Category Archives: Don Mattingly

What Have We Learned So Far From Spring Training?

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A month into spring training and less than two weeks before Opening Day, what have we learned so far about the 2012 Dodgers? Not a whole lot, you could argue. We spent all winter talking about how locked-down the first 23 spots on the Opening Day roster seemed to be, and for the most part, that hasn’t changed a bit over the last few weeks. Jerry Sands hasn’t done much to earn the final spot on the roster, opening himself up to some real competition from Justin Sellers and Josh Fields, and while that may lead to a depressingly weak bench, it may be for the best given Jerry Hairston‘s defensive troubles and Don Mattingly’s insistence on letting James Loney & Andre Ethier get another chance against lefty pitching.

On the pitching side, the rotation remains set while Blake Hawksworth won’t be ready in the bullpen, and so the final spot will come down to Josh Lindblom battling NRIs like Jamey Wright & John Grabow, just like we expected weeks ago. (It won’t be Ramon Troncoso, of course.) Wright and Grabow each have the ability to opt out of their contracts on Sunday, which would then give the Dodgers until March 30th to decide to add them to the roster. If they don’t, they’re free agents. Expect at least one to be out of the organization in a week.

But we knew all that. What else has spring training taught us?

Well, we know that Juan Uribe isn’t worried. But he really, really should be. You know how little importance I place on spring training numbers, and so that’s why you won’t hear me making a peep about the fact that Matt Kemp has only a .297 OBP in Arizona, because, you know, spring. (It works both ways, too. I’ve been saying for months that Ethier’s going to have a great 2012. Is he going to hit .440/.483/1.080 all year? Uh, probably not.) But that’s not an absolute, and when you have a highly-paid veteran coming off a massive bust of a debut, in which injuries played a part and conditioning was called into question, you’d like to see something to give you some hope that he’ll rebound this year.

Heading into the last week of March, Uribe has managed just five singles. It’s hardly cause for optimism, though he’s doing his best to Allen Iverson the situation away by saying the games don’t count:

“I’m not worried because this is practice,” Uribe said, smiling and as carefree as ever. “I want to make sure I’m healthy, that I’m having good at-bats. It doesn’t matter if I get hits. This is to prepare for the regular season.”

Uribe said he was pleased with the results of the surgery he underwent in the fall for the sports hernia that prematurely ended the first season of his three-year, $21-million contract.

“You really don’t know how you feel until you start playing,” he said.

Feel the enthusiasm, don’t you? Uribe’s going to get his chances simply because of his contract, but I’m having a hard time envisioning him being the starting third baseman all year. Unfortunately, the options behind him are slim. Adam Kennedy is hardly a viable option, Hairston is useful mostly for his versatility, and Sellers is much more valuable up the middle than he’s going to be at third base. Spring sensation Fields could get a look, but despite his 23 homer 2007, his fielding and subsequent hitting have been so poor that he’s been worth all of -0.1 fWAR for his career.

It’s an ugly situation at third base, and Uribe is doing nothing to make us feel any better about it. But hey, if not David Wright, Mark Reynolds seems to be available. So there’s that.

******

Still holding out hope that Frank McCourt won’t hang onto the parking lots? You’re not alone, according to Mike Ozanian of Forbes…

The five remaining groups bidding for Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers want the roughly 130 acres of land Dodger Stadium’s parking lots sit on to be included with their current offers for the team. The current bids for the Dodgers range from $1.3 billion to $1.6 billion.

According to a high-ranking baseball executive familiar with the bids who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the potential owners do not simply want the right to lease the parking lots at Dodger Stadium from team owner Frank McCourt, they want outright ownership of the land.

No surprise there, of course. Why wouldn’t the incoming owner want to own the land his new toy sits on and ensure that he doesn’t have to deal with the soulless McCourt? By all indications, McCourt doesn’t want to give the lots up; on the other hand, it’s not that difficult to see him acting that way simply to drive up the purchase price, because that’s exactly the sort of thing he does.

******

Ken Rosenthal doesn’t think that Clayton Kershaw is going to repeat as NL Cy Young or that Matt Kemp will take the MVP that so many of us thought he should have won last season, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t expect any awards to come home to Los Angeles…

NL Manager: Don Mattingly, Dodgers

Several NL executives view the Dodgers as a darkhorse in the West, and not simply because they boast one of the league’s best hitters, Kemp, and pitchers, Kershaw — or because they’re about to be sold.

Mattingly, managing for the first time, held the Dodgers together through a rocky first half last season, then guided them to an 82-79 finish. His challenge this season is to get the most out of right fielder Andre Ethier and first baseman James Loney in their respective free-agent years.

With a little help at the trade deadline, the Dodgers could return to prominence sooner than expected, elevating Mattingly’s profile.

I felt Mattingly really did an excellent job in his first season, as we discussed near the end of last year, and so it’s not hard to see this scenario at all. On the other hand, the Manager of the Year award is kind of a crock, because it almost always goes to the manager of a playoff team, thus largely making it the “Talented Roster of the Year” award. Yahoo’s Tim Brown chimes in with some Mattingly praise as well.

******

I’m headed off to spring training this weekend (that’s Florida, not Arizona, though) and so expect a quiet few days around here. (Which, based on my history of being gone when big things happen, will almost certainly guarantee that McCourt is going to agree to sell the club to Lindsay Lohan at some point in the next three days.)

That said, the new site is coming along wonderfully and I still plan to launch it in the days leading up to Opening Day. I’m pretty excited about it, and I hope you will be too. Just for kicks, here’s a sneak peek…

…and much more to come. (This would be a hell of a lot easier if we could all just agree to never, ever use Internet Explorer again, by the way.) While I iron out the last few items, I would like to make sure that I’m building this in the most effective way for your usage, and so I’d love to see some discussion on these two items. First, a survey on how you find new MSTI content…

[polldaddy poll=6070039]

Second, I’m going back and forth on the commenting system. Many of you like the default WordPress system for its simplicity, while many of you hate it for exactly that same reason. I’m looking into using a third-party system (not Disqus) that would allow for real-time commenting and the ability to sign in via social networks, as well as more easily reply to other comments in the thread. What say you?

MSTI’s 2011 in Review: Management

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Don Mattingly (B+)

Sometimes, I think we underestimate just how bad of a situation the 2011 Dodgers were for a rookie manager to get shoved into. As if getting handed the reins to a team with no managerial experience wasn’t tough enough, Don Mattingly was lucky enough to finally get his dream job on a team that suffered through one of the worst off-field seasons of any club I can remember in decades. That’s on top of an on-field collection that featured two superstars but far more dead space than bright spots.

That’s a team that could have collapsed, and not just in a traditional “we’re going to lose 98 games” sort of way, but in a “we’ve totally given up and we’re going to be an embarrassment on and off the field” sort of way. You don’t have to squint to hard to envision a scenario where we’d have been calling for Mattingly’s head at the end of the worst season in the long history of the Dodger franchise.

But it didn’t happen. The team was awful for the first few months, losing games and being uninteresting while doing so and losing nearly the entire bullpen to injury, but we never questioned their effort. Save for Andre Ethier’s usual outbursts, we never heard about problems in the clubhouse, and from our external view, Mattingly was able to keep the club focused on the field and not in the courtroom. By the end of September, as the team suddenly turned into a second-half force, I had no choice but to praise Mattingly’s performance:

Now let’s be clear, because we talked about this last week when discussing Jeff Pentland vs Dave Hansen: with the exception of the new-and-improved James Loney, this team largely turned around because they turned over their roster. They had more Juan Rivera & second takes of Jerry Sands and Dee Gordon, as opposed to hundreds of plate appearances wasted on the gimpy and useless like Juan Uribe, Dioner Navarro, Marcus Thames, and a less-than-healthy Ethier. A manager, no matter how beloved or despised, can only have so much impact on a game. But had things been allowed to fall apart even more than they had in the middle of the season, there might not even have been the opportunity to rebound.

No, he hasn’t been perfect, because this is the same guy who has killed us with bunts, used Mike MacDougal in big spots, and who once chose Juan Castro over Sands and others to pinch-hit with the bases loaded, which also meant Kershaw came out too early and Lance Cormier had to be used to blow the game. Then again, what manager is? Perhaps I’m colored because I was very vocally disliked Joe Torre, but complaints with managerial decisions seem to be cut by a factor of five this year.

Don Mattingly isn’t going to win the NL Manager of the Year award, nor should he, yet he probably will get some back-end support, and it’s well deserved. If a year ago at this time, nearly to the day, we were worried that with everything else the Dodgers had going on, they’d also have to deal with an inexperienced manager no one could count on, now we’ve seen that Mattingly is capable of keeping the players focused and working, no matter what kind of garbage is coming from the outside. In a season of small victories and big defeats, that’s one to be proud of.

Two months later, my opinion hasn’t changed. Mattingly’s not the perfect manager, just because nobody who likes bunts as much as he does could be. But in a trying season, he proved masterful at keeping the clubhouse focused and the players under control; his (and Davey Lopes’) impact on Kemp alone should be worth a raise. Considering how little I thought of Torre and how worried we were about Mattingly to start the year, 2011 was a successful one from the bench. Now let’s hope that Mattingly spends his winter checking out run expectancy charts, can we?

Ned Colletti (D)

(As a reminder, this covers only Ned’s moves from the end of the 2010 season to the end of the 2011 season, so it’s not the place to complain that this year’s club had Dioner Navarro instead of Carlos Santana, or that Juan Rivera was re-signed for far too much.)

Let’s start with the positives, because there honestly weren’t many. Aaron Miles, Mike MacDougal, and Dana Eveland were the kind of decent zero-cost, mild-return scrap-heap pickups that Colletti does a good enough job of finding every year, and swapping out Marcus Thames for Juan Rivera at basically no cost worked out wonderfully, at least at first. Getting a decent reliever in Blake Hawksworth for the brutal Ryan Theriot was solid, though somewhat marked down because Colletti had acquired Theriot in the first place, and while trading away Rafael Furcal he picked up an interesting if somewhat fringy prospect in Alex Castellanos. Oh, and he signed Chad Billingsley to a reasonably priced three-year deal, which was nice, and even though it completely failed to work out, trying to go overboard in pitching depth by signing Jon Garland and Vicente Padilla to round out the rotation was a clever idea, at least until Garland let it slip that other teams didn’t like his medical reports.

Got that? Good. Now let’s recall how we felt about the 2010-11 offseason back in Februrary:

I’ll be the first to say that this hasn’t exactly been the brightest offseason around here. We’ve been dismayed at the seemingly excessive contracts handed out to Matt Guerrier, Rod Barajas, and Juan Uribe. We’ve cringed at the impending disastrophe of the JaMarcus Gwybbons, Jr. situation in left field, wondered why they couldn’t find a righty partner for Andre Ethier, been disappointed over the inability to upgrade on Casey Blake, and resigned ourselves to another year of mediocrity from James Loney. We’ve been terrified at both how there’s no good option for a #2 hitter and how the lineup as a whole seems to have been assembled with no regard for OBP. We’ve worried about atrocious outfield defense and considered what things may have looked like if the near-misses for aging vets Aubrey Huff , Michael Young, and AJ Pierzynski hadn’t been misses at all. We’ve fretted that minor-league deals or not, historically poor players like Juan Castro and Aaron Miles are in the mix and just may make the team, and we’ve wondered when and if proven young talents like Clayton Kershaw and Chad Billingsley would see long-term deals.

With the exception of the fact that Billingsley did end up getting signed, how much of what worried us before the season no longer seems accurate after it? Not a whole lot; we expected most of those moves to work poorly, and they largely did. Besides, that list doesn’t even include the fact that Colletti had actually picked up the team half of Scott Podsednik‘s 2011 option, which Podsednik miraculously declined, or that Dioner Navarro was handed a job that he in no way deserved.

And that’s what really bothers me the most, you know. It’s one thing when a well-thought-out plan doesn’t pan out, because that’s happened to every general manager in the history of baseball, and it’s happened to all of us in our day-to-day lives… and it’s another thing when a collection of moves which you know aren’t going to work don’t work. We knew a lineup full of low-OBP guys would have trouble scoring runs. We knew Blake couldn’t stay healthy. We knew Ethier wasn’t going to hit lefties. We knew going after Huff was an awful idea, and consider it a bullet dodged that it didn’t happen. We knew Navarro wasn’t better than A.J. Ellis. We knew Thames and Jay Gibbons were not the solution in left field. We knew that Guerrier wasn’t going to be a difference-maker in the bullpen. I’ll grant that we didn’t exactly know that Uribe would be quite this bad in year one, but we knew that he wasn’t worth the contract. Those things were almost certainly not going to work, and they didn’t; pressures from the McCourt divorce aside, these are the reasons why the Dodgers were such a lousy squad through the first few months of the year.

I basically said as much in June, as things really looked bleak…

The point is, this was always a flawed team, one that few thought was going to head anywhere unless everything worked out completely perfectly. It hasn’t, and while the depths we’ve seen lately may have been deeper than expected from a team we thought would be at least competitive, little here has been a complete surprise. For once, that’s not entirely Frank McCourt’s fault. Off-field distractions aside, the Dodgers were one of the more active teams in free agency last winter, and though the payroll isn’t to the levels it really ought to be, it’s also not a $50m shoestring budget like other teams have to deal with. This is the team that Ned Colletti put together, and it hasn’t been pretty.

Once the season started, Colletti’s main role was filling in holes of a roster decimated by injury and looking around to see what was out there if Hiroki Kuroda accepted a trade. Kuroda didn’t, but credit to Colletti for at least acknowledging the team was in sell mode this year. Of course, the former PR man did have his usual “foot-in-mouth” moment early in the season, publicly stating Jonathan Broxton was out as the closer weeks before that was actually true. And then out of nowhere came the Trayvon Robinson deal, just seconds before the July 31 deadline, which was so universally reviled that it turned Colletti into a national punchline. (Okay, more of a punchline.) My thoughts on the matter are well-known, and I’m not going to repeat them all here… but okay, I wrote a ton about it, so here’s two paragraphs:

That means that fans – not just Dodger fans, this happens on all teams – tend to overvalue their own players, and even yesterday on Twitter I saw people groaning about losing Robinson before even knowing who was coming back. I think that’s short-sighted, because I have no problem with trading prospects. A solid farm system exists to provide value, and while the obvious outcome is “good young player comes up to join the big club”, value can also come from “good young player is traded for immediate impact veteran or another good young player”. Depending on the circumstances, trading a top prospect is not always a bad thing – as long as you get value back. If the Dodgers are deep in outfielders and short in catching, than the idea of trading Robinson for an impact catching prospect is not a terrible plan.

The problem here is that few think Tim Federowicz is an impact catcher, and many doubt he can hit enough to even be a viable major league starter. This isn’t a new theme, because so far in Ned Colletti’s tenure, he’s often spent prospects to get players who were not of equal value. I didn’t mind trading Santana when we all thought Russell Martin would be here for 5-7 more years; I hated trading him for two months of a good-but-not-great third baseman. (If Santana had been sent to Cleveland for CC Sabathia that year rather than Blake, I guarantee you there wouldn’t have been anywhere near the same outcry.) I didn’t mind the idea of trading James McDonald & Andrew Lambo, two players unlikely to be stars, but the problem was a team that had no business going for it in 2010 trading them for an elderly reliever who wasn’t going to make a difference. This is why the Robinson trade stinks so bad, because you’re trading a top-5 Dodger prospect for three guys who are barely top-25 Red Sox prospects.

And even though Robinson had an uncertain debut in Seattle and may never pan out, that’s still the point – the idea that you likely could have gotten more in return for him than what they did. Even if neither Robinson or Federowicz become anything, it doesn’t feel as though Robinson’s value was utilized fully. Though we’ve never doubted his passion or humanity – made clear in a rare August interview – we’ve also never doubted that one of the brightest moments of his tenure was that flickering hope that the Cubs might actually be interested in bringing him aboard.

But Ned is what Ned is, and he’s been around long enough that it’s foolish to hold out hope that he can change. If anything, watch the rush for a new owner closely, since new owners often like to bring in their own people.

******

That wraps up this year’s edition of the season in review series. Thanks as always for reading and indulging the need to fill up down time in the fall months with such a long series.

Don Mattingly’s Surprisingly Strong Season

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I was filling out an award ballot for Howard Cole’s (of Baseball Savvy and the OC Register) IBWAA this morning (fun facts, I placed neither Ian Kennedy nor Prince Fielder in the top five of the NL Cy Young or MVP, respectively), and came upon the “NL Manager of the Year” section. Now, Kirk Gibson is going to get a ton of praise for turning around an Arizona club that lost 97 games last year (including a 34-49 record on his watch) into a runaway division winner this year, and rightfully so. He was my choice, and I imagine he’ll win the actual award. Aside from Gibson, you’ll probably see Milwaukee’s Ron Roenicke garner some support for cruising past 90 wins to a division title in his first year as a manager (despite a clearly superior roster to most of his NL Central competitors), and Charlie Manuel probably deserves some notice for taking a Philadelphia team that everyone thought was going to win 100 games and actually living up to expectations.

And then… well, you could argue that Don Mattingly deserves a pretty large amount of credit, right? Remember, this is a first-year guy who many of us didn’t want to see get the job over Tim Wallach last year, worried as we were about his inexperience, proximity to Joe Torre, and the humiliating “double mound visit” fiasco that helped to blow a game against the Giants while he was filling in for an ejected Torre last July. In addition, he managed in the Arizona Fall League last year, an extremely unusual step for a major league manager.

But he got off to a pretty good start in the spring by naming Clayton Kershaw the Opening Day starter on the first day of camp, rather than letting it linger as Torre had, and (along with Ned Colletti) putting together a coaching staff including Wallach & Davey Lopes that we felt far, far better about than the old-school curmudgeon types like Larry Bowa and Bob Schaefer that Torre had the previous year. Despite another ultimately-meaningless-but-embarrassing gaffe in camp where he filled out the lineup incorrectly, we at least had some hope that Mattingly could be the new, younger leader the club needed after three years of Torre.

And then the season started.

Besieged by injuries, weighed down by awful performances from the Navarros, Uribes, and Cormiers of the world, and assaulted from all sides by the McCourt devastation, the Dodgers sank. They were 14-14 at the end of April, but that was just the beginning. They won just 12 games in May and 10 in June, with 12 more in July. Technically (since they won the season opener on March 31 and went 13-14 in April) they were losers in each of the first four full months of the season. As they reached their low points, falling 14 games under and 14.5 games out in the NL West at different points in July, most of us had all but given up on this team and begged them to sell.

And who could really even blame Mattingly at that point? The roster he’d been given to start with wasn’t a great one, and the injuries and off-field mess eventually made the situation untenable. But, to his credit and that of his coaches, we never saw the team give up. Oh, they were still bad, and oh good lord were they boring for quite a while, but they never quit. We never saw players loafing between the lines, and – other than Andre Ethier‘s annual and completely expected outburst about his contract – we rarely if ever became aware of issues within the clubhouse or with the media. For a team that’s recently lived through Manny Ramirez, Jeff Kent, and popular-if-perhaps-not-totally-accurate suggestions about Matt Kemp, that’s impressive on its face in the light of the outside distractions.

Now that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really mean too much if the team doesn’t perform on the field, and don’t forget that we all spent the majority of the first four months writing about the potential for the 2011 Dodgers to be remembered on a historically bad level. After a loss on July 22 to Washington, their fourth in five games, the Dodgers had sunk to last place at 43-55, on pace to lose 270 games. (Conservatively.)

But they won the next day. And the next, and the next, and the next. Despite being swept by Philadelphia in the middle of the month, August was the first winning month for the Dodgers, at 17-11. September has been even better, at 15-8, headed into the final three games of the year; all told, the Dodgers are 37-22 since that July 22 game, a .627 winning percentage which would be a 101-61 pace if kept up for an entire season. From the depths of July which few of us had ever seen before, this is a team that needs just one win in the last series to come away with a winning record. There’s not a soul among us who would have believed that midway through the year.

Now let’s be clear, because we talked about this last week when discussing Jeff Pentland vs Dave Hansen: with the exception of the new-and-improved James Loney, this team largely turned around because they turned over their roster. They had more Juan Rivera & second takes of Jerry Sands and Dee Gordon, as opposed to hundreds of plate appearances wasted on the gimpy and useless like Juan Uribe, Dioner Navarro, Marcus Thames, and a less-than-healthy Ethier. A manager, no matter how beloved or despised, can only have so much impact on a game. But had things been allowed to fall apart even more than they had in the middle of the season, there might not even have been the opportunity to rebound.

No, he hasn’t been perfect, because this is the same guy who has killed us with bunts, used Mike MacDougal in big spots, and who once chose Juan Castro over Sands and others to pinch-hit with the bases loaded, which also meant Kershaw came out too early and Lance Cormier had to be used to blow the game. Then again, what manager is? Perhaps I’m colored because I was very vocally disliked Joe Torre, but complaints with managerial decisions seem to be cut by a factor of five this year.

Don Mattingly isn’t going to win the NL Manager of the Year award, nor should he, yet he probably will get some back-end support, and it’s well deserved. If a year ago at this time, nearly to the day, we were worried that with everything else the Dodgers had going on, they’d also have to deal with an inexperienced manager no one could count on, now we’ve seen that Mattingly is capable of keeping the players focused and working, no matter what kind of garbage is coming from the outside. In a season of small victories and big defeats, that’s one to be proud of.

******

Other news: Kemp, unsurprisingly, won the NL Player of the Week award today, his second such honor. He’s still not going to win the Triple Crown. Mattingly, among others, is featured in a new “It Gets Better” anti-bullying Dodgers video out today. And yes, the rumors are true, the Dodgers have slightly updated their logo, and when I say “slightly”, I mean “slightly”. With an understanding of the behind-the-scenes functional reasons the changes were made, however, it makes a whole lot of sense, even if casual fans may not even notice.

Dodgers Winning With Roster in Flux

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The Dodgers used 20 players in Saturday’s 2-1 victory over Atlanta, their 11th win in 12 games. Of the 20, only eight – Matt Kemp, James Loney, Andre Ethier, Jamey Carroll, Tony Gwynn, Rod Barajas, Kenley Jansen & Hong-Chih Kuo – were seen as certainties to make the Opening Day roster when camp started, and Barajas & Ethier made only cameo appearances in the game. (Aaron Miles, A.J. Ellis, and Mike MacDougal also did make the Opening Day roster, but at least two got their spots due to the injuries of others and none seemed likely to do so when camp opened.)

Going in the other direction, of the 20, only eight again seem assured of being Dodgers in 2012, but it’s not the same eight – Kemp, Ethier, Jansen, Ellis, Javy Guerra, Dee Gordon, Scott Elbert and Nathan Eovaldi. You’ll also likely see some of the Loney / Juan Rivera/ Justin Sellers group return, though none should be so confident as to start purchasing homes at the moment.

On a smaller level, it’s even happening on a day-to-day basis. Take the first two games of the series in Atlanta, for example. Loney, Kemp, and Rivera hit 2-3-4 both days, yet the other six spots in the lineup were essentially completely different (Sellers did play both days, but had different spots in both the field and the batting order.)

In fact, since the streak started on August 22 in St. Louis, Don Mattingly has rarely tossed out consistent lineups. Just look at the number of hitters who have started games in each of the nine batting spots over the 12 game stretch:

1st: (5) – Carroll, Sellers, Aaron Miles, Gwynn, Gordon
2nd: (3) – Loney, Gwynn, Sellers
3rd (1) – Kemp
4th (3) – Rivera, Ethier, Loney
5th (4) – Ethier, Casey Blake, Miles, Russ Mitchell
6th (5) – Miles, Loney, Blake, Barajas, Gwynn
7th (4) – Barajas, Ellis, Carroll, Trent Oeltjen
8th (4) – Sellers, Carroll, Ellis, Eugenio Velez
9th (6) – Regular five-man rotation + Dana Eveland

That’s a lot of changes for a 12 game span; over the 138 games of the season, Mattingly has penciled in 121 different lineups (not including pitchers, which bumps it to 134). You’ll notice, however, that there’s one position that never changes, and that’s Matt Kemp hitting third. “Of course Kemp is going to play every day,” you might say, “because he’s awesome.” Indeed he is. However, over the first 126 games of the season, Kemp started and hit cleanup 125 times, with Blake getting one start when Kemp had a day off on June 10 in Colorado.

On August 22, with the club having lost five of their last seven and nine of their last fourteen, Mattingly finally bumped Kemp up to third, where he’s started each of the 12 games since with three homers and a .999 OPS. The Dodgers, as you know, have lost just one of those games, and even that was mostly due to Eovaldi’s poor start last Sunday against the Rockies.

Now, there’s a lot of reasons the Dodgers have played so well lately. Loney coming back from the dead is a big one, as is getting great production from behind the plate in the post-Dioner Navarro era and Ethier bouncing back from his knee controversy with some big hits. The rotation has been good more often than not, and the bullpen has been very good, though mostly under-the-radar. (I almost included “more Rivera, less all the other guys who weren’t Rivera” here, until I noticed that Rivera has actually been pretty lousy during the streak, with just six hits in 43 plate appearances.) Shockingly, guaranteeing that your best hitter – arguably the best hitter in the league – sees more plate appearances and always hits in the first inning has been a big positive as well.

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Clayton Kershaw goes for win #18 today against Atlanta rookie Randall Delgado as the Dodgers try to finish off a sweep of the Braves. Arizona’s Ian Kennedy moved to 18-4 yesterday, and MLB Network’s Mitch Williams – with Joe Morgan gone, perhaps the only commentator more consistently off the mark than Steve Lyons – thinks that’s a big deal in the Cy Young race:

Williams believes Kennedy and Halladay’s home ballparks give them a clear advantage over the Dodgers lefty.

“Kershaw is 9-0 at home but if you put Kennedy or Halladay in Dodger Stadium they would be 9-0 at home too,” Williams said. “Chase Field and Citizens Bank Park are band boxes so Kennedy and Halladay have to pitch.

Kershaw has indeed been excellent at home, where in 14 starts he’s allowed just 74 hits while putting up a fantastic 107/24 K/BB mark. It’s just too bad he hasn’t been able to match that on the road, where in 14 starts he’s allowed a disturbing 80 hits and a terrible 105/26 K/BB mark.

Uh, right. Thanks for playing, Mitch.

******

Might we see more unexpected callups than previously thought? I still think that Jerry Sands and Tim Federowicz are locks to come up in the coming days as the AAA season winds down – Ken Gurnick reports that Ramon Troncoso was called up this morning – but Gurnick also thinks we might see some of the AA arms sooner than anyone figured:

Mattingly said that the Dodgers will call up a few more players from Triple-A when Albuquerque’s season ends on Monday, perhaps Jerry Sands and Tim Federowicz, and a few more when Double-A Chattanooga is finished with the playoffs. Allen Webster, Shawn Tolleson and Cole St. Claire have been considered.

We’re going to talk about this more in the offseason, but the Dodgers should not be spending a single dollar on adding relief pitching this winter. It’s one area they’re extremely deep in, and we’ve seen that spending big money on non-elite relievers rarely makes sense; Matt Guerrier has been fine, yet hardly making enough of a difference to be worth his contract.

2011 Midseason Grades: Pitching and Management

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Thanks for all the feedback on yesterday’s hitting grades, and today we move on to pitching and management. Remember, the letter grades are just for fun, without a whole lot of thought or science behind them.

Starting Pitchers

Clayton Kershaw (A+) (9-4, 3.03 ERA, 2.45 FIP)
Is A+ even high enough? I’m not sure it is, though we certainly expected great things from him. Think about this: his HR/9 rate and H/9 rate are unchanged from last year, but he’s managed to do that while lowering his walk rate (again!) and increasing his strikeout rate. He’s leading the league in whiffs, and he has two shutouts among his three complete games. He’s 23. He’s lefty. He’s an All-Star.

Don’t let anyone tell you that he’s progressing towards being an ace, or one day he could be one of the best. Clayton Kershaw is, right now, one of the 10 best pitchers in baseball. The scary part? He could still get better.

Chad Billingsley (B) (8-7, 3.87 ERA, 3.41 FIP)
Over at Baseball Prospectus this morning, Geoff Young of DuckSnorts offers the opinion that Billingsley “should be a star, but isn’t”. And that’s true. 26-year-old Billingsley is walking more and striking out less than 23-year-old Billingsley did in 2008. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because he’s still a very valuable asset and the extension he signed over the winter was welcomed, but he’s also not going to be a Kershaw-level star like we’d once hoped he would be. Again, that’s not to get on Billingsley, it’s just seemingly who he’s going to be – a durable #2 or 3 type who will be consistently inconsistent (3 starts this year of at least 8 IP and 1 ER or less, 3 starts allowing 5 ER or more). That’s not a star, but it is a quality pitcher we should be happy to have.

Hiroki Kuroda (B) (6-10, 3.06 ERA, 3.73 FIP)
Only five pitchers have received less run support than Kuroda (shockingly, no other Dodger appears on the top 40 of that list), so let’s not pretend the poor win/loss record means absolutely anything at all. Conversely, the ERA is a little misleading as well, since he’s striking out fewer and walking more than he did in either 2009 or 2010, facts which are reflected in the higher FIP. Still, he’s been a solid member of this rotation… and probably the only Dodger with any real trade value at the deadline. I’ll be sorry to see him go, if he does.

Ted Lilly (D) (6-9, 4.79 ERA, 4.59 FIP)
Lilly hasn’t been awful (back, back, it’s gone!), but nor has he been (throw to second, and the runner is in!) in any way worthy of the $33m deal he received in the offseason. He’s (that ball is far, it is out of here!) striking out fewer than ever, and more (he’s going, and he swipes second without a throw) batted balls in front of a defense that isn’t great at converting them into outs isn’t (that ball is crushed into the second tier!) a good mix. Oh, and he’s 35 and has complained (Navarro’s throw to second, not in time, another steal!) of arm soreness already. Loving that three-year deal more than ever.

Rubby De La Rosa (A) (3-4, 3.74 ERA, 3.40 FIP)
Probably the most impressive of any of the rookies pushed ahead of their schedule this year, de la Rosa has shown immense talent while being forced to learn on-the-job. While his first few starts were dicey – good lord, the walks, and that one game that he nearly got bounced in the first inning was a heart-stopper – RDLR has shown marked improvement, even flirting with no-hitters in each of his last two outings. The talent is unquestioned, but the real concern now is limited his innings, since he’s quickly coming up on matching his previous high with more than two months remaining in the season. But if he’s limited and if someone like Kuroda is dealt… how do you finish out the season? John Ely? Dana Eveland? Yikes.

Jon Garland (D-) (1-5, 4.33 ERA, 4.59 FIP)
Hey, remember when Garland was signed largely because he’d never been on the disabled list before? If you do, then you probably also remember him saying he couldn’t get multi-year deals because other teams didn’t like the looks of his medical reports. Garland gets a lousy grade not because of his performance (ignore the 1-5, a 4.59 FIP is in line with his usual season), but because he sells his durability as a skill. Clearly, that’s one item he forgot to pack for his second (and likely final) tour with the Dodgers. At least that large 2012 option won’t kick in.

John Ely (inc.) (0-1, 6.23 ERA, 5.61 FIP)
Remember Ely-mania last year? Seems so far away, doesn’t it?

Relief pitchers

Jonathan Broxton (MRI) (1-2, 7 saves, 5.68 ERA, 5.56 FIP)
I have absolutely no idea how to grade Jonathan Broxton. Was he good this year? No, of course he wasn’t, and for many people that justifies their opinion that at around midseason 2010, he somehow lost his heart / mind / balls / toes / earlobes / whatever. The fact that he somehow managed to even close out seven games earlier this year is somewhat misleading, because he rarely did so smoothly; conversely, it’s difficult to blame him entirely for the big blown save in Florida because the Dodgers would have won if Jamey Carroll had merely fielded a simple ground ball.

I’d say the answer lies in the fact that he’s been on the disabled list for over two months due to a right elbow injury, with no estimated return date. We never saw the healthy Broxton this year, just as I felt we never saw a healthy Broxton in the second half of last year. The lesson, as always? Joe Torre cannot be trusted with relievers. You hate to say it about a guy who is only 27, but Torre may just have ruined Broxton’s career. Thanks for stopping by, Joe!

Hong-Chih Kuo (-) (0-0, 8.71 ERA, 4.12 FIP)
Take everything I said about Broxton above and multiply it by 100 for Kuo, because the anxiety issue he’s been fighting for years makes it impossible to really judge his on-field performance. Since returning, he’s at least managed to limit the walks (6/2 K/BB in 5.2 IP), though the results (five runs, four earned) haven’t all been there yet. The fact that he even returned as quickly as he did should count as a win.

Kenley Jansen (B+) (1-1, 4.40 ERA, 3.15 FIP)
I bet a lot of people will be surprised by this grade for Jansen. “But his ERA is 4.40, rabble rabble rabble!”, they’ll yell. That’s true, it is. That number is also heavily inflated by two poor outings – allowing 5 earned runs to Atlanta on April 19 in a game that the Dodgers were already losing in, and allowing 3 earned runs on May 23 in Houston, a game which preceded his stint on the DL with right shoulder inflammation by less than a week. Since returning from injury on June 18, he’s been nearly untouchable, striking out 13 while allowing just two singles in 9.2 innings. While the walks remain a problem, he’s actually striking out more per nine than he did in 2010, and you might remember that even last year’s rate was on the verge of being historic. The question for me is, why is he stuck in middle relief and garbage time rather than in higher leverage situations?

Matt Guerrier (C-) (3-3, 3.10 ERA, 4.44 FIP)
Boy, who would have thought that handing out an expensive multi-year deal to a non-elite middle reliever wouldn’t have worked out well? Besides everyone, that is. Guerrier actually hasn’t been that bad, but that’s sort of the point: players who get $12m over three years should be able to do better than “hasn’t been that bad”. Though he’s striking out slightly more than he did as a Twin, he’s allowing both more walks and hits than he did in either of the last two years, despite moving to the easier league. He’ll be 33 in less than a month. It’s not a good trend.

Mike MacDougal (C+) (0-1, 1.67 ERA, 3.74 FIP)
2003 All-Star MacDougal has done an excellent job of reviving his career after several years bouncing between the bigs and AAA. MacDougal, who made the 2003 All-Star team as a member of the Royals, has just a 1.74 ERA, emerging as a leader of the injury-plagued Dodger bullpen. The former All-Star has allowed only six earned runs to score, putting him in contention for 9th inning responsibilities. All-Star.

(I can’t do it. MacDougal has allowed approximately 982 of the 48 inherited runners he’s received* to score. For nearly the entire season, he’d walked as many as he’d struck out, before finally giving himself some distance in recent days. He’s not a good pitcher, but like Aaron Miles, we expected nothing, so the small contributions he’s made get him some minor credit. *note: numbers may be fabricated.)

Number of Ortizii: 0 (A++++)
Say what you will about this club, at least they’re not employing anyone named Ortiz who was last useful 6-8 years ago, much less multiple players like that.

Javy Guerra (B+) (1-0, 4 saves, 2.33 ERA, 4.01 FIP)
Guerra, like MacDougal all those years ago, is a perfect example of why we shouldn’t overrate saves. For a guy who walked 6.8/9 in the minors last year and was forced to the bigs simply because of injuries, he’s been fine. He’s keeping the ball in the yard, he’s cut down on the control issues, and he’s even managed to steal a few saves while serving as the last-ditch closer. As far as debuts go, his has been a successful one. Let’s just not go overboard in anointing him as the man in the 9th inning, because he hasn’t been that good – 13 K in 19.1 IP doesn’t thrill me – and in each of his last two saves, he loaded the bases before getting out of the jam. That’s not the kind of tightrope you can walk for very long.

Blake Hawksworth (B) (2-2, 3.00 WHIP, 4.12 FIP)
“Isn’t Ryan Theriot“, and that alone gets him a boost. Actually, I joke, but it’s sort of true: when healthy, Hawksworth has been a perfectly acceptable and average reliever, doing a decent job of keeping runners off the bases (WHIP of 1.000), and striking out more than double as he’s walked. Considering that Theriot is doing his usual “I’m not a very good baseball player, but I am short and white, and that counts for something, right?” routine in St. Louis, even just getting that moderate level of contribution in exchange is a big win.

Scott Elbert (B-) (0-1, 5.25 ERA, 2.54 FIP)
I know there’s been a lot of turnover in the bullpen this year, but Elbert is one of those guys where I constantly have to check if he’s still on the team or down in ABQ. I suppose that’s partically because he’s pitched just twice in the last two weeks, and partially because he’s rarely in for more than 2-3 batters at a time. As for his performance, he’s a bit of an oddity in that you’d expect a power lefty to be hell on lefty hitters, but he’s actually rocking a reverse split: lefties (.701 OPS) are actually doing more damage than righties (.561 OPS) against him. Overall, I guess you can say he’s been “acceptable”, in that he’s finally gained a foothold in the majors, but hasn’t exactly made us think he’s going to be a difference maker.

Then again, considering his mysterious disappearance at this time last year, even that is a massive step forward.

Ramon Troncoso (D) (0-0, 6.23 ERA, 4.92 FIP)
I know it’s popular to blame Torre for Troncoso’s downturn as well, and maybe that’s part of it, but I do remember writing a post last year that outlined how he had larger issues than overuse. Whatever it is, he’s barely a major league quality pitcher right now… which probably explains why he’s not in the major leagues. That’s what’ll happen when you aren’t striking anyone out and giving up an absurd amount of hits, though I’ll allow that since he was never a strikeout guy, pitching in front of a defense that does no favors probably doesn’t help.

Ronald Belisario (MIA)
Ha, no. There’s about as good of a chance that he pitches for the Dodgers again as there is that you’ll see Orel Hershiser or Don Drysdale out there.

Josh Lindblom (B+) (0-0, 1.69 ERA, 3.43 FIP)
Nearly two years after we first thought we might see him, Lindblom finally got the call this year, and so far, so good. It’s hard to make judgements based on just eight games, but he’s yet to allow more than one earned run in an appearance, and for now, that’s good enough.

Lance Cormier (dFa) (0-1, 9.88 ERA, 6.84 FIP)
I’m still convinced the only reason Cormier wasn’t DFA’d a week or two earlier than he eventually was (on May 24, when Rubby De La Rosa came up) is because he had a charity event for tornado victims set up at the stadium on May 15, and it would have been poor form to cut a guy just before or after that. I also like that we can say “nah, he wasn’t as bad as his ERA, look at his FIP” and while that’s true, even his FIP says he was awful.

Vicente Padilla (inc.) (0-0, 4.15 ERA, 2.61 FIP)
I sure do feel like we’ve talked about Padilla a lot this year for a guy who piched just 8.2 innings. First he was signed to a somewhat confusing 6th starter/longman/Broxton insurance role, in a move for depth I actually really liked. Then he required surgery for a forearm injury in the spring, preventing him from taking Garland’s rotation spot to start the year. He returned exceptionally quickly from that, taking over for the injured Broxton to nab three saves of varying quality in late April and early May, leading many to proclaim him the next big thing… until he returned to the DL with a recurrence of the arm injury. But the fun doesn’t stop there, because he was supposedly hours away from being activated in June before a neck injury flared up, leading to more surgery and probably the end of his season. Got all that? Phew.

Management

Don Mattingly (B+)
It may sound odd to praise a rookie manager when we weren’t fans of his hiring in the first place and when the club he’s leading is on pace for its worst finish in decades, but I don’t see how you pin much of this mess on Mattingly. He’s proven himself to be far more than a Joe Torre clone, in particular showing a nice willingness to be creative with his bullpen. It hasn’t been perfect, as some of his Navarro-related pinch-hitting escapades still burn, and he likes bunting more than I’d prefer, but he was handed a subpar roster that had its infield and bullpen totally destroyed by injuries, all as fans stayed away thanks to the off-field mess. It would be an impossible situation for any manager, and though the final record won’t be good, Mattingly has been a pleasant surprise, managing to keep the team playing hard through it all. Let’s just hope he doesn’t end up shouldering more of the blame than is needed when all is said and done.

Davey Mutha-F’ing-Lopes (A+^100)
I don’t usually grade the base coaches. Matt Kemp doesn’t usually lead the league in WAR. There you go.

Ned Colletti (F+)
Let’s quickly review all of the contracts handed out last winter by Colletti that were for at least $1m, shall we? Uribe, massive bust. Lilly, missing fewer bats than ever. Guerrier, adequate but overpaid and having one of the lesser years of his career. Garland and Padilla, both injured multiple times and likely out for the year. Barajas, crappier than usual and hurt. Thames, ineffective and injured. Navarro, hitting .183. To be fair, Kuroda has been very good, but it’s hard to say that without caveating that he clearly took a huge paycut to stay in LA.

There’s been a few positives – signing Billingsley was great, the no-risk NRI of Miles worked out, and trading Ryan Theriot for Hawksworth was a good move if you try to forget that it was necessitated by acquiring Theriot in the first place – and you want to be sensitive to the fact that the ownership mess has really put him in a bad position. But overall? Not good, Ned. Not good.

******

Tomorrow, the final review of the series: me.