Dodgers dominate early August schedule in spite of Seager / Bellinger on-base woes

Phil Gurnee ♦ August 12, 2019 ♦ Leave a comment

The whole point of this column was to highlight how bad Cody and Corey have been in August even with the Dodgers winning 80% of their games in August so far.

When I checked the August splits I was aghast that Cody had an OPS of .863. That isn’t bad, that is good and I’d need another angle, but before I could blink into that angle I also noticed that Corey and Cody are sharing the same OBP of .263 for August. And that is bad. Now I know that we are dealing with a very small sample size but that isn’t the point of this. The point of this little column is that even with Cody/Corey only getting on base about one-quarter of the times they come up, their inability to get on base has done little to stop the Dodger locomotion as the Dodgers chug their way to a plus 100 win season. The Dodgers are 8 – 2 in August in spite of Cody/Corey.  That is amazing, how are the Dodgers doing that?

Starting pitching and the revived bats of Pollock, Martin, and Joc.

Most of the damage in August has come from AJ Pollock, Russell Martin, Will Smith, Justin Turner, and Joc Pederson. Each of those listed above has an OPS greater than .900 so far in August.  Pollock is doing all his damage against LHP, and of course, Joc is doing all his damage against RHP.

You know who isn’t hitting in August besides Seager? Kristopher Negron and Tyler White. Negron made a big splash in late July but has only seven singles in August even while starting ten of the last twelve games. Tyler White has been unable to get it going and has only one hit which came in his 2nd at-bat. Neither is cause for concern because both were just placeholders while the Dodgers wait for Kiké, Taylor, Freese, and recently acquired Jeff Gyorko to come off the injured list.

The rotation so far in August had two rookies making the season debuts at Dodger Stadium and was still incredible. The Dodgers have made ten starts and only two have been bad. One of those bad starts was by Dustin May in his debut but……..

Player             Split Year W L  ERA GS   IP  H  SO/W sOPS+
Hyun-Jin Ryu      August 2019 1 0 0.00  1  7.0  5  4.00    28
Tony Gonsolin     August 2019 1 0 0.00  1  6.0  2  7.00   -23
Walker Buehler    August 2019 1 0 0.60  2 15.0  9  7.67    20
Clayton Kershaw   August 2019 2 0 2.08  2 13.0 10  2.33    70
Dustin May        August 2019 0 1 3.18  2 11.1 14 10.00    94
Kenta Maeda       August 2019 1 0 4.66  2  9.2  8 10.00    48

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used
Generated 8/12/2019.

Included in the August starts were :

• The seventh-best game score (77) by Kenta Maeda in his career
• The debut start of Tony Gonsolin who threw six dominant shutout innings
• The debut start at Dodger for Dustin May, who faltered in the 6th in his first start but bounced back for a terrific second start
• The return of Ryu from the injured list who threw just about a perfect seven innings as he continues to make his case for the 2019 CYA
• Walker Buehler putting up a game score of 88 with 15 K’s and zero walks, one of the most dominant games of 2019.

And it is just August 12th

With 120 games played and 42 left the Dodgers only have to win half their games the rest of the year to reach 100 wins for the season.  On the season the Dodgers are 48 – 16 at home which equates to a robust .750 winning percentage or in real layman terms, the Dodgers are winning three out of every four games they play at home. With only seventeen home games still remaining out of the 42 games left Dodger fans won’t get to see the team very much but when they are home they will be playing the New York Yankees, BlueJays, Rockies, Giants, Tampa, and the Rockies. On the road, they get games against some of the worst teams in baseball such as Miami and Baltimore.

I’d bet on 106 wins right now.