TORONTO — With four aces, the Dodgers are playing a very different hand in this year’s postseason.
“We’ve talked about this a lot,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said as the team celebrated its National League Championship Series victory and became the first defending champ to make it back to the World Series since the Philadelphia Phillies in 2008-09.
“There’s just a lot of different ways to win a World Series. Last year we did it in a very different way than we have so far this year. We had a dominant bullpen. Our starters weren’t as accomplished as this group. But our lineup filled in the gap. We had a really good team last year. We’re just doing it a slightly different way (this year). And again, there are a lot of different ways to do it. But it is fun to sit back and watch these starters do what they’re doing.”
“Slightly different” – that is an understatement.
The Dodgers won their 2024 championship with just three starting pitchers – Jack Flaherty, Walker Buehler and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. That trio plus the ‘openers’ in the bullpen games they sprinkled in along the way had a 5.25 ERA and pitched a total of only 60 innings in 16 postseason games.
Last year’s bullpen ‘dawgs’ pitched 82 innings with a 3.95 ERA on the way to a World Series title.
The leading men have changed this year.
Going into Game 1 against the Toronto Blue Jays on Friday night, the Dodgers’ quartet of starters – Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani and Yamamoto – has pitched 70% of the team’s postseason innings (64⅓), posting a 1.40 ERA and holding hitters to a .132 batting average.
That has left little for the Dodgers’ troublesome bullpen to do – only 27⅔ innings in 10 games. And most of those innings (15) have been covered by displaced starters (Glasnow, Emmet Sheehan, Clayton Kershaw and closer-to-the-rescue Roki Sasaki).
By comparison, starting pitchers have thrown 45% of the innings for every other postseason team.
Friedman calls the performance of the Dodgers’ four aces “incredible” so far this postseason.
“We knew going into October that the strength of our club was gonna be our starters,” Friedman said. “For them to do what they did (in the NLCS) eclipsed even our expectations.”
Those expectations were no more than that for most of the regular season. Snell spent four months on the injured list, Glasnow was sidelined for 2½. Ohtani was handled with extreme care in his return to the mound after a second elbow surgery. Only Yamamoto (173⅔ innings) threw more than 91 innings among that group.
It made for a patchwork rotation at times that recalled past problems and produced a 93-win regular season that felt like a disappointment – but positioned them for this. The quartet is pitching at full strength at the most important time of the season – a luxury for which the Dodgers could afford to wait.
“That’s what is so great about this organization. It’s back-to-back years, and it’s winning kind of different ways,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said this week. “We had Walker, we had Jack, and we had Yoshi rolling last year in the World Series. And then this year we got pretty much four No. 1s healthy going into it. And that’s special.
“About six weeks ago, a month ago, going in the regular season, we were just trying to piece it together. Waiting for Blake to get back off the IL, getting Shohei his innings built up. It was just kind of all in flux. And now everyone’s kind of clicking and rolling at the same time.”
That has allowed the Dodgers to hide their deficiencies in the bullpen – and ask less of their offense. They hit .199 and scored just 13 runs in the NL Division Series – and beat the Philadelphia Phillies in four games. It got better in against the Milwaukee Brewers in the NLCS – a .250 average and 15 runs – but hardly overpowering. But it was enough for a sweep.
“As an offense, you have so much confidence in those guys to just keep matching zeroes or throwing the zeroes up, where we can get going,” said Freeman, who was the 2024 World Series MVP. “Because we’re all facing the best pitching in the game right now. You’re not making it to the World Series without great pitching. So you’re not going to be scoring and putting up a massive amount of runs. So when you have a starting rotation like we have that are throwing up zeroes, they’re only giving up one run, like they have been, it helps as an offense. You just want to give run support as much as you can. And we’ve done it differently the last couple of years. And we’re kind of counting on our starting pitching again in the World Series.”
That will start with Snell, the two-time Cy Young Award winner and big free-agent signing last winter who will start Game 1 against the Blue Jays on Friday. In his most recent start, Snell faced the minimum 24 batters in eight scoreless innings against the Brewers. In his first three postseason starts, Snell has allowed just two runs on six hits over 21 innings.
“With every great starting staff, you got to have that anchor,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “And Blake’s always been a finisher. So obviously starting the way the season started, but having him get back to pitch the way he did sort of raised the bar for everyone.”