s not even all that close, as there’s considerable distance there between the Dodgers and the second-place Diamondbacks. What are the Dodgers doing way up there? They rank third in baseball in team strikeout rate. They’re tied for first in team walk rate, and so they slide into second in team K-BB%. The Dodgers look good because the Dodgers are good. And yet, there’s still something missing. It’s the third part of pitching effectively. I’d like to now make use of the expected wOBA metric that you can find at Baseball Savant. Here is how all the staffs rank in expected wOBA allowed:

Right, yes, Dodgers in first. Dodgers still in first. They strike people out without walking them. It’s a good pair of traits to have. But we’re still left with the matter of everything else — that is, the opponents’ batted balls. That’s how we can complete this picture. Here is the order of expected wOBAs, taking into consideration only balls hit somewhere fair.

Dodgers again. Their advantage is 18 points. Consider this a rough measure of batted-ball quality. This is actually something Tony Blengino briefly addressed the other day, but the Dodgers have managed to suppress hard hits, relative to the rest of the league. For all of the things that they’re good at, this is something we can only now begin to understand, with the information that’s suddenly become available.

To think about that above plot in a different way, the Dodgers are removed from the mean by very nearly three standard deviations. Even without expected wOBA, perhaps we’d have an inkling. Dodgers pitchers have combined for baseball’s lowest hard-hit rate. They’ve combined for baseball’s highest pop-up rate, and they’ve got one of the lowest rates of home runs. The team has allowed a very low BABIP. One should also note that the Padres, Rockies, and Giants have struggled to hit. Those are presently the bottom three teams in wRC+, and while some of that is because of the Dodgers, much of it isn’t. Plenty of factors come into play.

And so on batted balls, Dodgers pitchers come out looking extraordinary. This is, of course, only our third year of having Statcast information. So it’s the third year of expected-wOBA marks. And even expected wOBA as it is should still be regarded as something experimental. But we find the Dodgers at .330, with a league average of .360, meaning the Dodgers have been better by 30 points. The next-best team in our brief window has been the 2015 Mets, who were better than average by 20 points. That year’s Dodgers were better than average by 18 points. Last year’s Dodgers were better by 14 points — this isn’t a new trait. The Dodgers have suppressed good contact for years. This year, they’re doing it better than ever.

To break things down individually, here are the Dodgers pitchers with at least 50 at-bats tracked.

Romo? He’s gone, now pitching for Tampa Bay. Avilan? He just watched the front office acquire two new lefty relievers. Fields is still around, but he’s been striking out 10 batters per nine innings. It’s an open question to what extent this sort of thing can really be controlled by the pitchers on the mound, but there’s no question the Dodgers have excelled, and by this measure, both Tony Watson and Tony Cingrani also look good. Yu Darvish looks more average-y, but his game is mostly about missing bats. So the Dodgers won’t mind the occasional line drive he gives up.

Even a year ago, this kind of thing was tough to get into. People wondered how well the Cubs pitchers were suppressing contact quality, and though Ben Lindbergh got into it at one point, it required a lot of hard and manual work. Baseball Savant now makes it stupid easy, and maybe that makes it easy to overlook. This is a new area of study, and we have far more information than ever at our collective disposal. Why do the Dodgers have such a low team BABIP allowed? Part of it, sure, is good team defense, but maybe a bigger part is just that the pitchers have stayed away from the barrels. Nearly all of them, for that matter, even in a year where Kershaw has developed a home-run problem. It’s gone beyond just Kershaw. Most of the Dodgers have limited hard hits. The staff as a whole checks off the three main boxes, and you can consider this among the many reasons why the Dodgers are the clear World Series favorite.