Dodgers peaking on eve of playoffs
With bullpen straightened out, they’re on a roll
The most dangerous post-season teams are those that combine unmistakable talent and organizational smarts with an intangible quality best described as being ultimate survivors. Right now, nearly a week from the end of the regular season, that team, at least on the National League side, appears to be the Los Angeles Dodgers.
They’ve emerged from a mediocre, amorphous pool of contenders to establish themselves as the league’s team to beat.
A dazzling stretch of six wins in seven games this week against playoff hopefuls St. Louis and Colorado vaulted the Dodgers into first place in the highly competitive NL West, with a lead of 2½ games over the Rockies entering the weekend. And with a relatively weak schedule the rest of the way (vs. San Diego, at Arizona, at San Francisco), the Dodgers, after a tumultuous, inconsistent season, are in excellent position to win their sixth-straight division title.
Should they make it to October, the Dodgers would be the team no NL contender wants to face. After floundering for much of the season — they were 10 games under .500 on May 16, still at .500 as recently as June 9, 4½ games out of first place as recently as Aug. 22 and stuck in third place as recently as Aug. 30, they entered the weekend having won 18 of their past 25 games, playing their best stretch of baseball at precisely the right time.
While every contender must overcome setbacks over a 162game season, few have been pushed to the edge of oblivion as often and as acutely — and still survived — as the 2018 Dodgers.
To recap: They lost their most indispensable all-around player, shortstop Corey Seager, for the season to an elbow injury in late April. They were without their best hitter, Justin Turner, until the middle of May, thanks to a broken wrist. Some of the breakout stars of their pennant-winning 2017 team, including Cody Bellinger, Chris Taylor and Austin Barnes, were struggling to adjust to a league that had seemingly figured them out as hitters. At one point, Clayton Kershaw, Rich Hill and Hyun-Jin Ryu — 60 per cent of their opening day rotation — were sidelined with injuries at the same time.
The Dodgers’ depth, fuelled by a payroll consistently among the game’s biggest, was supposed to have mitigated these problems, but management seemed dumbfounded by the underperformance, with manager Dave Roberts at one point conceding, “It’s a mystery.”
Nowhere was the Dodgers’ shortfall more magnified than in the bullpen. For the better part of the season, they failed to build a sturdy seventh- and eighth-inning bridge to closer Kenley Jansen, and Jansen himself was struggling.
As late as the second week of August, when Jansen went on the disabled list after experiencing an irregular heartbeat and the Dodgers endured a stretch of late losses — which Jansen exacerbated with a series of blown saves upon his return — it appeared the faulty bullpen might torpedo their season.
But much as they did in 2017 when they called up Brandon Morrow in May, then traded for Tony Watson and Tony Cingrani in July, the Dodgers constructed a serviceable bullpen on the fly. This time, that included shifting starters Alex Wood and Kenta Maeda to the bullpen, then acquiring journeyman right-hander Dylan Floro, who entering the weekend had made 13-straight scoreless appearances.
“We feel we have one of the best, if not the best closers in baseball in Jansen,’’ general manager Farhan Zaidi said recently. “And we’ve generally thought it made more sense to invest elsewhere than the bullpen, because we have such a strong anchor, and we’ve had success finding those (setup) guys.”
Among the investments the Dodgers made elsewhere this summer was trading for Manny Machado — the best player to change teams at this year’s deadline — and Brian Dozier, then adding veteran first baseman David Freese in August.
This has allowed the Dodgers, essentially, to deploy platoons at every position except third base (Turner) and shortstop (Machado) — which partly explains how Roberts had used 152 different lineups, including the pitcher’s spot, in the team’s first 153 games.
Suddenly, in the past month, everything has started to come together. Since Aug. 24, when the stretch of 18 wins in 25 games began, Machado has hit six homers and driven in 19 runs; Yasiel Puig has slugged .774; Turner has slashed .378/.477/.633; and the bullpen has led all of baseball with a 2.45 ERA. Rookie Walker Buehler has a 1.43 ERA over his past eight starts.
“We’ve been inconsistent all year long,” Roberts told reporters this week. “Things are coming together at the right time. We’re right where we need to be. We control our own fate, and we’re now playing our best baseball.”
Even if the Dodgers clinch the West in the coming days and gain the luxury of easing into October, by no means will have they have an easy path to the NL pennant. The Cubs, though dealing with some debilitating injuries to their bullpen, are close to clinching the league’s best record and homefield advantage through the NLCS. The wild-card-leading Milwaukee Brewers own the league’s deepest and most potent bullpen and are also playing their best sustained stretch of baseball (19-9 since Aug. 18, entering this weekend).
Last year, the Dodgers won 104 games but stumbled into the postseason with a 13-22 finish that included 15 losses in 16 games — only to right themselves in October and push the Houston Astros to Game 7 of the World Series before falling.
Things are very different in 2018, when they will need a solid finish just to win 90. But the Dodgers’ survival instinct feels similar, and until they are vanquished for good, you wouldn’t want to count them out.