Editor’s note: This is the Monday, July 27 edition of the Inside the Dodgers newsletter from reporter J.P. Hoornstra. To receive the newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.
Billy McKinney, a 26-year-old outfielder, is on his seventh organization in his relatively brief time as a professional baseball player. He was drafted in 2013. His major league slash line (.224/.290/.426) is fairly pedestrian. Next to his Triple-A slash line (.261/.329/.505), McKinney’s career has “quadruple-A journeyman” written all over it. He will not make you forget Mookie Betts, the man he is replacing this week in right field.
McKinney is, however, archetypal of the kind of player who has populated the Dodgers’ bench this season. To earn his place on the 40-man roster, McKinney has a low bar to clear. Other than Matt Beaty and Zach McKinstry, the other lefties to pass through the Dodgers’ bench have struggled to hit their weight: Edwin Rios (.078), Luke Raley (.161), Yoshi Tsutsugo (.120), and Zach Reks (0 for 10) all had a runway to seize a long-term job. All have struggled.
By itself, this is not a terrible problem to have. If filling the 22nd through 26th roster spots is a front office’s biggest challenge, that front office is doing pretty well. (The Dodgers have bigger problems, mind you. Employing Trevor Bauer, Cody Bellinger’s OPS, and a 1-10 record in extra innings aren’t the kind of things teams boast about in 2021.) Getting production from the bench has been a persistent thorn in the Dodgers’ side — partly because of the volume of injuries, partly because Raley and Reks and Rios are the kind of homegrown talents the Dodgers have grown accustomed to delivering immediate results in recent years. To this point in the season, they haven’t delivered.
To find a season like this one, where the bench featured a revolving door of castoffs from other organizations, you have to go back to 2019. The problem that season was finding competent right-handed hitters on a roster that included several competent lefties: (a usually healthy) Max Muncy, Corey Seager, Joc Pederson, Cody Bellinger and Alex Verdugo. Remember Tyler White, Jedd Gyorko, Rocky Gale and Travis d’Arnaud? If not, it’s because the Dodgers were able to minimize their shortcomings. The quartet combined to make 42 plate appearances that year. Rios, Raley, Tsutsugo and Reks are already up to 163 plate appearances, and they’ve batted a combined .117.
Before that, you have to go back to 2016 to find a similar phenomenon. Carlos Ruiz, Josh Reddick, Chris Taylor (pre-swing change) and Will Venable were the mid-season acquisitions. That group combined for 288 plate appearances — mostly by Reddick, who slashed .258/.307/.335.
The 2015 season featured two noteworthy mid-season position player pickups: Chase Utley and Justin Ruggiano. They combined to make 201 plate appearances that year. It’s somewhat telling that, in his first year as theDodgers’ president of baseball operations, Andrew Friedman didn’t need to overhaul the Dodgers’ bench. He just needed two impact bats at the trade deadline to complement all the heavy lifting he’d done the previous off-season. This season, by contrast, he’s reached outside the organization to find Tsutsugo, McKinney, Albert Pujols and Steven Souza Jr. And the trade deadline is still four days away.
Back in March, I suggested that some of this was foreseeable. I didn’t think the Dodgers would enjoy the same injury luck they had in 2020, and their position-player depth looked like a problem outside of catcher — the one position at which the Dodgers have been relatively healthy. The purpose of this newsletter, however, isn’t to knock the front office.
The Dodgers have run this play before, giving their internal candidates a long runway until or unless they demonstrate they aren’t major-league ready. For the most part, this play works. This year it hasn’t worked, not well enough at least. The exception proves the rule: recent history suggests the Dodgers’ farm system should be strong enough to overcome injuries at the big-league level.
It seems to be a foregone conclusion that the Dodgers will aggressively pursue pitchers between now and Friday’s trade deadline. Maybe that means Danny Duffy. Maybe that means Ian Kennedy. It’s easy to think along with the front office in this regard. The Dodgers would prefer to have David Price in the bullpen, and Josiah Gray in Triple-A, but both are in the rotation now and for the foreseeable future. They would prefer not to use Phil Bickford and Joe Kelly in the eighth and ninth innings, respectively, when Kenley Jansen and Blake Treinen are unavailable in save situations. Yet that’s exactly what happened Sunday.
But what to make of the bench? Friedman has been aggressive acquiring outside help to this point in the season, but the injuries — first Corey Seager and Cody Bellinger, now Gavin Lux and Mookie Betts — have been unrelenting. Other than Pujols (101 OPS+), the hitters the Dodgers have acquired aren’t overwhelming opponents. The farm system has been of little help. Should Friedman and company count on a healthy Lux, Betts, and Seager as his only reinforcements? Or should the Dodgers trade for another batter or two? If so, would they be content to acquire a platoon player or — just spitballing here — should they try to engage the Rangers on Joey Gallo before he can become a Padre?
The answer isn’t obvious right now, and an obvious answer might not emerge in the next four days. It’s another reason why this year’s trade deadline is so fascinating for the Dodgers.
– J.P.
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