Well said. It will be interesting to see how Roberts manages his starters next year.Cal8285 said:I thought the Brewers were the team to beat in the NL until the Williams injury, although even then, it's baseball and anything can happen. The Williams injury definitely made the Brewers a weaker team, the ripple effect through the pen matters. Although Williams was the 8th inning guy, Adrian Houser isn't pitching the 5th inning of NLDS game 3 if Williams is healthy. If Williams is pitching the 8th inning in NLDS game 4 instead of Hader, game 4 may have gone differently.71Bear said:Some of us thought them Brewers were the team to beat after SF and LA exhausted each other in the stretch run. Atlanta was an afterthought…dimitrig said:
Congrats to the Braves!
They had as many injuries as anyone but beat some really good teams to win it all!
I still think the Dodgers would have prevailed if not for Roberts being a moron and using his starters in relief when he had one of the best bullpens in the majors.
LA and SF played a killer NLDS, leaving the winner regardless of who it would have in a weakened state moving forward. Atlanta took full advantage of their opportunity taking down LA and, subsequently, Houston.
Meanwhile, the Braves quietly got their top three starters going, as well the setup guys in the pen. Although the Giants took 2 of 3 from the Braves in mid-September in SF, the 3-0 shutout started by Fried with the Rosario cycle were signs of where the Braves were. By the time Rosario was healthy, they had more than made up for the loss of Ozuna and Acuna. Nobody was paying attention to the fact that the Braves improved themselves more than anybody with mid-season trades, and if they could get by the Brewers, were a good bet to knock off either the Giants or Dodgers.
After the Williams injury, I thought the Braves had a very slight edge over the Brewers, with either one still having a slight edge over the Giants or Dodgers (with the NLCS favorite in part depending on how much the NLDS took out of each of the winners).
One can quibble about what Roberts did with the starting pitchers in the post-season, but the Dodgers starting pitching was starting to look worn out before the post-season. You posted back on September 26:
"Pitchers who have thrown 170+ innings in the NL…
LA has 3
Phil has 2
No other team has more than one."
Maybe it was more what Roberts did with his starters in the regular season than it was the post-season.
The worm started to turn for Dodgers starting pitching on Sunday of Labor Day weekend. With the Giants and Dodgers tied, the Dodgers had Buehler starting and the Giants had a bullpen game. Who thought the Giants were going to win that game? Buehler stank up the joint, the first sign of the Dodgers starting pitching getting worn down. Scherzer being lousy in his last two regular season starts wasn't a good sign, either.
When the Dodgers had to fight until the last day of the regular season but didn't take the division, it only exacerbated things because they had to use Scherzer in the Wild Card game. He gave up only a run, but the fatigue was showing, which is why Roberts pulled him early. He might have had a bad looking line in game 3 of the NLDS except the wind kept all balls in the park except for Longoria's shot off Scherzer.
By late September, it was clear that in order to have a strong shot at the pennant, the Dodgers needed to win the division, avoid the Wild Card game, and get home field in the NLDS and the NLCS. They didn't. Then they got further broken when they had to first win the Wild Card game and then use everything they had to win the NLDS.
If the Giants had been as predicted before the season and won 75 games or so, the Dodgers may well have won the World Series. But that wasn't the hand the Dodgers were dealt, and by the time the NLDS was done, they were too broken to beat a quality Braves team.
Note: SF had the #1 bullpen ERA in the game. That was the secret sauce to 107 wins….
