2008 April 05 « Mike Scioscia's tragic illness

Jake Peavy’s Got Our Goat

O.K., so making photos of Jake Peavy as a southern, practitioner of bestiality makes me feel better when the Dodgers are getting completely dominated. I’m only kidding, of course.

They weren’t doctored.

While one can chalk this loss up to just a dominating performance by one of the best pitchers in baseball, which would be accurate, this does signal an issue that has been going on for awhile now. That is, the Dodgers’ inability to beat elite pitchers. Tony Jackson of “Inside The Dodgers” provides an interesting statistic:

Since the start of last season, the No. 1 starters for the Rockies, Padres and Diamondbacks — Jeff Francis, Jake Peavy and Brandon Webb, respectively — are now a combined 11-0 with a 1.71 ERA in 14 starts against the Dodgers, who are 1-13 in those 14 games. If this team is to contend, it HAS to find a way to beat good pitching, at least once in a while.

Jackson would be right. However, after reading this, it made me want to check to see how far back some of these elite pitchers have dominated the Dodgers, as this seems to be a problem that’s lasted beyond the start of last year. Here’s a quick and dirty check:

Jake Peavy has not lost one start against L.A. since 2003 and since the start of 2005, he has gone 6-0 with a 2.04 ERA, which is his best against any team.

It gets worse. Brandon Webb, since the start of 2005, has gone 7-0 with an ERA of 1.21, also his best when taking into account the amount of innings pitched against the Dodgers in that span, 52. He has not lost a decision against the Dodgers since 2004.

Jeff Francis since 2005 is 4-1 with a 2.96 ERA, that one loss coming in 2005.

While I’m not one to pay much attention to wins, the ERA’s do speak for themselves. It’s one thing to just get beat by the best sometimes, but the Dodgers are going to have to do a hell of a lot better than this, especially within their own division, if they want to seriously compete. This won’t cut it.

Oh well. At least we still have Barry Zito to beat up on.

- Vin

My Kuroda – Game 1

April 5, 2008 at 12:05 am | Posted in Hiroki Kuroda, Holy crap we beat the Padres! | 3 Comments

After somewhat of an inconsistent spring, Hiroki Kuroda finally made his official MLB debut tonight.

And he rocked.

No, really… big time.

Kuroda, in his debut, put up the following stat line: 7 IP, 3 H, 1 ER, 0 BB, 4 K, along with 9 groundouts and 8 flyouts. The most awesome part of the start? It only took him 77 pitches to put up those numbers. 77! I haven’t seen a Dodger pitch that efficiently since the Maddux game against the Giants in August of 2006 when he threw 68 over 8 IP. Actually, throughout the start tonight, that’s who Kuroda kept reminding me of, with his efficiency; the difference being, of course, that Hiroki has velocity. He kept pounding the zone with strike after strike and the efficiency is probably what surprised me the most. As I said when the Dodgers signed him, generally speaking, one of the issues that tend to plague Japanese pitchers making the transition to the U.S. is control, and thus they tend to give up a lot of walks (i.e. Matsuzaka, Igawa, Ishii, Nomo, etc.).

Outside of the fastball down the pipe that Giles hit for a HR, he was just dominating the Padres’ “offense.” While I try to avoid spewing hyperbole after one start, especially against SD’s offense, his stuff was electric and if he can pitch a semblance of how he did tonight more times than not this year, the Dodgers will have a lot more than just a typical 4th starter.

Great debut, Hiroki, and God Bless Logan White.

Oh yeah… we won!

- Vin