People tell me that I need to keep adding content. I’m not exactly sure why, but I think you guys talking among yourselves about whatever doesn’t need a lot of prodding from me. In other words, I am content to see the contents in the comments; but I’ll generate 10 stupid thoughts a day if people want me to. Do people have a preference? The only preference I have is to not interject myself into a robust discussion of any postseason topics with a bunch of people I respect.
So my “content” for today is the observation that it’s hard for me to picture us doing much better against the Brewers than the Dodgers have done these first three games. Honestly, I don’t think we would have done much worse either. 1 runs, 4 runs and 2 runs are not going to cut it, right Roger? And 1-4-2 is pretty much what we would have done, I reckon.
And with that, I am content for the moment.
I was thinking the same thing. Do the Dodgers need to blow up their core? Package Will Smith in a deal with Tucker and Betts to get salary relief?
Who would take those contracts? Even Will Smith, who is the prize, is on the wrong side of 30 and probably in decline.
Who would take Riley and Murphy’s contracts? 🙂
Can we trade Riley and Murphy for Smith and Muncy? Probably wouldn’t move the needle much if at all, but it would feel like progress. And for Riley and Murphy it might be the “change of scenery” that has become cliché to fantasize about.
FanGraphs had the Dodgers with >50% odds to win the World Series coming into the NLCS. The model now sits at 9%. Amazing collapse.
To win the World Series? That seems really high. They have to win two home games and two road games just to get there… that has to be < 7%. Even if it were 9%, they’d have to be a lock to win the World Series. I suspect the FanGraphs model hasn’t watched Ohtani at the plate.
That’s ridiculous. All things equal they were about 50% to beat the Brewers but all things were not equal. Their best player is struggling which downgrades them.
Fangraphs knows that its model just doesn’t really work for the playoffs; their writers have mentioned that in chats. So those odds were always questionable.
The Brewers win the pennant.
While it obviously doesn’t prove anything, four come-from-behind victories is one more data point for the importance of bullpens over starters in the modern postseason.
Also a good point about bullpen construction. LA tried to buy themselves a bullpen but Scott and Diaz have been overpriced mediocrities for them; their most effective reliever over the past few years has probably been the homegrown Vesia, whom they pay peanuts. If not for the free agent busts in the back of the bullpen, they could have put guys like Sheehan and River Ryan back there the way we did with Fuentes.
The Brewer pen isn’t just cheaper, it’s better, and its homegrown nature seems to make it more flexible. Ashby is such a stud – he’s like a Ramiro Mendoza kind of guy, a rubber-armed multi-inning weapon. I just realized he’s Andy Ashby’s nephew. Man, with that 99-mph sinker and 12-to-6 power curve… imagine paying $100 million for two closers whose stuff is worse than the bespectacled 28-year-old 7th-inning guy on the other team.
One thing Alex Anthopoulos has been very good at is building a pen, and he certainly HAS paid free agent prices for a Proven Closer (TM), both Will Smith and Robert Suarez, and results on all those deals have so far been mixed. But the pen has had sufficient depth that those guys weren’t absolutely irreplaceable. His real gift has been in trading for bullpen studs: Iglesias, of course, but also Joe Jimenez, Pierce Johnson, and even Chris Martin.
But even though the Brewers technically came from behind each time, I think the Dodgers didn’t get beaten by the bullpen mismatch. I think they got beaten by Milwaukee the same way we got beaten by LA: their offense was old, hurt, and worn down, and they just couldn’t play at a high level for a full nine-inning game. They plum got outplayed.
I’m just glad we don’t have to hear about how much the world is rooting for the Dodgers and how inspirational it is to see them win again.
Also I’ve decided we need to sign Arozarena. He would fix a lot of our problems and may do a 3-year deal. Keep Dubon at SS and resign Mahle.
The game is being taken over by more young players and older FA players are less valuable. Developing pitching and hitting has to be the highest priority. There are some exceptions but they are fewer and farther between than they used to be.
Also, there is a lot less risk with younger players. You try a lot and if they’re good you keep them and if they’re not you can jettison them with little cost. You can’t just jettison an expensive FA.
I think I half-agree with you, as long as you don’t go overboard with it and eschew older FA players altogether.
The interesting thing is the implication this has for the new CBA. The main thing the owner’s offer does, IMO, is make the younger players richer and the older FA players poorer. The players (and in particular the players’ agents) hate this feature more than just about anything else. But if the handwriting is on the wall for older FAs….
By the way, is there anyone (other than stadium vendors) who will regret a move back to 154 games?
I thought the Dodgers looked vulnerable in the NLDS. It just goes to show how awful the Braves were.
We were playing like an 80 win team that ran into a 90 win team that ran into a 103 win team.
Thus endeth the 6-year streak of Will Smith winning the World Series.
So if mlb goes to a 154 game schedule will every record broken since 1961 require an asterisk?
The asterisks all went away years ago. There are a number of ways MLB can treat season counting records, and I’m not sure what they’ll do. I’ll note that Bonds only played in 153 games in 2001 and that’s one of the few records anyone actually cares about.
Decreasing season length is a rare record ratchet… we’re so used to seasons getting longer and records growing without an actual increase in ability. Going to per game (per season or per game played?) records would be the obvious “fair” rewrite of the record books.
I suspect that, unless you included something like a 100-game minimum, going to per-game season records would mean that Negro Leaguers would have a lot of the season records, for what that’s worth. And setting a minimum # of games high enough that it would exclude Negro Leaguers might also cause heartburn.
Good point. Until these records became official records, I had never known just how short these seasons were. Josh Gibson never had a 75 game season. Cool Papa Bell never played 100. Satchel Paige never made 25 starts.
Bill James had a good section on Negro League baseball in his Historical Abstract, in which he wrote about how many exhibition games the teams played against all kinds of opposition, often more than in the official league seasons. He wrote that the quantity of non-league games had the (probably unintentional) side effect of helping the teams find talent when they couldn’t afford scouts and there wasn’t much media coverage of non-professional teams.
For the crapshoot folks, this is the third time this decade that the World Series has been a matchup of #1 seeds and the second time in the last 3 years.
That’s one way to describe a set of outcomes with varying odds, none of which are greater than 50-50.
It’s not just that the #1 seeds are in the WS, but that in all 8 postseason matchups so far, the team with the better regular-season record has won. That much chalk seems very unlikely, given the slight differences in regular-season records in several of the pairings, as well as the fact that some teams like Philadelphia with less depth but more front-line pitching may have been better suited for the postseason than the regular season.
Some pushback. The better records have both home field advantage and, for the four teams with the best records, pitcher setup advantages through byes. So that gives us four wild-card and four divisional series coming out with the better record winning. With, say 60 percent probabilities for the combination of home field and pitcher setup and better record (note the exception of the White Sox-Houston series, in which the worse team got home field and neither team could set up pitching) we indeed have a pretty low-probability event. To get to a reasonably rare occurrence (say 10 percent) we would have to get to a 75% chance of victory, which is indeed evidence against the crapshoot. But it’s also just a rare event. You need more than one.
I think the crapshoot aspect is real, but it is better described by occasional unexpected outcomes. It’s more of an occasional feature, not a baked-in certainty.
Examples:
2023 Rangers
2021 Braves
2019 Nationals
On a long enough time scale, okay teams will win the World Series, but the best teams will win it more.
Just to be clear: the crapshoot theory is not the theory that the best team in the playoffs (assuming they have a first round bye) has a 12.5% chance of winning. It’s more like 25%.
Maybe this all comes down to semantics.
When people say crapshoot, I hear that the Braves’ chances are similar to the Dodgers’. In other words, close to a coin flip. But they probably mean something like “there are no guarantees,” which, well, obviously. Actual opinions are probably more similar.
I think you’re right about the semantics. If I thought all the teams had an equal chance of winning, I’d probably describe the playoffs as a lottery. When I think of a crapshoot, I think of different odds for different bets, and even the best bet wins fewer than 50% of the time. (Full disclosure: I don’t know crap about craps.)
Sdp if we’re going to talk about crapshot World Series winners I have to bring up the 1987 Twins. I’m convinced that franchise sold its soul to the devil for a couple rings.
They scored 786 runs and allowed 806 in the regular season (85-77 record but a 79-83 Pythagorean record). They beat a monster Tigers team (with Doyle Alexander) and then beat the “go crazy” Cardinals in a seven-game World Series. A young Frank Viola started 3 games in the World Series and won 2.
Baseball means this kind of outcome is more likely than the NFL but it’s still extremely unlikely.
Interesting take from Jayson Stark, concluding that MLB has a more competitive balance than other pro sports.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7712643/2026/10/22/as-the-brewers-and-rays-are-proving-maybe-just-maybe-baseball-isnt-broken/?unlocked_article_code=1.KlE.YeT4.sKDC43LX6waO&source=user_shared_article&smid=ta-ios-share
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