Brandon League is an absolute mess. I know this. You know this. Don Mattingly, despite his refusal to publicly throw his closer under the bus, assuredly knows this as well.

We still don’t know why — and trust me, there is a “why” somewhere, because even those most opposed to League’s free-agent deal did not predict this — but at this point, it barely matters. When the game is on the line, League can no longer be absolutely anywhere near it.

Now, I’ve worded that very specifically to say “when the game is on the line” and not “in the ninth inning”, because I think I’ve been very clear in the past that the closer role is highly overrated and that games are just as often won or lost before the ninth. To remove Kenley Jansen from the often more-important eighth inning just to let League or someone else blow the game before it ever gets to Jansen in the ninth does feel like a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Interestingly enough, although I awoke to a barrage of anti-Mattingly complaints, the Dodger manager was showing some advanced thinking along those lines:

“Tonight the numbers said to go with Brandon,” he said. “Does that mean keep the guy? I don’t know. It’s hard to make that decision 12 minutes after the game.”

But he defended his decision to use Kenley Jansen in the eighth inning against Bloomquist, Goldschmidt and Cody Ross (Jansen retired all three) and use League for the bottom of the order. He pointed to the statistical matchups and said if the batting orders had come up the other way, he would have used League in the eighth and Jansen in the ninth.

“If you want to play sabermetrics, those were the best matchups,” he said. “The guys Kenley got are the guys he gets out better than Brandon. The matchups should have been exactly the way it was. But if it doesn’t work, it’s a bad decision. We talked before the game, the eighth and ninth [innings] were up in the air depending who comes up.

The emphasis there is mine, and that’s actually phenomenal. While it clearly didn’t work out, the process was sound. Jansen should be facing the 2-3-4 hitters, regardless of what number inning it is. All too often we see horrible process that ends in a successful result for a completely unrelated reason, but the process is hailed anyway; here, even though it didn’t work out, I love the thinking behind it.

Well, most of the thinking, that is. Just because Jansen is facing the better hitters in the eighth doesn’t automatically mean that it absolutely has to then be League in the ninth, and it really shouldn’t be. Unfortunately, the options are limited there. Ronald Belisario was unavailable last night and has been nearly as erratic as League this year. No one wants Matt Guerrier in a more important role. Peter Moylan is a non-roster ROOGY. J.P. Howell, maybe, but part of his value comes from being able to go multiple innings. There’s not much help in the minors, either, not with Javy Guerra & Shawn Tolleson injured and Steve Ames, Jose Dominguez, Josh Wall, & Chris Withrow all prospects of varying interest who aren’t suddenly big league closers.

So you’re left with Paco Rodriguez, and I honestly wouldn’t have minded if Mattingly had lifted League to bring in the southpaw against lefties Gerardo Parra, Jason Kubel, & Didi Gregorius. We’ve heard rumblings previously this season about potentially putting Rodriguez in higher-leverage situations, and I imagine we might hear them again soon. I’m fine with that if so; that said, Rodriguez had already thrown in four of the last seven days, and so we don’t know what his status was for last night. But he’s shown he isn’t clearly a LOOGY, and he needs to be treated as more of a valuable weapon for now.

Really, that’s the problem. The bullpen was supposed to be a strength, and it’s not, and there’s only so much you can do about that. (Just wait for “Joc Pederson & Zach Lee for Mike Adams & Michael Young,” coming soon to a stadium near you.) So for now, all Mattingly can do is make do with what he has. He’s not going to throw League under the bus, ever, nor should he; but Mattingly can restrict him to the middle innings until such time as he manages to sort out whatever is wrong here. That day may not come, and it may lead to a lot of heartburn when Guerrier is suddenly in important situations. But even if we don’t know what the right answer is, we do know this: it isn’t Brandon League.

While it’s all a whole lot of fun to try and figure out if Don Mattingly has truly gone off the deep end on us or if he’ll even be managing this team tomorrow — Dylan Hernandez says yes, but we’ll see, and I am terrified about publishing on another topic right now — it only masks the fact that is a team with some serious, actual problems. There’s about eight different directions I could go with after a lead like that, but today we’ll start with “so… just what is Brandon League‘s deal?”

Let’s be clear: few, if any, thought the extravagant three-year deal bestowed upon him by Ned Colletti last winter would actually be worth it. We all know that Colletti’s multiyear deals for non-elite relievers never work out, and so far this one looks worse than any other.

But to be completely fair, I don’t think anyone really expected this, either. League’s 5.19 ERA is close to what a 5.40 FIP says he ought to have; whether you’re using standard stats or advanced metrics, he’s been garbage. That’s surprising, because we all remember his outright dominance last August & September after a mechanical change implemented by Ken Howell & Rick Honeycutt. If not enough to make the contract worthwhile, it did seem to be a viable reason to expect some return on that investment, and gave us all ammunition to strike back at those who just looked at his 2012 as a whole.

Through nearly two months of the season, League has been a complete mess, striking out an atrocious 4.15 per nine. This isn’t due to bad luck that should even out — a .279 BABIP isn’t that far off average — it’s quite simply that he’s not missing bats. Well, that, and that he’s giving up homers at a pace like he’s never done before.

At first I thought, well, okay, perhaps he’s just failing to stick with the mechanical changes and is going back to the old way that cost him his job in Seattle. But in looking through the video, nothing stands out as being obviously different, and as we can see from Brooks Baseball, the change that happened near the end of last year in his vertical release point looks to have stuck so far in 2013:

If charts aren’t your thing, take a look for yourself at two pitches chosen at random over the two seasons. At left, a pitch that struck out Joaquin Arias last October against San Francisco; at right, giving up a double to Miami’s Adeiny Hechavarria on Mother’s Day. Other than the high socks and pink Mother’s Day shoes, do you see much of a difference in his mechanics? I can’t say I do, nor does it seem that he’s moved his position on the rubber.

So he’s throwing it the same way, from the same position. That doesn’t seem to be the problem.

How about his pitches. Are they flat? Are they simply not not moving? While he’s lost some horizontal movement on his pitches, he’s increased the vertical movement at the same time:

Here’s where we get into the weeds where I fully and completely admit that I am not a pitching coach, because if you were to ask me, “well, is one movement better than the other,” I’d say “sure, why not”; the truth is, I don’t have a good answer to that.

But you don’t need to be a pitching coach to know that this next part is a problem. While League has slowly been throwing his sinker less over the years — he used to get grounder rates in the 60-73% range, down to 56.1% this year — his splitter seems less effective because his velocity has been on a steady downturn as well.

That seems damning, but I’m hesitant to put this all on reduced velocity, because it’s not like he was throwing 99 last September and he was doing just fine. But it’s a bad trend, isn’t it? Last September, League got swings on half of his splitters, half of which were missed, resulting in a 27.1% swing-and-miss rate. This year that’s down to 20% misses; his sliders are down from 27% to 13% misses.

Across the board, he’s just not generating missed bats, and it’s difficult to know exactly why. Though I can’t really quantify this in an effective way, it surely seems that while he’s not become suddenly wild — his walk rate is down from last year — he’s not hitting his spots. That is, when he’s getting the strike zone, he’s getting all of the strike zone, and that leads to a lot of solid contact

To be honest, the smartest thinking on the subject might have come in less than 140 characters…

It may just be that League is this awful, but this is usually the moment in the storyline when we find out he’s been pitching hurt all year.

— Jon Weisman (@jonweisman) May 19, 2013

Lowered velocity, lousy command, and fewer swing-and-misses? Something has to be behind all this, and nothing seems clear from a mechanical point of view. An injury would make as much sense as anything else, but until we hear anything on that front, we’ll continue to be grasping at straws — expensive, long-term straws.