Corey Seager – Anatomy of a 14 game hitting streak
Corey Seager extended his streak to 14 games last night pushing his batting average over .300, and has now reached the magical .900 OPS mark. We know all streaks are not created equal. Some are simply a bunch of unproductive singles sprinkled in with a double here and there. This streak is not one of those:
- 62 PA, 24 hits, 12 runs scored, 8 doubles, 1 triple, 2 home runs
- Triple stat line of .421 / .468 / .702
- Seven multi-hit games, five times he’s had two hits, one time he’s had three hits, one time he’s had four hits
- In seven of his last eight games he’s had at least one extra-base hit
James Loney settling in with the NY Mets
The long time LAD ex -first baseman has shockingly filled the void of the Lucas Duda injury for the Mets.
James Loney was toiling in AAA for the Padres on May 27th when he was purchased by the NY Mets to replace Lucas Duda who had been placed on the DL. Loney couldn’t even hold a job with Tampa Bay this past spring, but the purchase by the Mets has put new life into his old bat.
James Loney has a triple stat line of .297 / .345 / .495 in 120 plate appearances. That slugging % is the highest it has been since early 2013. One has to assume that will be the peak for Loney, and a long slow (or fast) climb down the triple stat line ladder is in his future. Yet, it has been great to see Loney get some keys hits when it looked like his major league career was done.
Maybe Will Venable can do the same for the Dodgers. They were both released this spring, both hooked up with AAA teams, both were given a second chance.
Corey Seager wins his first NL Rookie of the Month award
Per the press release:
Dodgers rookie shortstop Corey Seager led Major League rookies in hitting (.343, 35-for-102), hits, home runs (8), runs (20), total bases (69), and slugging (.676), while pacing National League rookies with a .409 on-base percentage and eight doubles. The 22-year-old slugger’s 13 RBI were the third-most among NL rookies last month. This is his first career monthly award, and the first for a Dodgers rookie since Alex Guerrero (April 2015).
It all sounded so good until the last sentence.
Bud Norris 3rd best game score for pitcher traded in-season in LAD history
As Bud Norris was shutting down the Rockies last night, my mind wandered back to Brad Penny and his brilliant debut. Paul Depodesta blew up Los Angeles by trading Paul Loduca, the heart and soul of the team in the middle of a pennant race for Penny. Depo knew the team needed another starter if they were going to have a chance against the Cardinals in the postseason and made a calculated gamble that was disliked by most Dodger fans.
It was a brilliant move by Depodesta that looked great after the Brad Penny debut. Penny would put up the greatest game score debut for a pitcher that was traded for during the season. Unfortunately, for Depodesta the trade ultimately backfired when Penny was shut down after only two starts with nerve damage. Penny would make one more start but was unable to pitch in the postseason.
I started researching to see how the Bud Norris debut held up. The criteria was very simple, players traded for during the season and their debut game. I’m using the game score metric for this list.
Very well, actually. Number three on the list. I remember each of these games except the Rick Honeycut and Jim Bunning games.
Carlos Perez would not only have a great debut game, but would go on a roll that Sept tossing two shutouts, and pitching nine innings four games in a row.
There are some solid LAD names on this list, along with some very forgettable ones who were thankfully gone after the season ended. Nolasco, Garland, Correia, and Hernandez in particular.
I was surprised that Brian Bohannon did not make the cut.
I was also surprised at how few trades were made from 1958 – 1980 during the season. Jim Bunning was an exception. The 1969 Dodgers traded for HOF Bunning in August and the future HOF and Senator provided a game score of 63. I had forgotten the Dodgers in 69 were even in the pennant race that late in the year.
| Player | Date | GamsScore |
| Brad Penny | 8/3/2004 | 81 |
| Ricky Honeycut | 8/21/1983 | 76 |
| Bud Norris | 7/1/2016 | 75 |
| Ted Lilly | 8/3/2010 | 74 |
| Greg Maddux | 8/3/2006 | 72 |
| Carlos Perez | 8/1/1998 | 72 |
| Ricky Nolasco | 7/9/2013 | 70 |
| Jon Garland | 9/3/2009 | 64 |
| Kevin Correia | 8/11/2014 | 64 |
| Roberto Hernandez | 8/8/2014 | 63 |
| Jim Bunning | 8/19/1969 | 63 |
Bud Norris notches 7th best start in career in LAD debut
Does it bode well for the LAD that Bud Norris has pitched two of the best games of his career in back to back starts?
You couldn’t have asked Bud Norris to do any more than what he did on Friday night in place of Clayton Kershaw. Norris not known as a strikeout pitcher struck out eight in only six innings, while shutting out the potent Rockie offense.
Historically, using game score as the metric, this was the 7th best start in the career of Bud Norris.
| Date | Opp | IP | H | ER | BB | SO | GmScr |
| 5/1/11 | MIL | 7.2 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 11 | 81 |
| 9/26/12 | STL | 7.1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 81 |
| 9/12/14 | NYY | 7 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 10 | 79 |
| 6/9/14 | BOS | 8 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 6 | 79 |
| 6/26/16 | NYM | 7 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 77 |
| 8/12/11 | LAD | 7 | 2 | 0 | 4 | 8 | 77 |
| 7/1/16 | COL | 6 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 8 | 75 |
Bud Norris has made 177 starts so when your 176th and 177th starts, are two of the best starts of your career, you start to wonder if an old dog has learned new tricks as suggested by Jeff Sullivan in this Fangraphs article on June 27th.
Corey Seager – Anatomy of a 13 game hitting streak
Corey Seager has a 13 game hitting streak, and as we know all streaks are not created equal. Some are simply a bunch of unproductive singles sprinkled in with a double here and there. This streak is not one of those:
- 58 PA, 22 hits, 11 runs scored, 8 doubles, 1 triple, 2 home runs
- Triple stat line of .415 / .466 / .717
- Six multi-hit games, four times he’s had two hits, one time he’s had three hits, one time he’s had four hits
- In his last seven games, he’s had at least one extra-base hit
Ten reasons why the Dodgers are probably toast
I can go positive and I can go negative. Jon Weisman already made the case for staying positive, so I thought to myself, can I find nine reasons not to be optimistic? Heck, I could probably find 20 but I’ll limit myself to ten.
- The best hitter on the team is a rookie who has yet to have a slump. Even though Corey Seager is the greatest thing since Mike Piazza, can he follow Mike Piazza and continue carrying the offense on his back until the end of the year?
- Adrian Gonzalez not only looks lost but sounds lost. Just the other day he lamented the defensive shifts he is seeing and bemoaned they are making him a .250 hitter. Heck Adrian, Dodger fans will take .250, just hit a home run once in a while instead of ground balls to second. You can’t really blame the shift on your lack of power. Call up Big Papi and ask him how he’s doing it. You can’t complain about how baseball is making slow 1st baseman obsolete when Big Papi is rewriting record books while being the slowest player in baseball.
- Ryu could barely get through his rehabs without having to stop multiple times. What do you think is going to happen when he has to pitch every fifth day for a month?
- Julio Urias has two more starts and then is gone from the rotation. For how long we don’t know. All year? Until Sept? Can he be effective out of the bullpen?
- Bud Norris could be good, average, below average, or horrible, and for his career, he’s been the latter two much more than the former two. Notice that none of those options are above average.
- Dave Roberts thinks that Howie Kendrick is a starting left fielder. A left fielder who is about to garner his 100th plate appearance as a left fielder without driving in one single player that wasn’t named Howie Kendrick.
- Puig looks good again, but for how long? Will it be the hamstring that takes him down, or will it simply be that he’s not very good?
- Injury-plagued seasons don’t simply stop being injury plagued. If this season can take down Clayton Kershaw it can take down anyone.
- The phrase – “the soft underbelly of the bullpen” might get used three out of five games for a while.
- If everything goes right the Dodgers could win exactly as many games in the second half without Kershaw, and still not make the postseason because they are battling multiple teams for the wild card, not just chasing the Giants. Two of probably four teams are going to make the wild card from among the Marlins/Mets/Cardinals/Dodgers.
That wasn’t much fun. Well, to be honest, writing the Adrian part was fun, but for the most part, this column doesn’t have much of a payback to the writer.
Also by the time I got to the end of number ten and re-read what I wrote. I don’t see any reason why the Dodgers can’t be the play-in game. Normally a writer would cancel this column and try another angle, but I’m committed, and since no one will read it anyway, I’ll post it as it is.
Julio Urias making history
Link to the Julio Urias category page:
[2016 Postseason Update] Urias appeared as a relief pitcher on Oct 13th making him the youngest pitcher to pitch in an NLDS game. Urias threw two shutout innings, partial because of a 3rd base coach boner. It was the game that inspired the “Kershaw Saves ” T-Shirt and possibly the greatest NLDS game played by the Dodgers. Urias will be starting on 10/19/16 making him the youngest starting pitcher ever in the postseason. Hopefully, we will have a positive update.
Oct 19th start. I was David Young and we watched young Julio strike out four of his first nine outs. That was the peak Julio, but he wasn’t stretched out to get more than nine outs, and the Cubs caught up to him in the fourth. He would end up getting eleven outs but give up four earned runs in the fourth. That was the last game Urias would pitch in 2016. Quite a season for a guy who started the year 19 years old and broke many LAD records for a teen-ager and put himself on many major league teen-ager leaderboards.
[Season Ending Update]
Julio Urias breaks Joe Moellers fifty-four-year-old record for LAD strikeouts for a teenager by fanning four in his 7/21/16 start giving him 48 compared to Joe’s 46. With the season now over for Urias, he ends the year with 84 strikeouts.
Urias ends his season with the 7th most strikeouts by a teenager in the NL since 1958. Urias is 9th overall when you include the AL and NL.
As you can see, Urias also holds the 2nd highest SO9 rate of any teenager since the LAD came into existence in 1958. Just Dwight Gooden and the infamous Rick Ankiel have fanned hitters at a better rate then Julio.
As great as all these teenagers were, you don’t see any hall of fame pitchers here. Gooden didn’t fall victim to arm issues but to drugs. Gary Nolan had a massive bone spur, and the story about that will turn your gut when you see how disposable baseball felt about their greatest assets. Joe Posnanki details how Frank Jobe saved Gary Nolan’s career.
He was 18 years old when he made his first start in the big leagues — he and Feller are the only two pitchers in baseball history to strike out 10 or more big league batters in a game before they turned 19 years old.
“Pitchers have to throw with pain,” his Reds manager Sparky Anderson told him. “Bob Gibson says every pitch he’s ever thrown cut him like a knife. You gotta pitch with pain, kid.”
Larry Dierker threw 1250 major league innings by the age of 23. Mike McCormick would win a Cy Young at age 28 in 1967 for the Giants but he was never really more than an average pitcher. Ray Sadecki became famous for getting traded from the Cardinals to the Giants for Orland Cepeda in 1966. Cepeda would lead the Cardinals to the 1967 World Championship while winning the MVP and eventually hit his way into the HOF.
Here is the complete list of NL teenagers from 1958 on who struck out at least 40 hitters:
| Player | Year | Age | SO | SO9 | SO/W |
| Dwight Gooden | 1984 | 19 | 276 | 11.39 | 3.78 |
| Gary Nolan | 1967 | 19 | 206 | 8.18 | 3.32 |
| Larry Dierker | 1965 | 18 | 109 | 6.69 | 2.95 |
| Larry Dierker | 1966 | 19 | 108 | 5.2 | 2.4 |
| Ray Sadecki | 1960 | 19 | 95 | 5.43 | 1.1 |
| Billy McCool | 1964 | 19 | 87 | 8.76 | 3 |
| Julio Urias | 2016 | 19 | 84 | 9.8 | 3.6 |
| Mike McCormick | 1958 | 19 | 82 | 4.14 | 1.37 |
| Don Gullett | 1970 | 19 | 76 | 8.81 | 1.73 |
| Mike McQueen | 1970 | 19 | 54 | 7.36 | 1.74 |
| Joe Moeller | 1962 | 19 | 46 | 4.83 | 0.79 |
Can Bud Norris and the cavalry save the Dodger season?
Depth replaces adequacy, it doesn’t replace brilliance.
Jon Weisman gives nine reasons why Dodger fans should not dispair. As usual, Jon hits the right notes but is the case convincing? Does it have to be? If you are a fan you should be a fan, even when the chips are down.
With Clayton Kershaw on the DL for what will be an extended period of time for the first time in his career, the chips are certainly down. The Dodger faithful could be excused for giving up on postseason aspirations but not on the team. The odds are long, they are after all six games back of the Giants with half a season already gone and that was with the best pitcher in baseball. Jon talks about the wild card, and even though the Dodger lead the wild card, it is very close with multiple teams, and none of them just lost their ace. The Pirates lost their ace a month ago and didn’t react well to it losing 12 of their next 18 games and basically dropping out of the wild card race, a race they led headed into June.
Can the rotation without Clayton fill the gigantic hole created by his absence?
The rest of the rotation hasn’t exactly been Drysdale/Osteen after Koufax, or Sutton/John after Messersmith, or Sutton/John/Rau/Rhoden after Hooten, or Ruess/Hooten after Fernando or Leary/Belcher after Orel.
The current rotation schedule looks like this and do try to stifle that smirk.
Bud Norris – making his first start, replacing Kershaw in the rotation. As noted Bud was good in June, but counting on Bud Norris to continue to be someone he’s rarely been before is probably not a good idea. Bud has five straight starts in June with game scores > 50, with his best start of the year his last start of the year before being traded to the Dodgers. That game was the fifth best in his career and it turned him into a Dodger. I know we are supposed to count on our scouting to make the best decisions, but it was only a year ago the scouts told the Dodger front office that Mat Latos would help the team after Mat put up solid starts in June/July of 2015 only to never pitch one good inning for the Dodgers. So yeah, I’m skeptical but also holding out hope that Fangraphs is right, that Bud Norris has tweaked himself just enough that a meaningful change has occurred.
Scott Kazmir – five starts in June with game scores ranging from 43 to 51. Never awful, never good. His average of fifteen outs per outing in June won’t cut it going forward. That is OK for a nineteen-year-old, that is not OK for a 32-year-old getting 12.5 million in the first year of his three-year deal.
Julio Urias – this would be great if Urias was a year older or even two years older and all the inning limits had been lifted, but we know that Urias has a maximum of two more starts in the rotation, so he’s just a placeholder until after the all-star break.
Brock Stewart – great story, but unless Brock can go a full five innings without a meltdown, he’s probably just a placeholder for now.
Kenta Maeda – hasn’t quite been what we needed as far as working deep into games, but Kenta has been very good at suppressing runs in the innings he’s pitched. Ranked as one of the top 20 pitchers in the National League, he’s now the defacto ace of the rotation until either Clayton returns or someone else steps up while Clayton is out.
That is the current rotation, a group of pitchers that are basically 15 out pitchers. That will destroy a bullpen faster than a Chapman fastball.
Can the cavalry help?
Ryu has been rehabbing for months now, but finally appears to be on the cusp of joining the rotation. If Ryu has no more setbacks, he is set to replace Julio Urias in the rotation after the all-star break. I have no idea what to expect, if you were to get the historical Ryu, that would shock everyone and be a huge boost to the rotation. In 56 starts, Ryu has averaged 18 outs per outing. Yet, he’s coming off of major surgery, hasn’t pitched in the major leagues since 2014, and I’m skeptical that he can be effective enough to get 18 outs with any consistency this season. Ryu could help, but at best, he’s simply going to replace Urias, not be any better, and at worst won’t stay in the rotation.
Brandon McCarthy is almost on the same pace as Ryu. The difference is that McCarthy is coming off of Tommy John surgery, not labrum surgery, and has missed only one year. McCarthy should be replacing Brock Stewart in the rotation after the all-star break, and since that rotation spot has been the bugaboo all season, it does not take a lot of optimism to think that McCarthy can upgrade that spot. How much is unclear. McCarthy himself has had a spotty career. The Dodgers signed him after his career season, but he lasted only four starts before needing TJ surgery. We really have zero ideas what McCarthy can do for the team but it is doubtful that just one year after surgery that he can just glide right into the 2014 version.
Jose De Leon – if all things had gone right, Jose would have gotten the first call to the majors from the farm system, but Jose had health issues that shut him down at the start of the year. He’s back and pitching well, as he gets stretched out, Jose is certainly someone who could help in the rotation if anyone falters. I’ve put him ahead of Wood because he’ll be ready before Wood.
Ross Stripling made the rotation and was shut down to keep his inning count down. Ross had TJ surgery several years ago and only threw 71 innings last year. He’s pitching again, and should be stretched out in a few weeks if the Dodgers need someone. Ross was adequate, and adequate is ok when asked to be the fifth starter. If he’s asked to be any more than that, that would be problematic.
Alex Wood was shut down a month ago for a posterior impingement. He recently started a throwing program but was also put on the 60 day DL yesterday, which means he is definitely out for all of July. If Wood can return, he would certainly help.
Frankie Montas had rib surgery in February. He came back from that and was on the verge of joining the Dodger rotation several weeks ago when he hurt his rib again. He’s out for a while, he might be able to join the team in Sept, but if so it will certainly be out of the bullpen. This one hurt a lot, as Montas has as big an arm as anyone in the system.
The rotation following the All-Star Break should be:
- Kenta Maeda
- Scott Kazmir
- Hyun-jin Ryu
- Brandon McCarthy
- Bud Norris
That would be rotation would look good if we didn’t have all these qualifiers like coming back from surgery. It would look better if Clayton was part of it.
Which leads us to the biggest question of the season. How long will Clayton Kershaw be out? For sure until after the all-star break. I think it is also for sure that he’ll be out all of July, and possibly all of August. We will know more after the epidural shot has had time to do its job and he’s examined again.
If Clayton misses a month, this team can still compete for the post season. If Clayton misses six weeks the odds get longer. If Clayton misses two months, I don’t see a reasonable chance. My biggest concern is the taxation of the bullpen without that one guy giving them a break every five games. You can handle this for a few weeks, maybe a month, but two months? probably not. Or maybe all this depth makes it possible.
I’m not writing off the season because anything can happen in baseball, but even the play-in game looks doubtful right now with how the team is currently constructed. Clayton was the reason the Dodgers were going to compete for the postseason, and no one can replace the best pitcher in baseball if he’s gone for any length of time. Yes, that last sentence is simply stating the obvious.
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Dodgers, Yesterday and Today 