Category Archives: 2012

A First-Place Team With a Lot of Work to Do

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Name the holes the Dodgers have if they intend to make a playoff push this year, in rough order of urgency:

  1. First base. James Loney & Juan Rivera are both atrocious, as Dodger first basemen have combined for a .271 wOBA, second-worst in baseball ahead of only Seattle.
  2. Third base. Juan Uribe is an automatic out when healthy, and he’s rarely even that; Elian Herrera & Adam Kennedy are below-average replacements. Combined, the .292 wOBA is sixth-worst in baseball, and one of the teams behind them (the White Sox) figures to improve now that they’ve swapped out Orlando Hudson for Kevin Youkilis.
  3. Shortstop. Dee Gordon has been up-and-down all season, showing flashes of brilliance around frustrating struggles on both sides of the ball, and now he’s almost certainly headed to the disabled list after dislocating his thumb last night. It’s nice to think Luis Cruz has had a few good days, yet nothing in his long minor-league track record suggests he’s someone you count on at the big-league level. On offense, shortstop is another bottom-five wOBA, and when including defense with fWAR, it’s arguably the worst group in the game.
  4. Left field. For a time, I figured that a team which had Matt Kemp & Andre Ethier in the other two outfield spots could get by with some collection of Bobby Abreu / Jerry Hairston / Tony Gwynn / Scott Van Slyke / Herrera / Rivera in left, but now I’m not so sure. Van Slyke clearly isn’t ready, and I feel like not enough people have noticed that Abreu is hitting .192/.292/.295 since May 31, with negative defensive value. (The ‘hot start’ myth strikes again!) The same goes for Herrera, who has cratered since his nice debut, and while Gwynn is of course excellent with the glove, he still has a .288 OBP on the season. The .274 wOBA from this group is only just barely better than Pittsburgh’s for the worst offensive production in the game.
  5. Starting pitcher. It’s foolish to say, as some have, that Clayton Kershaw has taken a big step back from his 2011, and Chris Capuano has been the surprise find of the year; also, Aaron Harang has been adequate at the back of the rotation. Yet with Chad Billingsley eternally inconsistent, Ted Lilly lost to an injury that’s clearly far more serious than we were first told, and Nathan Eovaldi getting hit hard, there’s definitely room for improvement here.
  6. Relief pitcher. I actually don’t want to include this here, since the group as a whole has been solid and Javy Guerra could be back any day, with Blake Hawksworth & Rubby De La Rosa potentially rejoining later in the summer. But we’ll add it since Ned Colletti’s desire to add another reliever is always included in media reports, and the rough debut of Shawn Tolleson and the season-ending injury to Todd Coffey isn’t helping. I have to admit, as much as I love what Ronald Belisario‘s done, I’m terrified about relying on him, and that’s not just because of his obvious demons – it’s hard to believe a .145 BABIP lasts forever.

Now if you didn’t know any better, you’d think I was talking about a club that was struggling to even reach .500, much less one that pushed its way back into first place yesterday. Yet here they are, and while we can argue about whether it’s the right path, I don’t think there’s any question that a team in first place, with a new ownership group looking to impress, and with an incumbent general manager looking to keep his job, is going to be buying – we already saw them try for Carlos Lee, who ended up in Miami yesterday.

For me, the question is less about looking at trade options to fill a hole or two, but about how many holes you can really fill. Does fixing one problem matter when you still have four or five others staring you in the face? If not, how can the Dodgers – flush with money, but limited with prospects – find everything they need on a market very short on impact players?

For example, Jed Lowrie seems like the perfect fit, as he can fill in for Gordon at shortstop now and then replace Uribe at third later, but he’s likely to be massively expensive, to the point where Zach Lee is probably where the conversation starts; you might say the same about Chase Headley. Everywhere else you look, you get a variety of new opinions. At dodgers.com, Ken Gurnick names a bunch of new supposed targets, including Aramis Ramirez (intriguing), Corey Hart (probably not available), Ryan Dempster (a well-known target), Cole Hamels (can’t see the Dodgers meeting trade price, but definitely in the winter), and Michael Cuddyer (DOES NOT WANT). MLB Trade Rumors has the Dodgers tops on their list of teams looking for first basemen, including potentially available Ty Wigginton (such an obvious future Dodger I’m surprised we haven’t talked about it already), Bryan LaHair (pass), Justin Morneau (intriguing but risky), Mark Kotsay (NOOOOO!), and Adam Lind (who knows?).

I think we all know that the Dodgers are going to do something by the end of the month, and that’s what makes July both so entertaining and so terrifying. Yet with such an odd mix of talent available in the marketplace, I’m not sure that they can really fix all of the problems this roster has – in fact, I’m sure that they can’t, because there’s just too many. You can argue that no team is going to get a bigger July boost than getting back Kemp & Ethier after the All-Star break, and that’s probably true. Now let’s see how many of the other leaks they can plug without giving up on too much of the future.

June Can’t End Soon Enough

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Just a quick thought today, since I’m quite busy but I can’t stand staring at the Angels game recap on the front page any longer: things can only go up from here. We’ve talked a lot about how the offense isn’t that great, about how James Loney, Juan Uribe, & Adam Kennedy are black holes at the plate, about how Dee Gordon keeps showing that he’s generally not ready around flashes of brilliance, about how Juan Rivera is not anywhere near as good as his reputation suggest, and about how Bobby Abreu, Jerry Hairston, Elian Herrera, and yes, even A.J. Ellis should never have been expected to keep up the fantastic starts they brought to the Dodgers. That’s all true. There’s a lot of problems on this team, and no easy fixes.

There is this, though:

Split GS PA R 2B 3B HR BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS BAbip sOPS+
April/March 23 855 91 35 3 20 83 156 .254 .333 .390 .723 .295 104
May 28 1076 130 54 8 19 95 204 .285 .351 .419 .770 .343 112
June 22 809 81 30 5 6 77 167 .225 .302 .306 .608 .283 71

Just look at that June swoon. That .608 OPS means that over the course of the month, the entire offense has been hitting like Kennedy has all season (.616.) As I’ve been saying all along, this team was probably never as good as they showed in the first two months – and if there’s a better example of “the balls just stopped falling in” than that May BABIP, I’ve yet to find it – but nor do I believe that they’re as bad as they’ve been showing in June. They just can’t be.

The real question is, “how much longer will this last?” Matt Kemp will be back, as will Mark Ellis. You have to believe that trades are coming, and the guys who are here – some, mind you, not all – will get back to hitting.

It’s that, or go with the argument – incredibly unpopular, I’ll admit – that this team isn’t really built to be a champion in 2012 and shouldn’t be trying to “go for it”. I think there’s a lot of validity to that, but given that they had the best record in baseball just a few days ago and are still in first place with a 75% or so chance to make the playoffs, I’m not exactly looking to throw in the towel on the season just yet.

This team is going to hit again. It’s just a question of when, and who’s wearing the uniform.

Maybe This Is the Year That Interleague Play Isn’t Awful?

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On Friday night, the Dodgers head to Seattle to kick off an interesting and lengthy portion of their schedule in more than one way. It’s not only the start of 15 consecutive interleague games – and more on that in a second – it’s the start of 11 consecutive series in which they need not travel further east than Phoenix. After leaving Seattle this weekend, they return home for sets against the Angels & White Sox before traveling to Oakland, Anaheim, & San Francisco. That’s followed by home dates against the Mets & Reds, a trip to Arizona, a brief interruption for the All-Star Break, and a home series each against the Padres & Phillies. It won’t be until July 20, when they head to New York to play the Mets, that the club will be forced to go on a serious road trip.

So while that’s set up well for a banged-up roster, the two-plus solid weeks of interleague play is problematic, since the Dodgers traditionally struggle against their interleague brethren. Since 1997, the only teams with a poorer winning percentage in interleague play than the .456 clip the Dodgers have played at are the Orioles, Royals, Diamondbacks, Pirates, & Padres. No surprise there – those clubs are hardly the elite group of the game, and with the exception of a bright spot or two from Arizona those teams generally lose consistently no matter what league their opponents are from.

Among the many issues for the club in that time has been their difficulty in filling out the designated hitter role. We talked about this last year, joking that the Dodgers could barely find eight MLB-quality hitters each day, much less nine:

But what about this year? Is it really a good thing for the Dodgers to have yet another bat in the lineup? Now, instead of choosing between one of Russ Mitchell or Jay Gibbons or Juan Castro or Tony Gwynn – part of a collection that Steve Dilbeck half-jokingly called one of the worst benches ever– each day, the Dodgers get the “benefit” of having multiple variations of them in at a time.

Is that really an upgrade on having the pitcher hit? Hell, Clayton Kershaw and Chad Billingsley have each been more dangerous at the plate this year than Gibbons, Mitchell, and Castro. Hiroki Kuroda can at least lay down an excellent bunt when he’s called upon to do so, which is more than we can say for most of these other guys. I’m mostly being facetious here, but only mostly. While other NL teams are going to add another bench bat or markedly improve their defense by taking a glove away from an Aubrey Huff or Jason Giambi or Jonny Gomes, the Dodgers will have the fine pleasure of adding little to no value at all to their lineup.

Five of the nine starts in AL parks ended up going to Marcus Thames, Trent Oeltjen, & Gibbons; the Dodgers went 6-9 overall. That’s generally been the case historically for the club, as well; the two Dodgers who have made more than seven starts in the role are Olmedo Saenz, who hit just .190/.271/.286 in 18 starts, and Dave Hansen, who hit .257/.372/.343 in 11 tries.

Will this year be different? For once, the Dodgers have a roster that might be conducive to the additional spot, since Bobby Abreu & Juan Rivera are each players who you’d love to see without a glove on whenever possible; in addition, Don Mattingly says that Andre Ethier will get at least one start at DH this weekend. That should hopefully allow both more regular playing time in the outfield corners for Alex Castellanos and a way to keep regular playing time for Elian Herrera, Jerry Hairston, & Juan Uribe, once Uribe returns next week to further muddle the infield picture. (It’ll also lead to at least one game where Adam Kennedy DH’s, I can almost guarantee, which will just be infuriating.)

DH issues aside, the Dodgers are fortunate to draw Seattle & Oakland this year rather than Texas, entertaining though it may have been to see them test themselves against the best team in the AL. Then again, the Angels are playing much, much better than they had been in April and the White Sox are shocking everyone by leading the AL Central, so once again interleague play is going to present a tough challenge.

Is this finally the year that they break their usual interleague curse? So far, the 2012 edition of this team has been able to handle every other obstacle that’s been thrown in their way. If they want to prove they truly deserve the elite status that their record bestows, holding their own with the American League would be a good way to do it.

Putting the First Third of 2012 Into Perspective

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As the Dodgers have slumped over the last week and a half, losing seven of ten while the Giants crept to within three games, I’ve spent some time trying to recall our expectations for this team headed into the season. We were worried about the offense behind Matt Kemp & Andre Ethier, uncertain – though optimistic – about what A.J. Ellis & Dee Gordon could provide, crossing our fingers that James Loney would be the guy who ended 2011 rather than the one who started it, and cautious about the older back end of a rotation comprised of Ted Lilly, Chris Capuano, & Aaron Harang.

It was a largely veteran team built to get by in a year of ownership transition, a collection of players which seemed to be intended more for Ned Colletti to have a safely mediocre team rather than a group that promised much upside. I can’t find the post right now, but I’m pretty sure that in the spring I predicted that this was a team that seemed likely to be in the 82-85 win range, yet with as much chance to win 75 as 90. Sure, we’d enjoy the greatness of another year of Clayton Kershaw & Matt Kemp, but mainly we’d bask in the long-awaited glory of moving past the McCourt debacle, and anything positive which happened on the field in 2012 would almost seem like a bonus.

Then the season started, and somehow the Dodgers made it through 54 games (one-third of the full season) with the best record in baseball, even despite the recent slump. Expectations, whatever they may have been, have been shattered.

That, I think, is what has made this slump so disappointing for people. (That, and that the games have largely been painfully uninteresting to watch.) Had you told us prior to the season that Kemp, Mark Ellis, Juan Rivera, Juan Uribe, Matt Guerrier, Ted Lilly, & Jerry Hairston (for a time) would be on the disabled list all at the same time, and that the Dodgers would go 3-7 in a ten-game stretch, our response probably would have been, “wow, we won three?! Great!” But people are no longer looking at this team as the questionable middle-of-the-pack squad we thought they’d be, they’re looking at them as the team that burst out to a red-hot start, and teams with the best record in baseball shouldn’t play as atrociously as they have been – in theory.

There’s plenty of reasons for the recent slide, of course, none more obvious than the absences of Kemp & Mark Ellis, who were each excellent when healthy. And though none of us like to hear it, playing Arizona, St. Louis, & Milwaukee is far more difficult than San Diego & Pittsburgh were in April. But perhaps most of all, the good hops and close calls which had almost uniformly been going the Dodgers’ way early in the season have started swinging back the other way. The days where an unexpected new hero would appear out of the woodwork every night – a Matt Treanor here, an Ivan De Jesus there, a Scott Van Slyke over there  – seem long gone right now.

So maybe this team isn’t quite as good as the hype had been spouting a few weeks ago, when they were topping national power rankings left and right. Maybe a team that’s regularly giving considerable lineup time to Adam Kennedy, Tony Gwynn, Loney, & Gordon shouldn’t really be surprising any of us when they fail to score runs, and maybe there’s not a lot to dream on in the near term, considering Kemp is out for several more weeks at least and the imminent returns of Rivera & Uribe aren’t exactly recipes for instant upgrades.

Yet for all of the depression over the last ten days, there’s still quite a bit of hope here. We’ve learned that A.J. Ellis is for real. (Send him to represent the NL in Kansas City so everyone else can learn that as well, won’t you?) We’ve learned that Bobby Abreu, when used properly, can still be an effective offensive weapon, that Elian Herrera may just have some utility, and we’ve learned that a healthy Capuano can be quite a bit more than we thought he would be. Most importantly, they do still have the benefit of that great start, because those wins still count. If they’re merely the .500 team from here on out that many of us expected they’d be, that’s still a 87-75 at the end of the year. That’s right in the playoff hunt, even if it’s easy to see them continuing to struggle over the next few weeks as they head into interleague play without Kemp, considering it’s unlikely that the new regime stands still with this undermanned roster as the trade deadline nears.

So cheer up, Dodger fans. The next few weeks could be pretty rough, but that’s okay. Kemp will be back. Mark Ellis will be back. Rubby De La Rosa may even be back at some point (though only in the bullpen). Trades will be made, and prospects will come up. Thanks to the cushion of the great start, the Dodgers will remain in the race, even if they’re not quite the team that April made them out to be. Considering what we thought of 2012 entering the year, that alone is more than we could have asked for.

And if not? If they collapse and blow the rest of the summer entirely? That’s the worst-case scenario, of course, but there’s a bright side there too; that’d make it a whole lot easier to make some of the front office changes many of us have been clamoring for. That seems unlikely at the moment though, so as long as we keep things in perspective, the rest of 2012 should have plenty of interesting moments left to offer.

Patchwork Dodgers on Verge of Record-Tying Offense

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Thanks in large part to a five-run seventh inning last night, the Dodgers are now on a six game streak of having scored six runs or more. That’s not only impressive, it’s getting close to historic.

Rk Strk Start End Games W L R 2B 3B HR BA OBP SLG OPS Opp
1 BRO 1945-05-05 1945-05-13 8 8 0 68 20 2 5 .315 .389 .450 .839 PHI,STL,CIN
2 BRO 1941-05-22 1941-05-30 8 7 1 53 18 5 6 .284 .363 .447 .810 STL,PHI,NYG
3 LAD 2001-06-26 2001-07-02 7 7 0 58 19 2 8 .347 .397 .527 .924 SFG,SDP
4 BRO 1953-08-27 1953-09-02 7 6 1 72 17 3 16 .380 .461 .659 1.120 CHC,CIN,STL,MLN
5 BRO 1943-06-18 1943-06-23 7 6 1 50 14 2 3 .292 .399 .404 .803 PHI,NYG
6 BRO 1919-09-24 1920-04-18 7 4 3 67 19 3 4 .332 .389 .477 .866 PHI,BSN
7 LAD 2012-05-17 2012-05-22 6 6 0 40 14 4 5 .333 .390 .505 .895 SDP,STL,ARI
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used
Generated 5/23/2012.

If the Dodgers can score at least six tonight against Arizona lefty Joe Saunders, they’ll tie the Los Angeles-era record for most games having scored that many in a row. Of course, doing it with a lineup that’s basically Andre Ethier, A.J. Ellis and a whole lot of Isotopes as Matt Kemp & friends have been on the disabled list certainly earns you some bonus points, because look at some of the other teams on that list.

The Dodgers will be on the cover of SI this week, so when they play poorly next week you'll know why.

The 2001 Dodgers finished in third place, mostly due to a pitching staff which had to squeeze 86 starts out of Terry Adams, Eric Gagne, Luke Prokopec, Terry Mulholland, James Baldwin, & Giovanni Carrara, but they had a formidable middle of the order. Almost every one of the lineups in the midst of their streak featured Gary Sheffield, Shawn Green, and Paul Lo Duca, each having massive career years, plus an up-and-coming Adrian Beltre and the final remnants of Eric Karros. (Today, by the way, is also the tenth anniversary of Green’s “four home runs among six hits” masterpiece.) The 1943 club had seven of eight regulars finish with an OPS+ above league average and a lineup which included Hall of Famers Billy Herman, Arky Vaughn, & Joe Medwick. We’ll bypass the 1919-20 line, which was done over two seasons nearly a century ago, and point out that the 1953 lineup was merely among the finest in club history – the glory days of Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese & Roy Campanella.

And the 2012 club? Other than Ethier & Ellis, it’s a new hero every night. It’s Bobby Abreu. Or Ivan De Jesus. Or Matt Treanor. Or Elian Herrera. Or Justin Sellers. At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if they sent up Chad Billingsley to pinch-hit in extra innings and he hit a go-ahead grand slam.

I have absolutely no idea how they’re continuing to do this, with this lineup. All I know is, this is beyond our wildest dreams, and while there’s certainly going to be tough times ahead this season – there always are, for every team – watching them do this every night with such a revolving cast is fantastically entertaining. Now let’s see if it can be record-breaking, too.