Official 2018 Los Angeles Dodgers Thread : Game 4

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Game 6 won't look good for a bullpen game. I agree that Floro and Victor should have both gotten more outs. BUT....I wanted Julio in Game 4 and we gonna get Julio in Game 4. I feel really good about Walker, Julio, Clayton in the next 3 starts....

Keep in mind we also did not use Graterol or Jansen in either game. We didn't use Treinen either last night AND even though I wanted Victor to get more innings he barely pitched and should be available on Friday night if needed.

Also, when I think about the fact that Snell is their best pitcher and we still could have easily won this game, I feel REALLY GOOD.

I DO think Dave overmanaged, but I DON'T think this one is on him.

Hernandez flubbed the grounder at second that would have ended an inning in a double play that ended up giving up runs. And at least one of their runs (maybe 2....I can't remember if the second time it happened was right before the Hernandez play) the Ump bailed them out with a pitch that could easily have been a strike that ended up being a walk. We weren't as sharp in the field tonight.

Bottom line is we threw out one of our worst rotations and had a B- game in the field. They played their A game and only won by 2, we we had people on the bags late.

LETS GO GAME 3
 
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lawdog1 said:
I’m going to throw Dustin May in there too. I know he’s just a kid, but he’s been trash in the post-season.
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May has been thrown in very unique situations and on unique frequencies. It is what it is, at the end of the day he's a 23-year-old kid who will likely get it together. I don't believe the Dodgers were content with losing yesterday, but the likelihood of it was pretty high before the first pitch. Buehler is going tomorrow with the best pen arms now rested. I don't care how well Morton has been pitching in the postseason, Dodgers have to remember he's just Charlie Morton and to be patient at the plate to get him out by the 4th instead of the 5th or 6th.
 
DsLee said:
May has been thrown in very unique situations and on unique frequencies. It is what it is, at the end of the day he's a 23-year-old kid who will likely get it together. I don't believe the Dodgers were content with losing yesterday, but the likelihood of it was pretty high before the first pitch. Buehler is going tomorrow with the best pen arms now rested. I don't care how well Morton has been pitching in the postseason, Dodgers have to remember he's just Charlie Morton and to be patient at the plate to get him out by the 4th instead of the 5th or 6th.
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Very fair points all around.
 
Charlie Morton is 3-0 .57 era with 15.2 innings pitched.

Walker is 1-0 with 1.89 era with 19 innings pitched.

Man my nerves are on 10 right now...
 
tupac003 said:
Was watching around the horn and one of the panelists said that if you think about it, everything went perfect for the Rays and they barely won that game...

Hopefully Walker, Urias and Kershaw deal. If so....
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They have a good point. Snell was balling, our defense was crap and we still had a good chance to at least tie the game. I think we’ll be good.
 
Don't know that I believe Mookie Betts is better than Mike Trout, but it's not absurd to talk about it. From The Athletic:

Posnanski: Look out Mike Trout — Mookie Betts is now the best player in baseball

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Before we get into the details of this shameless hot take — Mookie Betts has supplanted Mike Trout as “Best Player in Baseball!” — let’s just say up front that this is a good conversation to be having again. It has been too long. Mike Trout has been the undisputed best player in baseball for years and years now; there wasn’t even a real argument to be had. In 2015, Bryce Harper had a season for the ages, and there was a brief flurry of “Hey, maybe Bryce Harper is the best player in baseball now!” talk.

That didn’t last long.

Harper faded quickly while Trout just kept rolling along, freight-train style. He had no equal. From 2014-2019, Trout led the league in on-base percentage four times, in slugging three times, in OPS four times, in OPS+ five times, he won three MVP awards, finished second twice, finished fourth the year he missed almost six weeks with injuries and compiled Wins Above Replacement like no one since, well, ever.

Most Baseball-Reference WAR for a player through age-28 season:

  1. Ty Cobb, 78.4
  2. Rogers Hornsby, 75.9
  3. Mike Trout, 74.4
  4. Mickey Mantle, 74.3
  5. Alex Rodriguez, 71.2
Trout is third on this list even though this includes the 2020 season, which is obviously a wash. If Trout could have played a full season, he probably would have passed Cobb and topped this list. We are talking about a no-doubt first-ballot Hall of Famer if he retired tomorrow. We are talking about a player who has a career 1.000 OPS and also has stolen 200 bases at an astounding 84 percent success rate and also has been a superb center fielder and also plays at this impossibly high level every … single … season. And he’s only 29 years old.

Sure, a few terrific players have played brilliant baseball through these years — a Joey Votto here, a Nolan Arenado there, Andrew McCutchen and Freddie Freeman and José Altuve and Paul Goldschmidt and Christian Yelich — but none of them have ever seriously challenged the reign of Trout.

Until now. So here’s my proposition: Mookie Betts is the best player in baseball right now.

And I’m saying it out loud because I want to have the argument again.

The best player argument has brought so much joy for more than 100 years. Cobb or Ruth. Williams or DiMaggio. Mays or Mantle (more on this in a minute). Koufax or Gibson. Brett or Schmidt. Bonds or Griffey. Pedro or Big Unit. The debates have created sparks, and those sparks have kept the game exciting, vibrant, alive. Trout’s quiet dominance closed all that off the last few years. I mean, you really could not viably argue for anyone else.

Betts’ genius gives us a chance to spark again.

There are two things I love about the Betts vs. Trout argument.

The first is that the case for Betts right now is pretty much the same case we made for Trout at the very beginning when he was fighting (and losing) MVP battles to Miguel Cabrera. By the most common of measurements, Miggy was clearly the better hitter. Heck, in 2012, he became the first player in more than 40 years to win a Triple Crown. He hit .330/.393/.606 that year with 44 homers, 139 RBIs, 109 runs scored. Trout’s numbers were also great (.326/.399/.564, 30 homers, 83 RBIs, 129 runs), but I don’t think too many people bought the context-driven case that Trout was the better hitter.

So instead, many of us leaned into Trout’s extraordinary all-around game. We made the point that Trout wasn’t just a great hitter, he was a fantastic outfielder (probably should have won a Gold Glove that year) and he was the game’s best base runner (49 stolen bases and was caught just five times), and if you added it all up, he was the better player. Trout didn’t win the battle then — Cabrera won the MVP in 2012 and 2013 — but he won the WAR.* He has been virtually unchallenged ever since.

*See what I did there?

And now? Well, now I actually think that Betts’ case is that he is the better all-around player.

Sure, Trout is the better hitter. Look at the last three years:

Trout: .298/.439/.631, 186 OPS+, 347 runs created.

Betts: .314/.405/.576, 157 OPS+, 333 runs created.

Trout walks more, and he hits with more power. Betts is amazing — the second-best offensive player in baseball over those years, I’d say — but there’s still a gap between them.

So, how does Betts make up that gap? Well, I think now he’s better at everything else. If you were following this strange season, you might have heard that Trout’s defense declined significantly. I don’t put a lot of stock into 60 games during a pandemic, but I would say that Trout’s defense has always been somewhat hard to track. He makes great catches and rarely makes mistakes, but his center-field range after his amazing 2012 defensive season has generally been about average, even a touch below. He has never won a Gold Glove which tells you that people in baseball, while awed by Trout, have never thought he was a superior defender.

Betts, meanwhile, is a superior defender. He is a right fielder, which is not as exciting as being a center fielder, but Betts plays right field the way Clemente did, the way Ichiro did: he impacts the game in numerous ways with his instincts and his speed and his arm. I don’t know if Betts singlehandedly turned around the NLCS with his brilliant defense — that feels like one of those momentum narratives that breaks down when you look more closely — but I do know he was absolutely amazing.

At this point, I’d say Betts is a better base runner than Trout, too. Trout has more or less stopped stealing bases, while Betts is a threat. Trout also has become less aggressive on the bases in general. There’s a fun statistic called Extra Bases Taken that looks at three scenarios: You’re on first when a single is hit; you’re on first when a double is hit; you’re on second when a single is hit. Then the stat calculates what percentage of the time you took the extra base.

It’s not a perfect stat for a number of reasons, but it’s still pretty interesting. In this short season, Trout took the extra base just 47 percent of the time, the lowest percentage of his career. His percentage has been declining over the last few years.

And Betts? In 2020, yes, short season, but he took the extra base 60 percent of the time. And with the exception of 2018 when he was more conservative, he has pretty consistently taken more bases than Trout the last few years.

These gaps are small, definitely. But I think they add up.

And finally, we must talk about something else, something that will infuriate many people but simply cannot be ignored: Betts is in the World Series for the second time in three years, and he’s doing wonderful things — winning the nation tacos, displaying his defensive and baserunning genius — while Trout misses another October. Do not misunderstand: I do not believe for one second that it is Trout’s fault that the Angels have never found a way to put a good team around him. That’s an Angels problem. I believe with all my heart that Trout is a winner, that he plays winning baseball, that he is the victim of failed management.

But as beautiful as baseball’s statistical world might be, it is not the real world. Circumstances do matter. Reggie Jackson would not be Reggie Jackson without the World Series. Sandy Koufax would not be Sandy Koufax without the World Series. Bob Gibson would not be Bob Gibson without the World Series. When we talk about who the best player in baseball is, we cannot avoid the obvious point that Mookie Betts is doing amazing things in October when it matters most. And Mike Trout, alas, is not.

I think you put it all together, and Betts has taken the top spot.

I mentioned there are two things I like about having this argument and here’s the second: Trout vs. Betts echoes baseball’s greatest argument, Mantle vs. Mays.

Think about it: Trout is Mantle. You can see in the chart above that they mirror each other in WAR. Trout, like Mantle, plays a good center field, runs the bases well, but it is power and plate discipline that sets them both apart. Mantle’s major argument over Mays was that he walked so much more and in his prime hit more home runs and, as such, was the better player. Trout’s argument is the same.

And Betts is Mays. They both alter games with their hitting, their power, their defense, their arms, their speed.

So much of baseball these days feels unfamiliar, there’s no way around that. There’s the pandemic background, obviously. But even on the field, Game 2 of the World Series featured 12 pitchers, 22 strikeouts, five home runs, and it lasted three hours and 40 minutes. The game failed to entirely hold the interest of the actual game announcers, Joe Buck and John Smoltz, who at some point in the middle went on a long discourse about the NFC East. You rarely hear announcers in the third quarter of an NFL game talk at length about the relative merits of the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers.

So yes, absolutely, I love that Trout vs. Betts ties to the past and brings Mantle and Mays forward again. I’ve been as big a Mike Trout fan as anybody the last few years. And now? I’ve got Mookie Betts. Let’s argue about it.
 
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