Treading Water

Kicking Furiously, Going Nowhere, Which Is... Good?

Cover Photo Courtesy: @LindseyWasson

Baseball is weird. There are oddities almost every game. Before the game Tuesday, we published an article claiming Tatis was unlucky at the plate. And then that night, his bad luck reached a nadir (hopefully):

Courtesy: @TooMuchMortons_

We’re not even mad, just impressed.

Tuesday’s game against the Mariners was a bullpen day, known by some as a scheduled loss. But the Padres got nine good innings from the pen. They only gave up two runs, one of which came when a Ray Kerr pitch clock violation resulted in a walk and a run driven in. The other came when this happened:

Courtesy: @LosMarineros

That’s definitely a hit. But there are also nights when Grisham catches that. And there are nights when that ball trickles over the wall – as it seemed to consider doing – and the run doesn’t score from first.  But tonight, the Mariners scored their second run, which was one more than they needed, and the Padres lost 2-0. It was the Mariners’ sixth straight win and the Padres’ third straight loss. The offense got shut down and Soto struck out four times for the first time in his career. Tatis continues to have the luck of a man who ran over a leprechaun with his car.

The game had a bit of a hungover feel. It’s fair to wonder if the brutal loss on Monday – which might have been the harshest of the season – has hurt morale.

About that loss: There are takeaways from the Dodgers series that are relevant to the Padres’ suddenly flagging stretch run. We already examined the Dodgers’ aggressive use of their closer; now let’s look at some other ways that they squeeze out wins. And then let’s never speak of that series again.

Lineup Deconstruction

One of the other ways the Dodgers seek win probability is through lineup construction. The Dodgers give heavy weight to platoon splits, and when they feel a player has an advantage, they are not afraid to make bold roster rearrangements to take advantage of it. In the first game of the series, the Dodgers sent out a lefty-heavy lineup against Yu Darvish. David Peralta hit fourth in that lineup and Jason Heyward was fifth.  In July, the Dodgers acquired Amed Rosario from the Guardians for Noah Snydergaard. The Guardians must not have thought much of Rosario, because they parted with him even after it became clear that Snydergaard wasn’t in the Dodgers’ plans.  Rosario however has excellent splits against left handers, and the Dodgers knew this.  Rosario batted eighth against righty Darvish Friday, but batted fifth against lefty Blake Snell on Saturday, then batted fourth and hit a home run against lefty Rich Hill Sunday. On Monday against righty Seth Lugo, Rosario was on the bench until he was called on to pinch hit against lefty Tom Cosgrove. The Dodgers hunt marginal value like this. And it adds up. Rosario’s OPS against lefties is .833.  Max Muncy’s OPS against righties is .883. Heyward’s OPS against righties is .823 this year. For comparison, both Machado and Tatis have sub .800 OPS overall this season.  Heyward has 256 plate appearances this year and 239 are against right handed pitchers. The Dodgers avoid letting him hit in situations in which he’s likely to fail. In doing so they get incredible production. When you look at the Dodgers lineup beyond the top of the order, it doesn’t stand out. But the lineup performs like it’s all-stars top to bottom. The Dodgers have the most runs scored (642) in the National League, more than the star studded Braves, and second most in MLB.  

Platoon splitting isn’t new, but what the Dodgers seem to have realized is that multi-position versatility has more value than it’s currently given in the marketplace. Rosario is a weapon against left handers, plays three positions, and they got him essentially for free. Multi-position versatility can be had without a price premium, and that’s the secret ingredient to being able to field a lineup with night-to-night platoon adjustments. You need multi-positional players in order to be able to field enough R/L matchups within the 26 man roster constraint. This observation makes the decision to DFA the multi-positional Rougned Odor instead of the extremely-position-limited Matt Carpenter look very bad. The Padres can’t do much platooning because they lack lineup flexibility.

At the trade deadline, it looked like the Padres were trying to increase their platoon options by acquiring Ji Man Choi and Garret Cooper. Choi is a lefty who hits righties well, and Cooper is a righty with an .862 OPS against lefties this year. Strangely, on Tuesday, Cooper started over Choi even though the Mariners had a right-hander on the mound. And we know Choi was available: He pinch hit later in the game. The Padres have acquired some Dodger-style positional flexibility, but they seem reluctant to actually use it. It’s not clear why.

If there’s one theme to this Padres season, it’s that they don’t seem to place high priority on seeking marginal win probability. But it adds up.  The Dodgers’ acquisition and deployment of Amed Rosario should be a case study every MLB executive becomes keenly familiar with. 

Better Now Than Later

Monday’s Straw Hat game saw Seth Lugo have his worst outing of the season, giving up eight runs in the top of fourth after the Padres had taken a 5-0 lead. The way the Dodgers scored the eight runs is notable for two reasons.  First, Lugo’s postgame comments suggested the Dodgers hitters knew which pitches were coming. A reporter asked ‘did you feel like they knew what was coming?’ Lugo answered ‘Yeah, we know now that they did.’

Courtesy: @973TheFanSD

Lugo may have meant he was tipping pitches, but some speculated he meant the Dodgers were stealing signs.  Importantly: It is not illegal to steal signs in MLB.  The Astros, Red Sox, and Dodgers have been investigated for allegations of using technology to steal signs. That’s commonly thought to be the line between cheating or not: Was technology being used. The Astros and Red Sox were penalized for this while the Dodgers were not. Lugo stating that it’s clear the Dodgers knew which pitches were coming is not a de facto allegation of cheating. It’s fair game to relay signs if a team is tipping pitches in a manner that can be perceived by on-field players and staff.

Lugo faced nine hitters in the fourth, threw 29 pitches, and got one lonely swing and miss. Those are the results you’d expect if a team’s hitters knew which pitches were coming. Again, this is perfectly legal as long as the Dodgers didn’t use of technology. This is seeking that marginal win probability wherever it can be found. All you can say about this is, if the Padres were tipping their pitches, better to find out now than later.  Presumably, if the Padres were able to identify what was tipping the Dodgers off, it’s fixable.

Automatic Take?

The second thing that stood out about how the Dodgers scored on Monday was their deviation from one of the rules of thumb in baseball: the automatic take on 3-0. The pivotal play on Monday came when Mookie Betts eschewed this rule, and swung at a 3-0 offering from Seth Lugo and hit a grand slam.  

From: @Dodgers

The cumulative slugging % in MLB over the past five years on 3-0 pitches is .838.  This statistic is beholden to very obvious selection bias as only a team’s best hitters are given the green light to swing 3-0.  Still, when given the green light, those players are crushing the ball.  The OPS for a player who takes a ball 3-0 is 1.000, but that comes entirely from the OBP of 1.000, and the SLG is .000. And, of course, any runners on base move up only one base, maximum. But if the player gets a hit – and slugging .838 on 3-0 counts means they often do – that yields more expected bases for the runners.

The Padres have had 86 plate appearances that went to a 3-0 count this season but have put the ball in play only six times. Are they leaving run scoring opportunities on the table? We’ll see if we can flesh this out in a later article.

Running Wild

The Dodgers stole 10 bases in the first three games of the series despite having only stolen 62 bases in the first 109 games of the season. The Dodgers are not a base-stealing team; they’re in the bottom half of the league in stolen bases. But they ran wild off of Blake Snell on Saturday, appearing to be running on first movement. Chris Taylor stole consecutive bases. Will Smith stole only his second base of the season, with the first one being stolen against…Blake Snell. Freddie Freeman stole a base. The Dodgers exposed a weakness that Snell will hopefully be able to improve.

Curiosities

Freddie Freeman leads the Dodgers with 16 stolen bases and has only been caught one time. This is a remarkable accomplishment consider that he is in the 34th percentile in MLB sprint speed.   Freeman’s relative prolificacy doesn’t appear to come from some weird situational quirk: Only one of his 15 bases were the back end of a double steal. Which raises the question: How is Freddie Freeman stealing so many bags?

One thing that probably helps is he usually runs on off-speed pitches; those pitches account for 9 or his 16 attempts.

55.1% of major league pitches are fastballs, so Freeman seems to be doing an above-average job of picking good pitches on which to run. But he’s still stolen 44 percent of his bags against fastballs, cutters, or sinkers. Last year, Freeman stole 13 bases and was caught only three times. Despite low sprint speed, it appears that Freddie Freeman somehow just knows how to steal bases.  

Here's another possibly-slow Dodger curiosity: Mookie Betts is a below-average runner by sprint speed. Betts wasn’t always slow; he was in the 87th percentile in sprint speed in 2020, in line with his career numbers. But in 2021, his sprint speed dropped to the 53rd percentile, and he was down to 50th in ’22 and 47th this year. It’s a steep decline, and it doesn’t really match the eye test. One has to wonder here if the Statcast data is computing correctly. Still, it makes Nola throwing him out in the NLDS last year seem like less of a fluke.  

Draft and Develop, then Bench?

Luis Campusano was an early round draft pick projected to be a plus offensive catcher. He raked through the minor leagues. So far this year, he’s been raking in the majors. He went 4 for 4 with two home runs Monday. But he was on the bench on Tuesday. This is almost certainly due to the Padres’ concern about playing both their catchers in the same game and their injury contingency plan (there isn’t one). We’ve covered this before: The risk of playing two catchers in the same lineup is quite low. The risk of either catcher having to leave the game due to injury is about 0.4%, the risk of both getting injured in the same game is about 0.0016%. If only one but not both catchers got injured a pitcher might have to bat etc. Regardless, Campusano must be wondering what he can do to get sustained playing time. It would really benefit the Padres to figure out exactly what they have in Campusano before the season is over, and if it turns out that he’s developing into what he was projected to be, he might even be the best option to help win games down the stretch.

Treading Water

We’ve been assuming that 90 wins is the threshold that the Padres will need to reach to make the post-season. The bad news is that the Padres just lost a discouraging series to the Dodgers and dropped the first game against the Mariners. The good news is that the Padres haven’t lost much ground in the Wild Card race because the teams around them are losing, too. We should remember that 90 wins is just our best guess at what will be necessary; a smaller number might do the trick. The 2006 Cardinals won a measly 83 games but also won the World Series. The best team in baseball usually doesn’t win the World Series, any team in the postseason has a chance. The last week has been pretty bad. But the bottom line hasn’t changed. The Padres just need to make it to the postseason. They’re not out of this yet.