The Dodgers Don’t Need to Be This Dominant Yet
The team currently destroying MLB is the one that knows none of this really matters right now.
Going into 2024, we knew the Los Angeles Dodgers would be a juggernaut. They had just added the best player on the planet, Shohei Ohtani, while sprucing up the rotation with Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and James Paxton, snagging the underrated Teoscar Hernandez to fill out the lineup, and churning out even more prospects (like Andy Pages and Landon Knack) from the minors. This team looked scary from the get-go.
But somehow, L.A. has exceeded even those high expectations early this season. After sweeping the Atlanta Braves — the other major candidate for “best team in baseball” status — by a combined score of 20-6 this past weekend, the Dodgers have MLB’s best run differential and top Elo rating, best World Series odds (21%) and two of the three best players in baseball by WAR (with Mookie Betts and Ohtani sandwiched around George Brett Bobby Witt Jr.).
And yet, manager Dave Roberts was careful not to inflate the value of a sweep in early May, even if it was against a longtime rival.
“You could argue that [the Braves are] the best team on paper. Certainly you can,” Roberts said. “That’s a team we definitely look at potentially seeing in October, if we’re fortunate.”
Roberts knows better because he’s been here before, time and again. The Dodgers’ current Elo rating (1569) might be the best in the majors right now, but L.A. was at 1574 through 38 games last year, 1588 in 2022, 1572 in 2021 and 1588 in 2020. Obviously, in only one of those seasons — the latter, which was a shortened season anyway1 — did the Dodgers actually win the World Series, which speaks to the disconnect between a team playing well at this point in the season and achieving its ultimate goal.
The Dodgers aren’t alone in that regard. Excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, 17 previous teams in the wild-card era (since 1995) posted an Elo of 1565 or higher through the first 38 games of the season. Of those, just two — the 1998 New York Yankees and 2016 Chicago Cubs — went on to win the World Series, with three more — the 1996 Braves, 2003 Yankees and 2019 Houston Astros — reaching the Fall Classic but losing once they got there. The rest found a way to fall short earlier in the postseason or, in the case of the 2002 Seattle Mariners, to not even make the playoffs at all.
Los Angeles did, however, just crack a 1565 Elo through 38 games in three straight seasons and failed to win a title in any of them, the first time that happened since the Cubs of 1909-1911. If L.A. falls short again this year, they’ll be the first team ever to squander this many hot regular season starts in a row in MLB history.
But what’s the alternative if you’re the Dodgers? Not winning a bunch of games in the regular season? How would that make things better? It’s not like you can “save up” your wins for October.
And certainly, if a team that added Ohtani fell flat early instead of dominating, we in the media would crush them for that as well. Because we all tend to take their regular-season success for granted, the Dodgers are kind of in a no-win situation here. No matter how well they play early on, their season will be judged almost entirely by what they do over a four-week span 5 months from now.
It’s a tough spot to be in, but that’s the reality of a baseball world where the postseason makes up more of a team’s season — and its legacy — than ever before. Let’s also be honest, the Dodgers bring this kind of thing on themselves by acquiring so many superstars and carrying one of the game’s highest payrolls.2 Big-ticket, big-market squads always invite big scrutiny.
Of course, Los Angeles could make these early season successes feel more enjoyable if they just won more in the postseason, as much easier as that’s said than done. Because the Dodgers haven’t consistently cracked that code yet, for all the dollars and talent they’ve thrown at the problem, these regular-season wins are always going to feel hollow on a certain level — or at the very least, like the appetizer for a main course that may or may not ever come.
So, strange as it sounds, only in October will we know how to judge L.A.’s dominance in May. By then, we’ll know whether it hinted at the potential of a champion, or if it was merely setting up the same story we’ve seen from this team many times before.
Filed under: Baseball
38 games into 2020’s 60-game schedule left 22 more contests before the playoffs, so the Dodgers’ rating in 2020 actually meant they were playing this well with a few weeks left in the regular season, rather than an early-season moment like 38 games represents right now in 2024.
Though not the highest.
Injury risk has, and will, continue to play a role for LA as it does for all clubs. Yet, LA continues to compete at a very high level despite that. It's really an underappreciated story. Look at last year's decimation of the pitching staff. Add on the loss of Turner, Lux and Seager a year earlier....yet, LA still won an astounding 100 games.
Much is always made of their big trades and FA signings, but I've always been more impressed by their stellar player development efforts. They can identify talent and develop it with few equals outside of Tampa and perhaps a handful of others. Oh, and let's remember that the Dodgers rarely have a high Draft slot to help - other than Clayton Kershaw at #7
The young players continually in their pipeline provide capital for trades and replacements when overpriced free agents are allowed to walk. They give the front office incredible flexibility and a huge competitive advantage. Consider how many LA prospects get traded...and how many never really seem to meet expectations once they leave the Dodger system. Reclamation projects like Max Muncy further prove the point. A reject from the A's system, once subject to the Dodger development system Muncy quickly blossomed into a star.
The Dodgers demonstrate that sustained success at the major league level is arguably less about how much you spend, and more about what you invest in. Sure, winning high profile trades and free agent signings certainly helps, but those only work as a result of the grunt work of relentlessly identifying and developing top young talent...and not rushing it to the majors until it is ready.
Or, you can just ask my friend who is a diehard Mets fan...
I'll offer a theory, although, it will be wildly unpopular here. Here goes.
The Dodgers strike me as overly consumed by following crude averages for post-season in-game decisions. This has hurt them repeatedly as well known to Dodger fans - though there is some irony discussed below. It's been a frequent criticism of Roberts that he is robot-like in following the "averages." It is often suggested that Roberts remains the manager because he invariably does whatever the front office says in games.
Is a large sample ensemble average predictive of a single specific in-game decision at hand i.e. the single use case in front of you? Others will disagree, but I firmly believe it often is not - averages (e.g. the mean) are descriptive of how a specific data cohort has performed over time and is often not necessarily predictive. For example, understanding what Aaron Judge's batting average is year over year - the same data cohort i.e. Aaron Judge - is descriptive of his career, but not necessarily predictive of his 2024...and that's a narrow sample of one. The penumbra of a larger sample average might provide some predictive insight, but far less for a single in-game decision than is believed in my view.
Large sample averages invariably includes use cases that are irrelevant to the present in-game situation and are not easily corrected through a larger sample size comprised of even more irrelevant use cases. In this year's World Series, will what Oakland did in Miami in June or what Cincinnati did on a rainy April night in Colorado be relevant to a post-season game decision from say the Yankees against the Dodgers? It has been noted:
"...It is statistical error to apply the average of a group of data points to a single point and assume it to be true. Even assuming data is normally distributed (a “bell curve”), the probability that any one data point will be the same as the average is 50% — the same as a random guess." (See Eric Luellen, “Why Averages Are Often Wrong.” Medium, 24 Oct. 2018, towardsdatascience.com/why-averages-are-often-wrong-1ff08e409a5b.).
The irony was 2020. In the World Series, Tampa Bay manager Kevin Cash famously removed starter Blake Snell from a game to insert a reliever. Cash was relying on large crude averages (the third time through the lineup penalty over all games) in making his decision, but Snell had been unhittable, having thrown only seventy-eight pitches over 5-1/3 innings while allowing only one earned run, two hits, no walks, and nine strikeouts. Snell was dealing, and his pitch count suggested at least seven innings with the Dodgers who were in danger of losing a crucial Game 6.
Not surprisingly – as evidenced by the exuberance of the Dodgers in the dugout - the decision immediately blew up on Cash, and the Rays never recovered. Part of the problem was that for the use case in front him, the Cash seemed to have forgotten that the real "third time through the lineup penalty" was in using reliever Nick Anderson whose multiple appearances in THAT SERIES - made him very familiar to LA's hitters. The Dodgers won - ironically - by finding a more robotic manager mindlessly worshiping at the altar of averages.
Averages are great at a high strategic level for the bell curve of games during the regular season. They fall off quickly in the post-season where the teams are limited and much higher performing that seasonal averages reflect. The post-season involves teams sometimes described as “data outliers” relative the average - and their data and your post-season match ups and decisions are too.
When the post-season hits, the Dodgers need a manager who is sees the post-season as fundamentally different than the regular season. One who is able to use his experience and judgment to make the best decision from the single use case in front of him and not simply reading it off a sheet and hoping for the best all while weakly arguing in the post-game presser he made the "right" decision because "the analytics" says so.
More specifically perhaps, the Dodgers need a manager who might - I don't know - decide to go off script and pinch hit a limping Kirk Gibson in the 9th in a World Series because of the specific match up in front of him - I suspect that ain't Dave Roberts.