Dodgers dominate to capture NL traveling title

The Dodgers are finishing May by making a big move with the National League traveling championship. Hitting and pitching at a high level, the Dodgers are angling to become the third team this year to defend the title.

Cody Bellinger hit two homers for the Dodgers in a four-game stretch for the Dodgers while they played for the National League traveling championship (Johnmaxmena2/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license).

Closing out May, the Dodgers are playing their best baseball of the 2017 season. With five straight wins through May 29, the Dodgers aren't just winning. They are dominating.

It happens that the last four of those victories coincide with the traveling championship across the National League. The Dodgers now hold the title for the second time this season.

The Chicago Cubs arrived at Dodger Stadium with the NL traveling title on May 26, but it wasn't long before the Dodgers took it away. The Dodgers won three straight from the Cubs by a combined score of 18-4.

The Dodgers began a four-game series in St. Louis on May 30 with a 5-1 win against the St. Louis Cardinals.

Looking a little more closely at this four-game run by the Dodgers, we can see how sharp they've been against the defending World Champions and another club that has been a king in the NL for this entire century.

In those four games, the Dodgers hit 10 home runs. Balance has been key. Chase Utley and Cody Bellinger were the only Dodgers with two homers in this small run, so six players hit the other six homers.

As the composite batting numbers from the four games show (courtesy of baseball-reference.com), the Dodgers batted only .250. But 16 walks and 10 homers papers over a lot of batted-ball outs. They also paper over a lot of non-batted outs. The Dodgers struck out 41 times in these four games, the one disturbing trend across the team.

Pitcher by pitcher, start by start – and especially reliever by reliever – the Dodgers were all but untouchable. Their staff ERA in the four games was 1.25

On May 26, Dodgers left-hander Alex Wood pitched five shutout innings. He won, raising his mark to 6-0 and dropping his ERA to 1.69. Pedro Baez and Chris Hatcher each pitched two shutout relief innings to secure a 4-0 win.

The next day, Brandon McCarthy pitched six shutout innings, improving his numbers to 5-1 and 3.28. Ross Stripling finished a 5-0 win against the Cubs with three shutout innings.

On May 28, all of America anticipated a pitcher's duel between Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers and Jon Lester of the Cubs. But Lester lasted not even four innings, and Kershaw hung around for barely more than that. Four Dodgers relievers combined for 4 2/3 hitless, shutout innings in a 9-4 Dodgers win.

On to St. Louis. On May 29, Dodgers starter Rich Hill gave up one run in five innings. Four Dodgers relievers combined for four shutout innings in a 5-1 win for the Dodgers.

The pitching numbers (from baseball-reference.com) are here, but one key set of numbers isn't. In these four games, the Dodgers produced 15 shutout relief innings.

Long-term, the Dodgers won't hold up if four out of five starts last only five innings. Their batters can't be striking out 10 times per game, either. Short-term, though, the Dodgers rolled up key wins against strong competition. And dominated with the NL traveling championship.

Famously, the Cardinals have owned the traveling championship in the NL since it launched in 2011. But the early indications in 2017 show that we could see different results.

The Cardinals whiffed on their first try at the NL traveler when they lost two of three at home to the San Francisco Giants May 19-21. With their Monday loss to the Dodgers, the Cardinals lost four of their first five games with the NL traveler this season.

The leading teams so far in 2017 are the Dodgers, the Giants and the Miami Marlins. The Marlins notched a title with three defenses in April. The Giants have a title with two defenses in May.

The Dodgers, Giants, Marlins, Cubs, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies and Cincinnati Reds all have won titles this season. But the Marlins and Giants are the only clubs to successfully defend it.

The Dodgers and Giants are the only clubs that have won it twice this season.

AL 2014 a tale told by Athletics, Royals

One couldn't find two more different clubs in the American League than the Oakland Athletics, who went through much of the year as the team to beat, and the Kansas City Royals, who were unbeatable during the American League playoffs. The Royals will begin the World Series tonight against the San Francisco Giants.

First baseman Eric Hosmer has helped to power the Kansas City Royals to the World Series (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

We wondered if the Angels dodged a bullet on Sept. 30, when the Kansas City Royals took down the Oakland Athletics in the American League widcard playoff game.

Now, we're certain the Angels didn't dodge a bullet. Or, if they did, they just ran into the path of a more deadly bullet. The Royals took the Angels out of the American League Division Series (ALDS) in three games before sweeping the Baltimore Orioles in a four-game American League Championship Series (ALCS). 

Tonight, the Royals begin the World Series against the San Francisco Giants, capping a postseason that has exhilarated baseball fans and confounded numbers crunchers. 

The Giants took a 3-1 lead in games against the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series (NLCS) by scoring 12 of their last 22 runs on plays that didn't involve a base hit. The Giants have taken to calling themselves “cockroaches,” because you can't kill them. They polished off the Cardinals in Game 5 of the NLCS with a 6-3 win, scoring all their runs on homers. 

This might not be the World Series that fans of the Oakland Athletics would have wanted. Their rivals across the San Francisco Bay are in, and they're not. The American League club that plays most counter to Oakland's preference for long-run probabilistic reasoning is in, and they're not. 

It was hard, a couple of weeks ago, to imagine a more joyous scenario for the Athletics and a more ugly scenario for the Angels than this: Jon Lester pitches a gem for the Athletics, enabling them to win the wild card game in Kansas City. Then, the A's enter the ALDS with the Angels and prevail with pitching, specifically with Lester. With that, the Athletics would move on to the American League Championship Series, a puzzling midseason trade by Oakland general manager Billy Beane would have been redeemed, and the Angels would have lost the edge they've gain this year in their rivalry with the Athletics.

The next week of games might have been about an Oakland club banished from division contention, then redeemed for the reason of their banishment, a bulked-up pitching staff for which the A's gave away much of their ability to score. It might have been about Lester, made whole by winning the game he needed to win, now setting out to capsize the Angels, who beat them silly during a four-game sweep in Anaheim last month that decided the division early.

It could have been about those things. The narrative could have shifted back to the misunderstood genius of Oakland general manager Billy Beane and his wise men from elite universities, if only Lester could have redeemed a certain trade and held a 7-3 he took to the eighth inning in Kansas City. But all that's off the table. 

The Royals took it off the table quickly, rallying for a 9-8 win against the Athletics in an 12-inning wild card game. Then, they took the Angels off the table. It began on Game 1 of the ALDS, when the Royals won the game Thursday night that had to go into the win column for the Angels, the game with Jered Weaver pitching in the Big A against Jason Vargas. After that, the Royals were on their way.

When the World Series ends and we have contemplated why it went down the way it did, the enduring memory of this season will be the collapse of the Athletics, who endured such a nightmare for two months at the end. They were 72-44 on Aug. 9, and they needed every bit of that to endure their next seven weeks of losing and still have room to barely make the playoffs. Oakland didn't enter the playoffs looking like it would last long, and when the Royals, trailing, 7-3, kicked up a little dust in the eighth inning, one could feel the wind rushing in. The Royals were hitting, stealing, hitting the runner in, then stealing again. Lester left with a 7-4 lead with one out, and the tying run was at the plate. 

As if to mock the sabrmeticians and their darling Athletics, the Royals stole seven bases, including four in that wild eighth inning during which they cut that deficit to 7-6. In the ninth, the Royals tied it by bunting and stealing, which the stat fetishist disdains. In the 12th, the Royals hit the ball hard, and they won the game that way.

Many keystrokes have been expended trying to explain why the Athletics flop in the postseason, and all of them put together didn't say it as well as the Royals said it in the wild card game. The A's lost this game not because they eschew small ball, but because the Royals embrace it.

The stat fetishist struggles against the bleeding reality of baseball and often winds down his keystrokes by introducing a theoretical entity called "luck." At that point, we're not doing science, obviously, as luck neither explains nor predicts anything. But Beane believes in luck, too, as he said in his infamous Moneyball remark, "My shit doesn't work in the playoffs. My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is f*cking luck." 

Beane is wrong about this. The playoffs aren't about luck. They are about baseball, the game of skill and tactics. And, it appears, there are skills and tactics in baseball, which the numbers discourage, but they're also extremely useful tools for winning baseball games. How can the numbers show that certain tactics are disadvantageous for winning baseball games, yet the team most known for following the numbers never wins in the playoffs and was just now eliminated, in fact, because the team it just played would be nowhere without those tactics?

We've never understood, over here, why anyone would assume that a so-called "Moneyball" team would have to succeed in the playoffs, as if their success during the regular season should be some kind of necessary or sufficient condition for winning in the playoffs. We don't see the mystery. There's nothing that says a Moneyball team couldn't or shouldn't succeed in the playoffs, but the playoffs are such an entirely different competitive environment that we shouldn't expect the large database of the regular season to have any predictive force.

When you're putting together your Moneyball team, you're making a number of calculations. All of those calculations account for the long haul, and the 162-game regular season is nothing if not a long haul. That's a lot of discrete events converging on enough agreement to produce reliable conclusions about how to win x number of games. The book, not the old book but the new one, says you will score more runners from first base with no outs than from second base with one out. Over the long haul. So don't bunt. The book says that if you can't succeed on about 75 percent of your stolen base attempts, then you've probably lost more opportunities to score than you've gained. Over the long haul. So, be very careful with the running game.

So, you follow the principles, along with some others, such as, famously, going for hitters with high on-base averages. You finish off the roster figuring that the secondary numbers will add up to about 90 wins, then you send your team out there and it comes back with about 90 wins and a playoff spot. It works. It's a good system. Ingenious, really. It deserves the acclaim that it gets.

But now you're in the playoffs, and the evidence base on which you built your team to win the most possible games out of 162 can't give you the answers you need, because now your goal isn't to win about 90 games out of 162, but to win this one and only game right now. There is no long haul over which the numbers will even out through time. There is only this game, and there is only right now. 

So when the Royals trail, 7-6, in the bottom of the eighth with Jarrod Dyson on second base as the tying run, they're not thinking, "Over the long haul of 162 games, you will lose more scoring opportunities by running than by not running, so we better not try to steal third base." They're thinking that they need to win this game right now, and their best chance to do it is by stealing third base. When the Royals have a runner on first with nobody out, they're not thinking, "Over the long haul, the runner from first with no outs scores more often than the runner on second with one out, so bunting is the last thing on our mind." They're thinking that if they can get the runner to second with one out, they've got a chance to win this game right now. And they drop a bunt.

When you already know you've got another game tomorrow, you'll come out fine by following the long-haul percentages. When you don't have another game tomorrow unless you win this game right now, those long-haul percentages couldn't be less helpful. And a team that can't or doesn't execute those little ball tools to win this game right now is going to be at a disadvantage. 

During the postseason, the Royals have utilized those tactics to huge advantage, and opponents have been unable to defend against them. Over 162 games, perhaps, those tactics won't optimize your scoring. But you're going to need them in the playoffs. You're not playing the Cubs and Astros fattening up your numbers now. The teams you're playing against are likely to keep a lid on it defensively, so you need every tactic to score.

The Athletics, under Beane, have been one of the most frequent playoff entrants in the American League during this century. But we shouldn't be surprised when a team that's built to optimize in the long haul doesn't have the tools to optimize in the short haul. The playoffs aren't just a different season. The games are substantially different games because there are so few of them. 

The Royals are better right now than they really are, and this is not an unlikely occurrence, either. Kansas City's success with small ball is worth noting, but the Royals are winning with a great deal more. Finishing last in the American League this year with 95 home runs, the Royals have hit seven homers in eight postseason games. The home runs don't explain how the Royals have won each round of these playoffs, but the home runs have a lot to say about how they swept through the American League postseason.

Reliable power hitting by Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas isn't normally on the Kansas City menu. But it can be on the menu, it has been on the menu and, in their run against the Angels and Orioles, it happens that their kitchen brought in a shipment of home runs. When the Royals hit home runs, they are an outstanding team that can beat anyone. 

We saw it at the start of June, when the Royals went on a 15-4 tear over a three-week period, hitting 18 homers with a club OPS of .781 in 19 games. So, it's there, but we haven't seen it often. Indeed, we're seeing it again only now, with the Royals crushing four homers in three games against the Angels, then three in four games against the Orioles.

It's not a team we have seen frequently. But when that team shows up at the right time, the playoffs, that team has a chance to live forever.

Lester, trade loom large as A's straggle to playoffs

Tuesday's American League wildcard game is a beauty, with the Oakland Athletics sending Jon Lester against the Kansas City Royals and James Shields. Both arrived in controversial trades. The Shields deal already has worked out for the Royals, and Lester still has a chance to save his trade if he is the postseason pitcher that he always has been.

The Oakland Athletics acquired Jon Lester from the Boston Red Sox to get them through the postseason. Tuesday night in Kansas City, Lester has a chance to do it (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Generic 2.0 license).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The backdrop couldn't be more different for the Oakland Athletics and Kansas City Royals approaching their wildcard playoff game Tuesday night in Kansas City.

For the Royals, this playoff turn is their first in 30 years, since the real glory days, 1985 and its world championship. They are celebrating. The Royals have fought inch by inch to become a playoff team in the last couple of years, surviving to the last week last season and actually making a bid for the American League Central this year before settling in as the lead wildcard.

For the Athletics, an unimaginable nightmare continues. The Athletics lost 30 of their last 46 games, blowing a six-game lead in the AL West to the surging Angels, who won it going away. The Athletics, far from their days with the best record in the game, finished 10 games down to the Angels and fought to the final day to secure the final spot in the playoffs. So, the Athletics enter this game as a sinking ship. And their playoff history isn't glorious. The A's have been to the playoffs seven times in the 21st century, and won only one playoff series.

Many will tell you that the A's are where they are because of a certain trade they made on July 31. For the sake of Oakland general manager Billy Beane, we'll grant that saying so is a slight over-simplification, even though we never liked the trade for the Athletics. But it's not just a slight over-simplification. It's premature.

The Athletics are hanging this game on Jon Lester, who is in the cross hairs of a tortured narrative. Lester has done a fine job for the A's (2.35 ERA in 11 starts), and no one should blame him because the A's traded Yoenis Cespedes to get him in the deal that has taken a huge piece from the Athletics batting order. But it comes down to games like this for Lester, because games like this are why the A's got him. To some degree, Lester can ratify a very controversial trade for Billy Beane by coming through in this game.

And Lester is uniquely equipped to do it. He has pitched better against the Royals than against any other team in his career. The Royals are batting .196 with one homer against Lester in 353 plate appearances going back to 2006. Lester's record against the Royals is 9-3 with a 1.84 ERA in 13 starts (88 innings) with a WHIP of 1.068. The A's won only two of seven meetings with the Royals this year, and Lester pitched both of the wins, which went 8-3 and 11-3. They were the only games against the Royals in which the A's scored more than three runs. The Royals shut them out twice.

Lester has a 2.11 ERA in 11 starts and two relief appearances in the postseason. So, the A's have the right guy pitching in this game. One hopes. Because if Lester isn't the guy to pitch in this game, then this season will live in infamy for the Athletics. The Cespedes-for-Lester deal will go down as one of the biggest trading deadline blunders ever. Can the pitcher for whom Beane sacrificed so much offense do the job that he was brought in to do?

If Lester is the right guy, then he pitches the A's through Kansas City and then, all of a sudden, they're in a five-game series with the Angels, and you know the A's would relish that after how these last couple of months have gone. Lester can come back for Game 3 in that series, and there he would work in another critical moment. After what the Angels did to the A's last time they met, sweeping them four in Anaheim and blowing them right out of the division race ... these are games that the A's will want to play. And if the A's can get past the Angels, they will be lined up for two starts from Lester in the American League Championship Series.

The book is closed on Cespedes for this year. He has one more year on his contract with the Boston Red Sox, and he just drove in 100 runs for the first time. The Red Sox made out well, and they can take a crack at Lester on the free-agent market.

As far as the A's are concerned, the facts aren't all in. The trade certainly blew up on them down the back stretch as the A's continuously lost two out of every three games because they couldn't score. They're worse off for going in as a wildcard instead of the league's top seed. But all of that can be overcome with some pitching in the postseason. We still think the A's won't hit enough to go very far. But if Lester is everything that Beane traded for, then he will win some key games coming up and the A's could last for a while.

Some believe the Lester trade should somehow be compared with the deal that brought James Shields to the Royals, for whom he is the starting pitcher in this wildcard game. You can argue for their similarity, if you'd like, but the only similarity we see is that they are both trades. They are trades made by very different clubs for very different purposes.

Unlike the Athletics, who traded for Lester so they can make a big move in the playoffs, the Royals acquired Shields because they just needed someone to anchor their pitching rotation and help them contend for the playoffs. The Royals have never developed that guy and general manager Dayton Moore, entering the final year of his contract, paid big for Shields last spring.

Moore sent Wil Myers, Jake Odorizzi, Patrick Leonard and Mike Montgomery to the Tampa Bay Rays in December 2012 and brought back Shields, Wade Davis and Elliot Johnson. The Royals were pretty roundly panned for the trade. With only one winning season since 1993 as they made the trade, the Royals were finally getting it right with player development. It didn't seem sensible for the Royals to deal away promising players when they still appeared a couple of years from contending. Dealing a big piece of long-term future for a short-term future that wasn't promising, the trade smacked of desperation for a general manager in the last year of his contract.

But when we look at the Royals now, we can see how the pieces fit. The Royals have plenty of players, many of them quite talented, who can run out to the outfield, first base or designated hitter. They can't get Alex Gordon, Jerrod Dyson, Lorenzo Cain, Nori Aoki, Eric Hosmer, Billy Butler and Josh Willingham all into the same lineup. Two of those guys have to sit. We can't say the Royals are better off without Myers, who won the American League Rookie of the Year in 2013 with a 131 OPS-plus, but they aren't scrambling to fill his position, either.

The true gold in this trade is the pitcher Moore thought he was getting, because that's the pitcher who arrived. Shields has made that trade work for Moore by giving the Royals presence and credibility for their pitching staff. In two years with the Royals, Shields has taken 34 starts each time, throwing 228 2/3 and 227 innings for ERAs of 3.15 and 3.21.

If all the Royals got in the trade were Shields, it was worth making. The Royals could not have made this long climb to the playoffs without him. The club definitely improved around Shields, but if the Royals hadn't made that move for a No. 1 starter, they would be the Milwaukee Brewers, sitting at home.

Then the Royals made the trade even better for themselves by figuring out what to do with Davis. The Royals originally tried Davis as a starter, and it wasn't for him. The Rays had already reached that conclusion, which is why all 54 of his appearances for them in 2012 came from the bullpen, but the Royals had to see for themselves. They saw a guy who posted a 5.32 ERA and couldn't get past the third inning.

Now Davis is the eighth-inning hold guy, throwing an ERA of 1.00. With Kelvin Herrera throwing 100 miles per hour in the seventh, Davis tossing a 1.00 in the eighth and Greg Holland throwing 46 saves in the ninth, the Royals are well set on the days when Shields doesn't pitch eight or nine innings.

Whatever happens in the wildcard game, the Shields trade already is a success for the Royals. They finally made it to the postseason. For the A's, an old postseason hand who barely made it to the playoffs this time, their trade to bring in Lester hasn't been everything they would want. And it might not ever be. But it still can become good enough rather quickly.

Another lesson learned, again: you never know

Perhaps Angels general manager Jerry Dipoto isn't a genius, but he clearly has something on the game's annointed genius, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane. All Dipoto did this year was rebuild his bullpen on the fly, which is one reason why the Angels go to the last two weeks of the regular season with a 10-game lead in the American League West.

A common scene for the Angels: Huston Street finishing off a save. He's done it 14 times since the Angels picked him up on July 19 (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

We often learn lessons about baseball, and the lesson often is the same lesson: Things aren't always as they seem.

We're thinking about a division, the American League West, in which the first-place club at the non-waiver trading deadline made a spectacular deal for a pitcher to help down the stretch. Subsequently, the second-place club at the trading deadline lost its best pitcher for the remainder of the season due to injury.

Which of these clubs now holds a 10-game lead in the American League West, having all but clinched it with two weeks left in the season? And which club has plummeted through the standings to the point at which its all-but-certain playoff position now is anything but certain?

When this all gets written up, the Angels will be in the books with their first division title since 2009, making an inspired comeback from a miserable start in 2012 and a miserable season in 2013. The story to be told will not include anything about Angels general manager Jerry Dipoto tearing a big piece out of his everyday lineup to add a pitcher he didn't need. But it will say quite a lot about the bullpen that Dipoto has been rebuilding since sometime late last season, and particularly on the fly during the summer of 2014.

How dark was that night in Boston on Aug. 20, when Garrett Richards crumbled to the ground trying to cover first base in the second inning? They drove him off the field and to the hospital. Everyone could tell that Richards was down for good, which meant the Angels were supposed to win this division without a pitcher who was 13-4 with a 2.61 ERA.

It turned out to not be a very dark night at all. The Angels fell behind the Boston Red Sox, 2-0, on the very play that put Richards out for the season, then went down, 3-0, in the third on a homer by David Ortiz against Richards' replacement, Cory Rasmus. But that was as bad as it ever got. The Angels rallied for an 8-3 win that night. They tacked up a five-run inning, which has become common, to forge an easy win. The Oakland Athletics lost, 8-5, to the New York Mets, improving the Angels' lead in the AL West to 1 1/2 games.

The Angels picked up another half-game the next day with another win in Boston, then went to Oakland for a three-game series with a two-game lead. That lead was gone after the A's won the first two, but the Angels picked up the final game for a one-game lead, only to lose it the next night. That next night was to be the first start for which the Angels would need a work-around to replace Richards. The man they put on the job, Wade LeBlanc, wasn't very good, the Angels lost, 7-1, to the Miami Marlins, and an Athletics victory tied the division again.

So, that takes us through the games of Aug. 25, which was the very last moment when the Angels didn't hold first place all by themselves. From that night going to the games of Sept. 13, the Angels were unstoppable – 15-2. Even if the Angels didn't score an average of 6.9 runs during that stretch, they would still have won a lot of those games because the pitchers were tossing a 2.82 ERA. That's the whole staff, which includes some of C.J. Wilson's worst run of pitching in his three years with the Angels.

Think about this. The Angels are out Richards, Wilson can't last more than five innings unless the Angels already have scored 10 runs, Jered Weaver only now and then can put 89 miles per hour on his fastball, the other two starters are people named Matt Shoemaker and Hector Santiago ... and the Angels are getting everybody out.

During that very same run of dates, the Athletics were 4-13. Their offense scored three runs per game – 51 in those 17 games – from Aug. 26 through Sept. 12. In one of those games, they scored 11 runs, so we can just as well think of it as 40 runs in 16 games. The A's were scoring five runs per game as of July 31, the day they dealt left fielder Yoenis Cespedes to the Red Sox for left-hander Jon Lester. Their pitching staff, fortified by the in-season acquisitions of Lester, Jeff Samardjiza and Jason Hammels, tossed a strong 3.21 ERA in those last 17 games, but that's still not as well as the Angels are pitching without their best pitcher.

We do not attempt to explain things like this. We just look on in awe. Angels manager Mike Scioscia is doing something very right with his pitching staff, not the least of which involves massaging the rotation schedule to make the Richards turn come up as seldom as possible. That turn came up three times in those 17 Angels games, and the Angels won all three. They won all three without actually having a starting pitcher to take the starts. Instead, Scioscia has fashioned it as bullpen night, the kind of exhibition usually to be found only in the college game and the low minor leagues, and made it a major league happening.

Bullpen night made its glorious debut on Aug. 30 at Angel Stadium against the Athletics, when Rasmus, Michael Roth, Yoslan Herrera, Fernando Salas, Jason Grilli, Kevin Jepsen, Joe Smith and Huston Street joined forces for a three-hit shutout with 11 strikeouts in a 2-0 win against Samardzija and the Athletics. In 28 innings of pitching on these bullpen nights, the Angels are 3-0, tossing a 2.57 ERA by allowing eight runs (all earned) on 21 hits with 10 walks and 23 strikeouts.

Except for Roth and Jepsen, all of the relief pitchers named just now have been acquired by the Angels within roughly the last year. The pitcher who has been with the organization for the longest, Rasmus, arrived just before the non-waiver trading deadline last year (on July 29, 2013) in a deal with the Atlanta Braves for Scott Downs. Grilli and Street have arrived just this summer, and that's leaving out Joe Thatcher, a key left-handed specialist acquisition who has been felled by injury.

If the Angels had traded for a starting pitcher who tossed a 2.57 ERA in 28 innings over three starts, Dipoto would be heralded as a genius. Maybe, he should be, anyway. He's about to win the American League West without killing his offensive club for a starting pitcher.

Editor's note: All advanced statistics in this piece are from Baseball-Reference.com, unless otherwise indicated.

A's made the trades, Angels made the pitches

The Angels put together a huge four-game sweep of the Oakland Athletics at Angel Stadium during Labor Day weekend, increasing their lead in the American League West to five games. The Angels heroes were pitchers, none of whom arrived with any fanfare this season.

Angels pitcher Jered Weaver doesn't have his fastball, but he has guts and guile, which was enough to defeat the heralded Oakland Athletics acquisition, Jon Lester, in a key game during the past weekend (Keith Allison, (UC International crop)/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The Angels begin the rest of their life today after building a five-game lead in the American League West with a remarkable four-game sweep of the Oakland Athletics at Angel Stadium during Labor Day weekend.

And if it wasn't the Angels who made such bold and celebrated moves for pitching this summer, it was the Angels who received pitching when it really counted. Either that, or the A's didn’t receive hitting when it really counted. We'll say it's the first, but we don't rule out the second.

It has become tiring to labor over the grand error made by Oakland general manager Billy Beane when he traded his left fielder and the anchor of his batting order, Yoenis Cespedes, to the Boston Red Sox for left-hander Jon Lester, who he really didn’t need. But the weekend in Anaheim brought that error into the sharpest possible focus.

The series began with the only truly dramatic game in the bunch, a 4-3 Angels victory in 10 innings on Aug. 28. The A's entered the night one game down in the division and had their best pitcher, Sonny Gray, on the mound. But Gray came a bit unglued in the second inning. Josh Hamilton, Howie Kendrick and Erick Aybar began the inning with consecutive singles, the last of those driving in Hamilton for the game's first run. Then, Gray threw two wild pitches to place Kendrick on third and Aybar on second. A two-out single by Gordon Beckham drove in both runners and gave the Angels a 3-0 lead.

The Angels, countering with struggling left-hander C.J. Wilson, held that lead until the fifth, when the A's began hitting line drives. A leadoff single by Brandon Moss, followed by Geovany Soto's double, gave the A's their first run, then Coco Crisp hit a line-drive single to knock in Soto. In the sixth, the A's tied the game, 3-3, on solo homer by Josh Donaldson.

So, it became a battle of bullpens. And the Angels, who have been rebuilding their bullpen throughout the season, won. Five Angels relievers combined for 4 1/3 scoreless, hitless innings. The Angels won it in short order in the bottom of the tenth against Oakland reliever Ryan Cook. Albert Pujols led off with a walk and took third as he hustled out a single to center field by Hamilton. Kendrick hit a sacrifice fly to right field to drive in Pujols.

We witnessed that night the start of a remarkable occurrence  – the first four out of 29 consecutive scoreless innings by the Athletics, the AL's top scoring team, against an Angels rotation that is aged, unheralded, under-manned – everything but a sure thing. 

The second game, played on Aug. 29, was the definitive game. Not quite as improbable as the third game, perhaps, but what the second game said is in the standings today. The A's sent Lester, the guy for whom they spent heavily to win just this game, against Angels right-hander Jered Weaver, who is doing it all now with guts and guile. It was barely a fair fight.

The A's didn't reach base until Donaldson hit a double with two out in the fourth. They didn't get another hit until Sam Fuld's single with one out in the sixth. By then, the Angels had all the runs they needed, those coming on Chris Inannetta's two-run homer with no one out in the fifth after Aybar led off against Lester with a single. 

When the Angels batted in the bottom of the sixth, we could see the A's come apart at the seams. Watching the wheels come off of a baseball team is never a pretty sight, but the A's flailed all the way through August and it was just a matter of time. That time came with two out and nobody on, when Donaldson, the A's best player, made a fielding error allowing Kendrick to reach. Next, Eric Sogard, playing out of position at shortstop, made a throwing error, moving Kendrick to third and allowing the hitter, David Freese, to reach second base. Aybar then dropped a bunt in front of Lester and reached first base to load the bases. Flustered, Lester walked Iannetta for force in a run and give the Angels a 3-0 lead.

Pujols homered to make it 4-0 after seven innings, at which point Weaver departed, having allowed only three hits. Joe Smith and Huston Street finished out a 4-0 win the the Angels, giving them a robust three-game lead.

The importance of that game for the Angels can hardly be over-stated. They went to the third game of the series now assured that they would end the series with the division lead, even though their pitching plan for the third game – "the Garrett Richards start" that they will forever be trying to fill – was not one to inspire great confidence. That plan was Cory Rasmus, a reliever not even approximately stretched out for a start. The A's would go with Jeff Samardzija, famously acquired from the Chicago Cubs this summer.

No one could have or should have predicted that the team pitching Rasmus would beat the team pitching Samardzija. But the team pitching Samardzija doesn't have any hitters now. Missing Cespedes is some of it, but not all. The A's three-headed catcher (Derek Norris, John Jaso and Steven Vogt) has hit a bit over its head. Donaldson still has decent numbers for the season (.259/.348/.471/.819), but he hasn't been a force since May 30, which ended with him at .285/.379/.561/.940. 

Then there's Crisp, the key and unsung player of the A's surge in 2012 and their continued excellence in 2013. The A's committed themselves to Crisp as their leadoff hitter and center fielder on June 14, 2012, putting Cespedes in left field. Crisp was batting .172 with a .466 OPS. The A's were 28-35. From that point forward, Crisp batted .296 with a .857 OPS. The A's went 66-33, charging from five games back with 10 days left in the season to overtake the Texas Rangers for the AL West title.

The 2013 season was more of the same. The A's spent the entire season either in front or very close to it and easily won the division by five games. Crisp, the leadoff center fielder, had a solid year, if not great, tacking up a 4.3 WAR. He led the club with 93 runs scored and gave the club a solid all-around presence.

Beane has mentioned, correctly, that the A's already were struggling offensively when they traded Cespedes at this year's non-waiver trading deadline, which further mystifies the Cespedes trade. But there's no mystery that the A's decline offensively can be indexed some bit to Crisp. From July 5 to today, Crisp is batting .183 with a .559 OPS. The A's actually peaked offensively on June 4 (.253/.340/.421/.761). From that point to now, they are .244/.311/.372/.683.

Perhaps, then, it's not such a huge surprise that eight Angels pitchers, led by a three-inning start by Rasmus, shut the A's out on three hits to beat Samardzija, 2-0. The A's mounted one threat, that against lefty reliever Michael Roth, in the fourth. A walk, a single and an intentional walk loaded the bass, then Athletics manager Bob Melvin pinch-hit right-handed Jonny Gomes for left-handed Josh Reddick and Angels manager Mike Scioscia brought in right-handed Yoslan Herrera for Roth. Herrera induced a ground ball on which Kendrick at second base made an outstanding play for a double play to end the inning.

And with Reddick out of the game, the Athletics were without a left-handed stick who might have punished the ensuing parade of right-handed Angels relievers. The Angels walked out of the game with a 2-0 win no one could have predicted or expected, as well as a four-game lead.

The final game, on Aug. 31, was icing on the cake, an easy 8-1 Angels win behind rookie right-hander Matt Shoemaker, this season's surprise sensation, who improved his marks to 14-4 and a 3.14 ERA with seven innings of five-hit, shutout pitching. The Angels sacked Athletics left-hander Scott Kazmir with six runs in the second inning. The A's finally scored in the eighth. Angels, 8-1.

With only three games left between the Angels and the A's (Sept. 22-24 in Oakland), the Angels now still have a two-game cushion even if the A's win all three, which means the A's still have to be two games better than the Angels against everyone else just to force a one-game playoff for the division title. None of that seems likely to happen, especially after the Angels exploded and the A's imploded during these last four games in Anaheim.

Angels lose Richards, but not division

The Angels apparently will have to compete for the rest of this season without pitching ace Garrett Richards, who went down with a ghastly knee injury Wednesday night in Boston. But they are all but assured of going to the playoffs. And their team to beat in the American League West, the Oakland Athletics, aren't the team they were a month ago.

Angels manager Mike Scioscia will have some juggling to do with his pitching staff for the rest of this season (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Did the Angels lose the American League West Wednesday night?

Well, they won their game Wednesday night, 8-3, on the road against the Boston Red Sox, which increased their division lead over the Oakland Athletics to 1 1/2 games, their largest lead of the season.

They also lost their best pitcher.

The moment Angels right-hander Garrett Richards fell to the ground on his way to first base as he attempted to cover the back end of a double play in the second inning, this club's aspirations appeared to go dark. Richards laid out on the ground clutching his left knee. An object of skeleton that should have been inside his body appeared to protrude outside of his uniform. The club's training staff had to roll him over to get him onto a stretcher, then the stretcher had to be loaded onto a vehicle. 

The Angels already trailed, 2-0, in the bottom of the second inning at Fenway Park against the Red Sox, the last-place club in the American League East. Into the game came Cory Rasmus as the new pitcher. 

And the wheels began to spin. How in the world can the Angels make it through a season-ending injury to their ace pitcher, the hardest throwing right-handed of any starting pitcher in Major League Baseball?

But the Angels have not disappointed us this year, and there's so much to like about this club that it's hard to lose confidence. Even in the midst of that disaster, the Angels came back with a five-run fifth inning to take a 6-3 lead. Rasmus survived 2 1/3 innings without further damage, then Mike Morin tossed a shutout inning, then Fernando Salas, then Kevin Jepsen, then Joe Smith, then Huston Street. And the Angels kept their season moving. 

The Oakland Athletics lost earlier in the day in their own park, 8-4, to the New York Mets. The Athletics are reeling. From the day their general manager, Billy Beane, made the deal that brought him so much praise – the deal that tore the heart out of their everyday lineup in exchange for left-hander Jon Lester from the Red Sox – they are 8-11. 

With Yoenis Cespedes departed for Boston in the trade, the Oakland batting order slashed .224/.299/.344/.643 from Aug. 1-17. Before that trade, the A's slashed .253/.329/.405/.733. The American League this year is slashing .254/.318/.393/.711. With that deal, the A's went from being a much better than average offensive club to being a much worse that average offensive club.

It isn't that Cespedes was enjoying such an awesome season, but he wasn't bad, running a 115 OPS-plus with the A's. Since the deal, his OPS-plus with the Red Sox is only 80. But the man who came back to Oakland in the deal to replace Cespedes as the A's left fielder, Jonny Gomes, is OPS-plussing only 60 for the Athletics. 

Beane really disrupted his club's balance offensively. Before the deal, the Athletics ran out lineups with up to five guys who could hit, meaning four guys who couldn't. With Cespedes gone, they never have more than four players in their lineup who can hit, and sometimes they have even fewer. 

But the Angels now have fewer pitchers, and this is a club that seems to have fewer pitchers every day. They've already lost lefty starter Tyler Skaggs for the season, and they're still waiting for lefty reliever Joe Thatcher to come back from the disabled list. 

But no loss hurts like losing Garrett Richards, who entered Wednesday's game with a 13-4 record and a 2.53 ERA. And as Wednesday night ended, there was no indication of what they can expect from Richards. The club announced during the game that Richards suffered a left patellar injury. The patella is the kneecap.

"It's a significant injury," Angels manager Mike Scioscia repeatedly told reporters after the game.

The big question, of course: How significant? Can Richards be back in time for the postseason? 

No one knows.

But there's a lot else no one knows, which is why we can't answer the question with which we began, the question of whether or not the Angels lost the AL West simply because they lost their ace pitcher. 

The one source of help on which the Angels can not depend is a trade that would depend upon some pitcher clearing waivers. Because the Angels, at 75-50, have the best record in the Major Leagues, they are last in turn on the waiver wire. Any club that wants to stop the Angels from acquiring a pitcher can simply stake a claim on that pitcher. Reports tell us that Texas Rangers right-hander Yu Darvish and New York Mets left-hander Jon Niese have cleared waivers, but those would be hard deals to make.

In the minors, the Angels have little to trust. Their only pitcher at Triple-A Salt Lake who even conceivably belongs in a poor big league rotation is lefty Wade LeBlanc, who couldn't last more than one inning for the pitching-starved New York Yankees after they took him from the Angels on waivers in June. The Yankees released LeBlanc and the Angels signed him two days later. They might be glad now that they did.

At Double-A Arkansas, the Angels have 24-year-old lefty Michael Roth, who is 10-6 with a 2.82 ERA. Chances are, he gets the start the next time Richards' turn comes up.

Three more items to consider:

First, we don't know that Richards would have been the same pitcher down the stretch that he'd been approaching the stretch. He had never, in any professional season, thrown 160 innings. When he went down Wednesday night, Richards was on 169 1/3 innings. The Angels never had any guarantee of how well Richards would pitch in September with all those added innings on his arm, though they would much rather have found out. Either way, it was unknown how Richards would respond to the added innings, and we can't assume that the pitcher they've lost is the pitcher we've seen all season.

Second, the Angels almost certainly are in the playoffs, already. With 37 games left in their season, they are 7 1/2 games ahead of the AL's sixth-place team, the Seattle Mariners. If the Angels (75-50) go 18-19 the rest of the way, the Mariners (68-58) would have to go 26-10 and the fifth-place Detroit Tigers (68-56) would have to go 26-12 the rest of the way to knock the Orange County club out of the postseason. We have little hope, after watching Richards go down, that he will pitch any time before next spring, but the Angels do have that much cushion, just in case there is enough time to bring him back for the playoffs. 

Third, Athletics aren't 10-feet tall anymore. They were 59-36 at the All-Star break, a .621 winning percentage, which projects to 101 wins over a full season. Since the All-Star break, they are 15-16. For the remainder of the season, there is no scheduling advantage, to speak of, either way. The Angels and the A's have 10 games left against each other, starting this weekend with three in Oakland. The Angels have seven games left against Seattle, and the A's have six. Every other remaining opponent for the Angels and A's this season has a losing record, except for this: The Angels have one game against the Cleveland Indians (64-61) and three against the Miami Marlins (63-63).

Thus, the Angels didn't lose their division Wednesday night. They did lose their best pitcher. And they still have enough to win their division without him. Which doesn't mean they will.

Editor's note: All numbers in this piece are from Baseball-Reference.com.

Is the extra pitcher worth it?

Like the Oakland Athletics, the Detroit Tigers added a premium pitcher to a deep rotation at the non-waiver trading deadline and took a player out of their daily lineup to do it. Again, the questions about the Athletics' deal apply to the Tigers, even if Austin Jackson isn't as big of a loss as Yoenis Cespedes.

The Detroit Tigers made a deep starting rotation deeper by acquiring David Price from the Tampa Bay Rays. Is it worthwhile to deepen a deep starting rotation for the postseason (Keith Allison [original], UCinternational [crop]/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)?


By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The non-waiver trading deadline passed last week with quite a lot of smoke. Where there's smoke, there ought to be fire, but it remains to be seen if any of these deals will wind up so hot.

We've already discussed the deadline deal between the Oakland Athletics and the Boston Red Sox, in which left-handed pitcher Jon Lester and left fielder Yoenis Cespedes switched coasts. We don't believe it will add up as a plus for the Athletics, who added the pitcher at the expense of the mid-lineup hitter.

Another deal in much the same spirit occurred between three clubs – the Detroit Tigers, the Tampa Bay Rays and the Seattle Mariners. At the All-Star break, the Rays were nine games down in a division without a great club, which led us to believe the Rays would ride it out and take a crack at winning. But Thursday's three-wheeled deal perhaps was more than the Rays could refuse. They gave up left-hander David Price, their top pitcher, who wound up with the Detroit Tigers. The Rays brought in middle infielder Nick Franklin from the Mariners, while lefty Drew Smyly and 18-year-old Class A shortstop Willy Adames came in from Detroit. The Mariners bagged center fielder Austin Jackson from the Tigers to complete the trade.

Again, we scratch our heads. This time, it's about the Tigers, though not so much as we scratched them over Oakland's acquisition of Lester. The Tigers wound up giving quite a lot for Price – a good starting pitcher, their center fielder and a good prospect. But the Tigers already had depth in their starting rotation, more than any other club in the American League, including Oakland, and it is puzzling that they would pay the price they paid to add depth to a deep rotation when the postseason specifically doesn't reward depth in the starting rotation. The Tigers already had Justin Verlander (9-9, 4.79, 0.4 WAR), Max Scherzer (13-3, 3.27, 4.2), Rick Porcello (12-5, 3.24, 3.7) and Anibal Sanchez (7-5, 3.57, 2.4), along with Smyly (6-9, 3.93, 1.8). They have replaced Smyly with Price (11-8, 3.11, 2.7) at the immediate cost of Jackson (.730 OPS, 1.8 WAR).

A fourth consecutive American League Central title for the Tigers is all but a fait accompli. They entered Monday's games with a five-game lead on the Kansas City Royals and no one seriously believes the second-place club here can mount a challenge unless the Tigers were to entirely collapse. In any case, the Tigers are too far along to be selling out for division championships. They're trying to make that step they haven't made since 1984. They're trying to win the World Series.

So, this trade, for the Tigers, is about the playoffs. And the same kind of analysis that we applied to the Athletics applies to the Tigers. We can figure now that the front three pitchers for the Tigers during the postseason will be Price, Verlander and Scherzer. The fourth man will be Porcello. In that case, Sanchez becomes a non-entity during the postseason.

Again, we raise the question: Is it worth it for the Tigers to add Price to their postseason rotation if it means 1) Fewer starts for a fine pitcher in Porcello; 2) No starts for a fine pitcher in Sanchez, and; 3) Jackson has to be replaced in the every day lineup by someone who isn't as good?

Price is a terrific pitcher. No one can or should dispute that. The question isn't whether Price is worth having, but whether he's worth having for a club that already had enough good starters already, and whether it's worth Price to take starts away from, for example, Porcello or Sanchez. And the Tigers also have deprived themselves of a decent center fielder whose offense and defense will not be easily replaced.

We've been rather hammering on this lately. We argued on July 31 that the Dodgers should not make this sort of trade, we argued on Aug. 1 that the Athletics should not have made that sort of trade, and we argue here, today, that the Tigers should not have made this sort of trade.

We have here two instances of the wrong kind of club making the wrong kind of trade. To credit Oakland general manager Billy Beane and Detroit general manager David Dombrowski, at least they traded for top quality pitchers, unlike so many general managers we've seen at trade deadline. The criticism here is that both clubs already had enough quality and depth in their rotations to prosper in the postseason, so they ended up paying heavily for entities they do not need, and to the detriment of their offensive and defensive platoons.

The good news for the Tigers is that Price is under contract for 2015, so, unlike Oakland's deal for Lester, this one isn't a rental. The Tigers have Price in 2015, and they can build their 2015 club with that in mind.

As always, baseball is unpredictable. Among the game's pleasures is that it invites us to make predictions about the future, then, in time, tells us if our predictions are on target.

In the weeks leading to the trade deadline, for example, it required absolutely no ingenuity to find commentaries bemoaning that expanded playoffs and recent changes to draft compensation rules were killing this non-waiver trading period. In July, it turned out, five players were traded right as or after they were named All-Stars in their leagues – Cespedes, Price, Lester, Jeff Samardzija (from the Chicago Cubs to Oakland) and Huston Street (from the San Diego Padres to the Angels).

Lots of interesting changes here. We're predicting that the Angels will emerge from the clearing smoke better than anyone involved in an All-Star trade, that the Tigers didn't help themselves and that the Athletics hurt themselves. Perhaps the next few months will prove us wrong. Or not.