Andre Ethier with his family at his Dodger Stadium retirement ceremony in 2018.
(Jon SooHoo/Los Angeles Dodgers)
For most players on the 2017 Dodgers, the sign-stealing scandal perpetrated by the Houston Astros jeopardized a tremendous chance for Los Angeles to win the World Series.
For Andre Ethier, it was his last chance.
When he thought he was being traded to the Angels, Ross Stripling started wrestling with whether he would intentionally throw at an Astros hitter to retaliate. He concluded he probably would, at the right time, in the right place. I think it’s a fascinating question.
— Pedro Moura (@pedromoura) February 14, 2020
“I would lean toward yes,” Stripling said. “In the right time and in the right place. Maybe I give up two runs the inning before and I got some anger going. Who knows? But yeah, it would certainly be on my mind.”
* * *
No active Astro player has been punished for the sign-stealing scandal, and that’s wrong. Something should happen, right? Even the kinds of cheating that baseball holds in a warm place in its heart, like scuffing a baseball, get sanctioned when the details come out in the open.
Understandably, into that vaccum, calls for frontier justice have increased, as you can see from the Ross Stripling quote above. If Stripling, one of the most cerebral players in the game, is thinking an eye for an eye, you can imagine what a large cross-section of ballplayers are pondering — not to mention aggrieved fans out for blood.
As much as the impulse is understandable, this can’t happen.
It feels like 10 years since I last saw a Dodger game.
It feels like we’ve lived through an entire era of baseball in the four months and three days the Dodgers last walked off the field, heads bowed. It feels like we’ve aged a generation.
As I hibernated with other activities, I watched Dodger fans descend in to a deep well of anger and despair. The winter of our discontent barely seems adequate to describe it. Behind center field, offseason construction tore a hole in Dodger Stadium, delivered directly from Metaphors ‘R’ Us.
The bitterness of the Dodgers’ shocking Game 5 loss in the National League Division Series lingered like a slow-acting toxin, blackening the rose petals of fandom.
The unrequited pursuit of big-name talent, Gerrit Cole in particular, generated a sense of Kafkaesque imprisonment, blinding the reality that none of the Dodgers’ top rivals except the Yankees had improved their rosters. Then again, if the Yankees become the team to beat, isn’t that anguish enough?
Then the earth trembled, the ground beneath our feet cracked open and the void opened.
This morning, I was driving Youngest Master Weisman to a school event and while preparing to make a left turn, a car coming the opposite direction sped through the red light. I shuddered. And once again, I thought, “that’s how quickly it can happen.”
I’m not here right now — this just seems like a nice, writerly pic.
Over the past year, I have published as little as I have since nearly the start of the 21st century. But it has been one of my most fulfilling years as a writer.
A quick word about this list and its TV companion: I have chosen my favorites. There might be higher-quality movies or more important movies for a given letter, but these are the movies that meant the most to me.
And the bottom line is, you can’t change the letter you’ve been assigned … except in the case of National Lampoon’s Animal House, which I discuss below.
A: Arrested Development
B: Breaking Bad
C: Cheers
D: The Dick Van Dyke Show
E: EZ Streets
F: Freaks and Geeks
G: The Good Place
H: Hill Street Blues
I: I Love Lucy
J: Justified
K: The Kids in the Hall
L: The Larry Sanders Show
M: Mad Men
N: Northern Exposure
O: The Office
P: Parks and Recreation
Q: Quincy, M.E.
R: Rectify
S: Seinfeld
T: Taxi
U: Undeclared
V: Veep
W: The White Shadow
X: The X-Files
Y: Young Justice
Z: Zoom
Most surprisingly competitive letter:
W: The White Shadow, The Wire, WKRP in Cincinnati, The Wonder Years
Gleyber Torres has never played for the Dodgers, but he has come to have a peculiar place in Dodger lore.
People keep saying that the Cubs’ July 25, 2016 trade of Torres, then a 19-year-old mega-prospect, with three other players to the Yankees for super reliever Aroldis Chapman is an example of what the Dodgers need to start doing in pursuit of an elusive 21st-century World Series title.
Supposedly, Torres is the canary in the Dodgers’ coalmine of caution.
“Their organizational philosophy prevents them from making the kind of the deal the Chicago Cubs did in their championship season in 2016, ending a 108-year drought,” wrote Dylan Hernandez in the Times this weekend, though he’s far from the only one to make such an argument.
Here’s what this theory ignores:
Sometime late in the afternoon, when I began to feel anticipatory stress for the winner-take-all National League Division Series Game 5 at Dodger Stadium, I thought back to the origins of my becoming a baseball fan.
My earliest memories are hazy, but they were all painless. The Dodgers were 1974 World Series losers the first time I watched a Fall Classic, then also-rans the following two years. In 1977, I had my first feeling of disappointment, mostly inflicted by Reggie Jackson, but by then I was deeply, ferociously bound to the Dodgers.
Still, my roots were simply in feeling the game as a game.
During tonight’s game, even before the Dodgers lost their 3-0 lead and ultimately their season, I started to question where my journey had taken me. I’ve suffered through more painful defeats as a fan, more than I care to recall here. But from the moment Walker Buelher walked Stephen Strasburg in the top of the third inning, my tension devolved into relentless misery, despite Los Angeles being ahead. In my life, I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much of a game that the Dodgers were winning so unhappy.
It’s one thing to fear that the Dodgers might lose their lead. It’s another to barely enjoy the lead at all. At first, I cheered as Buehler escaped a couple of jams, but later on, I was slumped on the couch even after the Nationals trailed in the fifth, the sixth, the seventh.
And it’s not because I didn’t think the Dodgers would win. I really did. It’s that I was obsessing about how it would feel and how people would react (including total strangers on Twitter, for heaven’s sake) if the Dodgers didn’t win, rather than simply living the moment. It’s the worst way to spend a baseball game. It’s completely against my ethos. And yet I couldn’t break free.
Now they’ve lost, and people are going to analyze it to death and point fingers and hurl insults and demand heads. I don’t want any part of it. I genuinely don’t care.
During my afternoon recollections, and again now, I thought back to the 91-loss 2005 season, the Dodgers’ worst this century, when I came up with the Losers Dividend. It’s not that I’m looking to return to the days when the Dodgers were postseason outsiders. However, I do think I need to find some perspective again. Baseball is supposed to be fun. That doesn’t mean it can’t hurt. But if you’re not enjoying the happy parts, what’s the point?
I refuse to go any further in my life worrying about whether the Dodgers will win the World Series or not. I will always root for them, but I don’t ever want to have tonight’s experience again. I want baseball to be my Shangri-La, not my prison.
1) Good decisions can yield bad outcomes. Fans won’t care.
2) Bad decisions can yield good outcomes. Fans won’t care.
3) Many choices offer at best the lesser of two evils. Fans won’t care.
4) You might choose surprisingly off of private information. Fans won’t care.
5) Fans think their hindsight is true reality, dubious as that is. Fans won’t care.
6) You don’t have the benefit of hindsight. Fans won’t care.
7) Your successes may have more value than your flubs cost. Fans won’t care.
8) Sometimes, a team will beat you no matter what you do. Fans won’t care.
9) If your team falls short, you might deserve another chance. Fans won’t care.
10) You might, in fact, be a bad manager. Plenty of managers are. Some managers grow over time, some managers stagnate. Some never had enough to begin with. But ultimately, fans will judge you on the emotions you make them feel. Because fans care.
Click the chart below to enlarge.
Please welcome back the Clayton Kershaw Postseason Chart, which I introduced a year ago to illustrate how Kershaw has been both great and terrible in the postseason.
Not only terrible. Great and terrible.
Raymond Gorospe/MLB.com
We have nearly reached the end of the ’10s, and though selections of the Dodgers’ all-decade team should probably wait until after the 2019 World Series, these few days of relative calm before the storm of the postseason seemed like a good time to reveal them. Nothing is likely to affect these choices between now and then (although I’m fascinated by the idea that something could).
Most challenging was having to deal with five legitimate candidates for the four openings at outfield/first base. Catcher was nearly a toss-up, and second base yielded its own surprise.
Here we go …
In 2019, Adam Kolarek has retired 86 of the 111 left-handed batters he has faced — 77 percent — and allowed only five extra-base hits. (Kelsey Grant/MLB.com)
It’s the seventh inning of Game 1 of the National League Division Series … or maybe it’s the eighth inning of Game 4 of the National League Championship Series … or maybe it’s the 13th inning of Game 7 of the World Series.
The Dodgers are down a run … or maybe the score is tied … or maybe they are protecting a one-run lead.
But in any of the above cases, it’s critical for Los Angeles (the team and its city) not to allow anyone to score.
At the start of lunch today, I watched Kenley Jansen’s eighth-inning outing from Sunday’s Dodger game. It didn’t take long: only five minutes, because Jansen only needed 10 pitches. (Click the video above if you want to see.) The performance generated raves online and articles speculating whether this was a turning point for the somewhat beleaguered behemoth.
I’ve been mostly quiet online about the Dodger bullpen in general and Jansen in particular over the past 3 1/2 weeks since expending a ton of energy on the subjects. It was just too exhausting to keep revisiting. The essence of my take was that whether or not Jansen was the closer didn’t matter, because inevitably, he would be pitching critical postseason innings for the Dodgers even if they weren’t critical postseason ninth innings.
It didn’t mean Jansen hasn’t been struggling this year — he clearly has been, as I wrote in the first paragraph of that piece and repeated lower down. My main point was that the obsession with the “closer” tag was misplaced.
The focus needed to be less on Jansen’s role and more on his process.
For all the fuss over how much velocity Jansen has or hasn’t lost on his pitches, the central issue for him is his command. When Jansen is living on the edges, whether that pitch is just inside the strike zone or just outside of it, batters can’t resist swinging. And when those pitches have any movement at all, he thrives.
Things go wrong for Jansen not when a pitch is off by a mile or two per hour, but when the pitch is so far out of the zone that a batter can simply ignore it. That leads to walks, which in turn leave him little margin for error when the breaks don’t go his way, such as nights when his defense lets him down. Not to mention the fact that almost any baserunner is a threat to steal second against Jansen.
So let’s take a look at Sunday’s game, which he entered with the score tied at 2. Jansen retired the side in order on the aforementioned 10 pitches, but there were significant highs and lows within.
Kenley Jansen celebrates his most recent save, on August 6, with Will Smith.
(Jon SooHoo/Los Angeles Dodgers)
If Kenley Jansen is no longer the most dominant pitcher in the Dodger bullpen, then it follows that Kenley Jansen should no longer be the Dodgers’ closer.
Right?
Well, maybe. But the answer isn’t as simple as it would seem.
Thank You For Not ...
1) using profanity or any euphemisms for profanity
2) personally attacking other commenters
3) baiting other commenters
4) arguing for the sake of arguing
5) discussing politics
6) using hyperbole when something less will suffice
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9) typing "no-hitter" or "perfect game" to describe either in progress
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