Several Dodgers Arrested After Friday Night s Game

Graterol, Nelson and Price on deck tonight. Do need May to give us good innings tonight. Wouldn’t be surprised to see Miller get a look see later this summer

I really like Trevor Bauer, and I hope we can extend the end of his contract here. He is a fierce competitor, sort of reminds me of Verlander in intensity. We have a very fine starting staff, it is our strength.

The bullpen will not hold up over 162 games, unless Price is somehow a phenomenal reliever all year. it is a real shame about Knebel, but when you keep trying to rehabilitate pitchers with serious past injuries, this happens. Maybe somehow Morrow will come back to 2017 form. Without that, Roberts will wear out the rest of the bullpen. I don’t know where we can find a solid reliever, but we had better look for two of them at the trade deadline, in my opinion.

Big game today, it would be great if May could step up with a big effort. But who do we have in the bullpen to follow up? We can’t use Jansen, we can’t use Treinen, most likely.

Don’t get butt-ass hurt B&P, I think it is pretty obvious to all except you, that the replacement players aren’t really stepping up. In fact, many have realized that many of them are in fact not ready for this level yet and really may never be. Also, it is overwhelmingly evident that Jansen is not a back to back pitcher, his performance drops off the cliff when asked to come on consecutive days. I guess, Ray Charles can see that but B&P cannnot.

“Camelot (LADT) it tis a silly place”. (sorry Python fans for the bastardization). “Now bow down, now FO!” (my apologies again to Python fans for the bastardization). To non-Python fans, never mind, just move along, I won’t be able to explain it to ya.

The pre-season hype was all about the extreme depth of the Dodgers. The in season reality, not so much.

Wow, the Padres’ defense is top of the class, the Dodgers’ defense, not so much. This is going to be a problem for us.

Jansen is dominant once or twice a week. How many playoff games are played in a week? (food for thought)

Yes, a good test of character. Kenley came through in the clutch again. That, to me, is the most positive note of this game, especially after Knebel went down. With Knebel out, I’m liking the notion of Kenley-Price as a battle-tested, righty-lefty veteran duo to close out games.

Here’s hoping that Bellinger, Lux, McKinstry get well soon. Better that they are hurt now rather than in August. One advantage of a rash of injuries early in the season is that we get a chance to seem what players like Neuse, Peters and Raley can do. Rios and Beatty need to step it up or they’ll be sent down–but who will replace them? I’d rather see the young guys than someone like Sousa.

We know that the Dodgers have a very strong core: Betts, Seager, Turner, Bellinger, Smith, Muncy. So far, McKinstry is proving himself worthy successor to Kike–while also compensating (somewhat) for Joc’s missing lefthanded bat.

If Lux delivers–we keep waiting!– Taylor and McKinstry may be the best utility duo in the bigs, much as Smith/Barnes is the best catching tandem. So now Friedman & Co. have a chance to see what the weak links are. Same with pitching. Knebel’s injury may give a chance to Pepiot or Mitch White or Gray or ???

And depending on who fails to deliver, this could provide Friedman with a shopping list at midseason.

I find myself rooting especially for Peters, because (a) he’s a local guy and (b) several the prospect pundits had written him off and (c) the potential if he figures it out. Watching the highlights I grimaced seeing Peters’ split-second delay on that throw home. My guess is that he didn’t quite have a good grip on the transition from glove to hand. A clean transition might have led been a hero moment, with a runner cut down at the plate. So… dang. That would have been sweet. A confidence-booster.

I am a big believer in regression towards the mean – the principle that any extreme – high or low – will over time revert to its average. A lifetime .700 OPS hitter who is batting .900 for a stretch will come back to earth eventually. A lifetime .900 hitter who is slumping will also eventually revert to his mean – just like Tatis is doing now. There are some exceptions, when something fundamental changes (like JT changing his swing when he came to the Dodgers). But other than that, it is a statistical necessity that regression to the mean will occur. I have no doubt that the Dodgers will regress to the mean, and play much better over the course of a whole season than they are doing now. All of the statistical models predicted them to be the best team in baseball. There was a reason for that: past performance. Over time, they will return to that predicted level, unless something fundamental changes, such as injuries. Injuries is a random factor that these predictive models can’t account for. It’s a long season, and they have plenty of time to recover from their injuries.

I predict that they will win their division. However, what will happen in a playoff against the Padres is anyone’s guess, because it is a small sample of games in a playoff (3, 5, or 7 games). In small samples, wacky things can happen due to chance. And chance plays a greater role in baseball than in practically any other sport. Thus, winning the WS again is going to be tough, though our chances are better than most teams. However, once we recover from injuries, we will eventually start playing like ourselves again. And hopefully this adversity now will also build their toughness. They showed great character last year, for example, coming back when they were on the ropes against Atlanta. Maybe this slump provides them a challenge that they need.

I said before season our bench has taken a hit thus our depth is very shaky.

Bullpen very scary! Hits, wild pitches, stolen bases. San Diego runs wild on our pitchers. We have a lot of room for improvement for sure. Our own base running has been bad. We should have scored much more tonight. Happy to win but quite fortunate.

It’s pretty obvious this team is not perfectly built. The injuries have glaringly exposed our biggest weakness and will only be exacerbated with the loss of Knebel. Spitballing some random thoughts:

1. Raley doesn’t look as if he’s ready, for that matter Rios doesn’t either.

2. Victor Gonzales cannot walk the leadoff hitter.

3. DJ Peters looks like Billy Ashley….did he even foul off a pitch in 2 ABs?

4. Who will pitch the 8th if Treinen has to pitch in the 7th?

5. Why is Joe Kelly making $8 million this year?

6. Team needs Cody and Lux back in the line-up and suddenly the offense looks much more difficult for an opposing pitcher to get outs.

8. Defense looks shaky, very shaky.

9. Can Steven Souza hit?

10. Who will take (right-handed) Knebel’s spot in the BP? It can’t be Clevinger…can it?

11. Scott Alexander in the 8th inning, in a one run game….kind of confirms my opening sentence….this team is not perfectly built.

12. Depth is challenged when you have to rely on the likes of Raley, Peters, Beaty, Rios as opposed to Joc, Hernandez. Not saying the Dodgers should have signed either with the amount they got, but the bench has seen a significant drop-off in talent, experience and execution.

Doc keeps pulling Gonzalez out when a right handed batter comes up. He doesn’t know or doesn’t care that Gonzalez is good against both sides of the plate. Now he lets Treinen pitch to a left-handed batter and Treinen is bad against left-handed batters. I hate how he handles the bullpen.

The Dodgers bullpen cannot pitch a clean inning. There is no one I trust that will get the side out. First Gonzalez – now Treinen.

One thing is for sure Turner is not showing his age. He is still a very good hitter.

Another half-assed defensive attempt by a Dodger as Will smith can’t catch a foul ball and on the next pitch the Padre at 1B steals and then scores on a base hit. The poor defense is becoming an epidemic.

Everyone talks about the 2016 draft and how good it was but the 2017 draft was a total disaster. That is part of the problem why the bottom of our bench is so weak right jow

Well, I’m excited to see DJ Peters debut tonight. Hopefully there will be some magic to it. The defense looks a lot better when Mookie plays RF even if he’s a very good Center Fielder. The Dodgers are stacking righty batters tonight against Snell who’s coming off his longest outing of the season, 5IP and 95 pitches against the Dodgers.

Although I have no reason to believe so, but I’m choosing to believe that the Dodgers will break out of their slump tonight.

It was rough to watch Tatis Jr hit two bombs against Kershaw last night. I don’t like his attitude, flashiness, hairdo, dive when you don’t have to and especially all that eye black. I think he’s my most hated player in baseball, next to Machado and Correa.

Knebel out for a couple of months. Doc doesn’t know the specifics about the injury but expects him to be back this year. Kelly expected early to mid May. Clevenger recalled for Knebel. Santana going on the IL because he feels like crap after being vaccinated. Beaty recalled.

After prodded about Knebel, Doc thinks the injury is to his lat.

McKinstry timetable “longer than 10 days”.

Gavin should be in the lineup by Monday.

I can’t believe how bad people freak out over a 2 game losing streak. I guess no one checks the standings here. Imagine being a Yankees fan right now. Last I checked, the Padres are still in 3rd place. Does anyone really think the Giants are going to win the Division? They look like our biggest threat right now. 20 game down, only 140 remain. Still a lot of road to travel.

I doubt that this defense will play like this all year. Both of these games were winnable. Another inch on Justin’s hit last night or Nuese’s hit the night before and we probably have different outcomes. Relax, hit the bong and calm the F down.

Biggest mistake yesterday was Doc sitting Nuese after crushing two balls the night before.

You can speak of injuries all you want but the non-injured players (which include the likes of Betts, Seager et al) aren’t hitting.

This from True Blue LA:

“The Dodgers have 23 hits over their last 6 games, their fewest hits in a 6-game span since September of 1909.”

It is a long season and many of the hitters have track records indicating they will hit. But, good pitching stops good hitting and the Padres have very good pitching plus very good defense. Their gm has made the necessary moves to get the Padres a look at the top. Their depth has improved significantly and their defense is better than ours. At this point I think they have a better team and manager.

Betts is a good hitter not great. He is a great defender. Seager is so streaky. When he is hot you can’t get him out but when he is not his first pitch swinging is annoying. Turner is the best overall hitter but needs help. Smith is underachieving this early but with no offense Doc you got to play him. Muncy is a tough out but a complimentary player. Bellinger adds a threat and star power to the lineup. Pollock and the rest are role players. Throw pollock and Taylor and outside slider and they both k.

If the dodgers can stay healthy they will be hard to beat. The pads seem hungrier, better managed, and healthier currently.

Things fell nicely into place last season for the Dodgers including a lack of injuries to key players. No so this year. The depth of position players is being tested and so far the results aren’t good. Pinch hitters being 0 for the season. The veterans are struggling and the rookies haven’t answered the bell except McKinstry who’s hurt. Rios is horseshit. Last night was just another example. First he hits into dp, pulls up on a catchable pop up, takes 3 with the tying run on 3rd with 2 outs, And finally takes another called third in the 6th. I’d love to see Ruiz get some AB’s but if Rios gets sent down the only back up at 3rd is Neuse who isn’t exactly tearing the cover off the ball.

Did I hear Orel say Rios is officially “struggling”? Keen eye for detail.

Mookie liner in 7th was bad luck but Padres infielders are turning lots for shots into bad luck.

How many times does Crishum needs to beat the shift until we stop over shifting on the guy?

Death by papercuts right now. Nothing is really going the Dodger’s way. With the veterans struggling, this is a golden opportunity for all that heralded depth with Rios, Neuse, Raley, and Peters to come through.

Team slumps are head scratchers. That’s baseball. You just play through it. What’s the alternative? You can’t bench everybody.

League average of all of baseball (MLB) in batting OPS is down from the last 2 years. So even though the Dodgers hitters are in a slump it is not all that bad.

2019 league average in batting OPS was .758

2020 league average in batting OPS was .740

2021 league average in batting OPS is currently .703

Dodgers are currently 4th in all of baseball in batting OPS at .760

With all that said it’s time to option Santana and Rios and bring up 2 new faces. It wouldn’t hurt to do that.

Trade everybody!

This is why we’re fans. Panic at the first sight of adversity. Did I mention we should fire Roberts. Again. And AF is an idiot. Again.

I hope everyone knows that today’s post was satire. I remain undaunted. The Dodgers are the best team in baseball.

This too shall pass!

The real key is who is better, the Dodgers or the Padres? It is not an abstract question. If the Padres are better, they will likely go to the World Series, not the Dodgers. I remember when UCLA had some very good football teams int he ’70’s, but USC was usually better, so they won the game and went to the Rose Bowl, not UCLA.

Right now, the Padres look better, but of course that can change. They have the better bullpen, although Price has been a very welcome surprise, so far. If Knebel is hurt, we do not have enough talent down there. Our bullpen will not be bad, but theirs is deeper.

They seem very good defensively. Tattis is not even hitting until last night, and they still are within three games of us. Machado is not likeable, but he is quite a talent offensively and defensively. Until Betts and Seager start hitting, we will not score runs; outside of Turner, the rest of our lineup is not impressive. We need Bellinger, and we need him to actually hit .270 or so.

Maybe most importantly, SD might have the better manager. Roberts has his strengths and his weaknesses. I still have not gotten past his use of second-tier relievers in the last game of the SD series there. That probably cost us two games in the standings. Tingler seems to use his talent effectively, though of course we do not see him every game. Roberts does not seek to move up runners, while SD constantly ran on us. Maybe we just don’t have the talent for it.

Finally, picking up Bauer was really great. But we didn’t do much else. The bullpen additions are mostly injured pitchers, who often get injured again. And we do not have the right-handed bat we needed. Unless Smith lives up to what we thought of him last year, we do not have enough strong bats in the lineup–better than most teams, but good enough to beat the Padres over 162 games, and a crucial showdown playoff series? And which franchise is likely to make a key addition at the trade deadline? One never knows, but I would expect them to be more active. So we will see. Two wins in a row here would make things look much better. Two losses , and we are one game up, and they are better going forward.

Enough with the Verdugo stuff already. No Verdugo, no Mookie. No Mookie, no Championship. He is no longer a Dodger so quit yer bitchin. And I remember how many were on the Rios bandwagon before spring began. All they need to do is hit. The pitching in general has been good. For the last week the hitting has sucked. It happens. These guys are too talented not to hit. And they are missing some KEY pieces. Just hold the fort until the cavalry arrives. They will be fine.

Rios can’t hit if he is a statue in the batters box!

I just wanted to remind everyone that Verdugo is still really really good, he Is hitting .440/.462/.640 over his last 7 games and has already a .8 fwar in 20 games played and has a 146 wrc+ . He continues to play with so much energy and conviction you now have the Red Sox in 1st place, he Is in the top 10 in the AL in runs, hits, average, doubles, Rbis, and he leads MLB in OF assists this season with 3 and leads all of MLB in OF assist since 2020 with 10. He’s a great player and I really wish the Dodgers were able to get Mookie without giving up Alex, just imagine a Verdugo, Belly, Mookie OF……

Wow….that is a little drastic. But there are factors that need to be addressed. The injury bug has hit this team hard so far. And Knebel left with an arm issue last night. They miss Bellinger and Taylor. They hit a couple of balls really hard that the Padres made great plays on. But the hitting definitely needs to improve like yesterday. Rios looks worse up there than Beaty did, And of course, Kershaw picks last nights game to have his penchant for giving up solo homers return.

Dodgers need a colon cleansing!

Blow it out and eat some simple execution foods. Most of the team has earned some slack but I am ready for Matt Beatty to swap out Edwin Rios. He looks like a deer in the headlights. DJ and Edwin can go to the alternate site and work on contact with the ball.

Eager for the team to get healthy again. These are the times that test fans souls! We shall prevail.

I’m usually in my brainstorming mode and tend to spew out random thoughts when I first wake up and have my morning coffee, and Bluto’s hypothesis in yesterday’s post made my thoughts wander. So, not exactly topical to last nights game, but there it is.

…

Ok, but you’d have to isolate the influence of a pitcher’s actions. Maybe there’s a way to measure the size of leads from first base before the jump and look at trends through the years, or perhaps compare times between a runner’s initial jump and reaching 2nd base.

Even better would be something measuring the quality of the initial jump by time/distance of jump before the pitch is thrown. You would expect this to have an inverse relationship to the effort by the pitcher to keep the runner off balance or guessing with throws to first, etc.

I really don’t know. Interesting hypothesis, but separating out the influence of the pitcher and measuring it specifically presents challenges. Right now it would just correlate with the other trends that depress SB attempts.

Here’s another hypothesis: The reduction in SB attempts reflects, in part, the changing demographics in baseball.

Jackie Robinson was a disruptor, not solely because he broke the color barrier, but because he brought an increased level of athleticism to baserunning.

From the late 50s on, there was an increased emphasis on baserunning and stolen bases. It peaked in the 80s with the likes of Tim Raines, Vince Coleman and, of course, Ricky Henderson before there was a general decline in base stealing and more emphasis on home runs as a driver of run creation.

I remember watching games when I was young in the 80s when the crowd would actually boo a pitcher because they would just continually throw over the 1rst. It was a separate battle of keeping the runner off balance much like pitching is the art of keeping the hitter off balance. A pitcher would try to plant doubt in the head of the runner to limit his lead or have him guess wrong and either dive back to the bag when the pitcher actually made his pitching move to the plate (a pitcher who is able to pull this off is great at holding runners on), or the runner would guess wrong and be caught in a rundown.

There has been a general decline in the number of black Americans who play as children and rise through the ranks to become professional players. Without engaging in a discussion on genetic determinism, athletic actions that put a premium on speed – track and field sprinting, the wide receiver position in football, a base stealing specialist in baseball – correlate with black Americans.

The general decline in black American participation in professional baseball involves complex social factors. Currently, professional rosters consist of white Americans from generally middle to upper middle class enclaves with the support mechanism and the facilities to cultivate a sport that requires intensive skill development from a young age. On the other hand, there is a predominant influence by the Dominican Republic, where baseball is considered a means to upward mobility and out of poverty, and there are facilities and academies set up by MLB teams to cultivate and identify talent.

If MLB had more players on rosters who have the talent to steal bases, you would expect more base stealing. Part of this general decline in base stealing, I would argue, is because there are fewer players with that particular athletic skill in baseball.

If Manfred wants to improve the game, both in terms of the action on the field, but also in terms of diversity and making it more representative of American demographics, he shouldn’t be worried about making the bags bigger. What he should do is set up baseball academies in predominantly black enclaves in the United States and develop young black American talent. This would be better for baseball and better for America. He rather virtue signal and pull the ASG out of Atlanta and actually hurt black Americans who live there.