Prospect Development

Andrew –

I agree completely with your comments. I also appreciate a professional athlete like Ohtani who understands the concept of “team” success rather then have an “all about me attitude!” I hope that catches on in the sports world – professional on down to high school levels. That is an “old school attitude” but that is what I am….

I want to wish everyone on this extraordinary Dodger site that is manned predominately by Mark and Bear with all its insightful informative articles,and tireless work, a Happy, Healthy Holiday Season. We are very fortunate to be Dodger fans and should enjoy Shohei Ohtani the person and player and not worry about the amount of the contract. This is a once in a lifetime player with enormous talents we have all have not experienced before. Cheers to the upcoming championship years ahead of us.

I think Roberts made it clear that Mookie will be full-time at 2B. Last season, Mookie shuttled between 2B and RF after the Dodger brass lost patience with Miguelito’s struggles.

Heyward will play RF against righthanded pitching. His platoon partner, right now, figures to be righty hitters Taylor or DeLuca. If Mookie was to move to RF when Heyward sits against lefties, then righthanded hitter like Vargas, Taylor or Rojas would play at 2B. It wouldn’t be the lefty-swinging Busch, unless he has reverse splits.

So Busch is unlikely to play 2B unless something bad happens to Mookie.

That leaves LF as the best opportunity for Busch–but it’s an opportunity shared by Vargas and DeLuca as well.

Of those three players, DeLuca is the one true outfielder, with the greatest speed. In his brief time in the majors, he outhit both Busch and Vargas. With a great spring, DeLuca might even take over LF, much as Outman surprised his critics last Spring. But we obviously can’t count on that.

As Mark has mentioned, DeLuca could platoon with Outman. But playing them in a platoon could stunt their progress.

Keeping all three–Busch, Vargas, DeLuca–would ensure that none of them really have that “runway” to prove themselves. One or two will have much better opportunities if they are traded for guys like Burnes, Cease, Beiber or Glasnow.

The Dodgers’ biggest problem is the quality of the rotation, in particular the lack of a true ace. Solving the prospect logjam can fix the problem.

If the Dodgers can’t figure out LF with players on the roster, there is no shortage of good options on the free agent market.

Yammamoto incoming, just makes too much sense.

I can’t believe we’d target Hader, mainly due to contract length and losing another draft pick, but this dude thinks othertwise:

I am not satisfied with one Championship per decade (it should have been two, but I digress), it’s also very apparent to me that things have changed. If I have to explain how, the odds are (1) You think winners built Las Vegas; and (2) The team with the best record or talent wins.

The fact that a team wins 100 games makes them a contender. In 2023, there were too many pitching injuries, but stranger things have happened, and it is a crapshoot, no matter what anyone thinks.

It didn’t used to be. Before the playoffs, a team had at least a 50/50 chance. “Statistics and Probability 101” taught me that!

From the WSJ:

In part:

The word that baseball executives utter most frequently each October comes not from the diamond, but the casino floor. “Crapshoot” has become the game’s go-to way of describing the experience of guiding a team through the MLB playoffs.

It is used most frequently to explain why teams that were powerful during the 162-game regular season are vulnerable to being unceremoniously bounced from the playoffs in early rounds. The crapshoot effect is trotted out almost annually as a way to understand why the Los Angeles Dodgers—who have won more than 100 games five times since 2017—have only one World Series title, in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.

“Crapshoot” is also a favored phrase of Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, whose team missed the postseason for the first time since 2016 and hasn’t been to a World Series since 2009.

The first “crapshoot” outcome of this postseason came when the 84-win Arizona Diamondbacks swept the 92-win Milwaukee Brewers in the three-game wild-card series. It was the same when the Tampa Bay Rays—winners of 99 regular-season games—were quickly ousted from the postseason by a 90-win Texas club. You’ll hear about it again next week if the Dodgers or Braves, winners of 100 and 104 games respectively in 2023, stumble in their division series to the Phillies and Diamondbacks.

The use of the term “crapshoot,” like most things in the sport these days, dates back to the book “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis. In it, then—A’s general manager Billy Beane called the amateur draft a “crapshoot.” Later, Beane describes the playoffs as “luck,” and Lewis assigns the word “crapshoot” to the concept of the playoffs, too.

“I did play a little bit of craps in Puerto Rico in 1985 when I was in Winter Ball,” Beane said this week. “Beyond that, I wish I could think of a cute and funny way to describe why I chose ‘crapshoot.’”

It’s a term—and sentiment—that has risen in baseball over the past 20 years as probabilistic thinking has penetrated every corner of the industry, at a time when the playoff format itself has expanded to include up to four series. The latter makes it a much longer road to the World Series than the simple days when the top team in each league squared off in the Fall Classic.

The expanded postseason, which now includes three wild-card teams and a three-game wild-card round before the division series, has seemed to increasingly separate the odds of winning a World Series from the success over a 162-game season.

Orioles assistant general manager Sig Mejdal, a former blackjack dealer turned baseball analyst, has considered the luck element of the postseason extensively throughout his nearly 20-year career in baseball. What does the postseason tell us, if not who is the best team in baseball this year?

“It tells you who plays the best in these five and seven game samples, and it’s tremendously exciting,” Mejdal said.

The rise of randomness and luck as baseball has expanded the postseason raises the question of whether it’s good for entertainment, or an affront to everything the regular season represents.

“This is the business we’ve chosen, and you understand that what we do has some random parts to it,” said Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes. “That’s what’s frustrating about baseball, and also what’s beautiful about it.”

There’s a reason the game of “craps” is an apt metaphor for executives instead of more skill-based casino games like blackjack. Success in baseball is a mix of skill and luck, and the two elements generally tend to balance out over the span of a 162-game regular season. In a breakneck postseason made up of short series, however, executives feel the element of “skill” becomes less prevalent and “luck” takes center stage.

“My s___ doesn’t work in the playoffs,” Beane famously said in “Moneyball.” “My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is f______ luck.”

This turned out to be unsatisfyingly true for the A’s, who have reached the postseason 11 times since 2000. They advanced beyond the ALDS once, and were swept in that ALCS appearance in 2006.

Historical postseason data seems to be on the side of the executives. According to research from Stats Perform, dating back to 1995, the team with a better regular season record is 116-100 in postseason series, which amounts to a 53.7% rate of success. Additionally, teams with a home-field advantage in a postseason series have won 54.3% of the time dating back to 1995.

A 54-46 split in outcomes for the statistically better team is, still, better than the odds a craps player faces when he plays at a table, but the advantage remains slim. When success in any given postseason series is little more than a coin flip, it only reinforces the idea—presented most prominently by Beane—that a front office’s job is to simply get a team to the playoffs and from there, their chances of winning or losing are just about equal.

Still, there are some within the game who are resistant to the idea that the postseason is a “crapshoot,” and are wary of the way the sentiment affects a team’s approach in October.

“I think that thinking the playoffs are 100% random is a disease,” said one longtime AL baseball operations executive who was not authorized to speak publicly about his team’s postseason strategy. “Pure scientific and statistical logic, sure, there’s a lot of luck and randomness. But when you treat that dogmatically, you dissociate yourself from the actual reality of human beings needing to be at max confidence and max focus to win that tournament.”

The question for executives is whether there is a way to engineer a higher rate of skill into this increasingly luck-based tournament.

“I definitely think there’s a difference between an optimized regular season team and an optimized postseason team,” said Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski. “In 1997, with the Marlins, we knew it would be difficult to have a better record than the Braves in the regular season. We thought that we would have a much better chance in a short series, given the way we were built.”

The 1997 Marlins, who finished behind the Braves in the NL East, did indeed win the World Series that year. The difference between a regular season team and postseason team, in Dombrowski’s opinion, is that a great regular season team needs roster depth and a great postseason team needs top-end talent.

The reality that even a great team faces a tough road to winning the championship can cause a practical, but unenthusiastic, mindset when it comes to the concept of winning. Is it better to be a 99-win team in the regular season that loses in a three-game wild-card series, or an 87-win team in the regular season that advances to the division series?

“It is very convenient for a general manager to say, I got them there,” said Dominic “The Dice Dominator” LoRiggio, a professional craps player who believes he has developed a dice rolling style that allows for replicable skill in the luck-based game. “I put the players together. And if they don’t make it any further, you know, it was a crapshoot.”

LoRiggio believes the comparison between baseball and craps is apt, even if it’s a convenient excuse for failure.

“Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak had a bit of luck involved,” he said. “A quarter of an inch one way or another and the shortstop could have gotten to the ball. Any long roll with the dice, no matter how much skill you have [like myself] has some luck involved as well.”

The nature of baseball means that the best regular season team may not be the best postseason team. Player health, individual streaks, and luck have a significant impact on how equipped or ill-equipped a team is to run through the monthlong postseason. It’s an advantage to have a more skilled roster than your opponent when entering a series, but hardly significant enough to overcome the “luck and randomness” that make the postseason exciting and infuriating.

“The game employs a lot of really smart, brilliant young executives who have allowed my quote to age pretty well,” Beane said. “I felt the math was going to be on my side that the quote would age pretty well, but it was controversial at the time.”

Controversy, as it has done repeatedly over the past 20 years of baseball, has now become convention. Roll the dice, hit the ball, hope that kismet is rooting for your team’s side.”

Don’t confuse being smart with being weak!

I too believe in Vargas and Busch and would like to see them play. No more Peraltas please.