it does suck. Letting more teams in has not created more fun playoff baseball. Most of these series are a slog. Only Philly - Atlanta is livign up to any hype. It certainly devalues the regular season. but it also can no longer be an excuse. the dodgers are better than Arizona, rusty or not. Doesn't stop Houston from handling business.
My one rebuttal is snakes are much better than the twins. More dynamic talent and a much tougher division made them more battle tested.
And more on the battle tested thing… maybe Dave shouldn’t have pulled the top of the order every time we were down 5 runs in the 5th inning this season.
Exactly this. It was "Oh okay this is the year they try and get under the luxury tax and reset all that stuff" and I thought they might be a WC team that wins 87 games and could enter the postseason as somewhat of an underdog if anything. Friedman and co. have the regular season entirely figured out, where you can run your statistical models and analytics and there's enough of a sample size to see it play out provided people are healthy. All the smart GMs basically admit they build a team to make the playoffs but once they get there its mostly just coinflips and luck. Which in a literal sense isn't wrong. But we could've all said back in just about any pre-deadline month that this team severely lacked a rotation that was going to throw its weight around in the postseason. IMO the formula for the postseason is less platooning, durable starting pitchers, and limiting the amount of 3 true outcome players like Muncy in your batting order
I remember in the Colletti years when the Dodgers made the playoffs we were usually 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 4 of the teams in the NL in terms of talent and would just hope we'd get hot and go on a run only for us to get dispatched quickly. Now we have been clearly 1 or 2 for a decade in the NL and have lost to random teams getting hot. Love this sport
Spectrum just announced they are launching the option to stream the Lakers channel for 20 bucks a month without a cable/satellite subscription. Hopefully the Dodger channel is next
If that happens, I probably go to YouTube TV. My kid watches every dodger game so can’t cut the cord yet and the vpn stuff is too much.
Nine months is perfect. Let him rejoin the club in late July/early Aug and just get tuned up for the playoff bust.
This is like the third guy that was on the playoff roster that had season ending surgery after the season. Crazy how beat up the roster was. The mookie/freeman performances will define the postseason but even if they were performing well the roster was doomed with a rotation of injured kershaw, two rookies and lynn giving up bombs every game. Hopefully the team gets healthy, sign some FAs, and invest in a new sports psychologist
It’s been a bummer to see homegrown talent like May, Buehler, and Bellinger have career defining injury luck here.
Now a free agent for the second time in his career, Hernández said he is more willing to re-sign with the Dodgers than he was during the 2020-2021 offseason, via the “Foul Territory” show: “Yeah, definitely. I’m definitely more open than I was in ’20. In ’20 it was a for sure no, because I was looking for an opportunity to play every day. The roster was a little different. I think the roster was a little deeper back then, so it was harder for me to get consistent at-bats. I went there this year not thinking I was going to play as much as I did. Just like the last time, it’s going to be all about fit and the right place. These are things that are not easy to take into consideration, especially now with a kid. We’ll see. I’m not opposed to coming back but I’m also not closing doors on 29 other teams.” “At least I got to experience it already once. Day 1 of free agency, like half the league called. I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be great. I’m going to get $300 million.’ And then down to the wire, there was only like four teams that had legit interest. At the end of the day, one more team made an offer but it wasn’t an official offer, so at the end of the day just the Red Sox offered me a contract. So at least I know what to expect and I’m not going to be bugging my agent every single day.”
missed this from Buster on 11/6 Olney: Dodgers. A friend of Ohtani said he believes Ohtani already knows where he wants to sign. He'll go through the process -- standing back as his agent negotiates and works to goose the final numbers -- but in the end, Ohtani will drive this thing. So maybe the bidding doesn't matter that much, so long as the team he wants to play for steps up with a decent offer. And my guess is that'll be the Dodgers. One person in the Dodgers' organization said president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman is "obsessed" with Ohtani and that Friedman will put L.A. in position to land him. Ohtani would make the most sense, at this moment, for the Rangers -- they have a blank checkbook and the time to let him heal as a pitcher -- but I think Ohtani picks Southern California, again.
Trout might be my favorite player in the league and I'm not sure I'd want to empty the war chest for him. Too injury prone. 36 games played in 2021 119 in 2022 82 in 2023 plus his OBP has really dipped the last few years from his peak
Christian McCaffrey gives me hope but I just don't see Trout's game aging well. He's not drawing walks anymore, his legs are no longer a weapon, his K% is on the rise, he isn't really CF material defensively anymore Not to mention he's signed through 2030