The Dodgers' bullpen shows the power of a moving target

Some relief gymnastics, along with overwhelming offense, gets L.A. back into the World Series.

Dave Roberts

They didn’t do this on purpose. They didn’t stage this nonstop March Of The Penguins, from bullpen to mound to dugout to medicine cabinet, because it was their preferred plan of attack in the National League playoffs.

The Dodgers like starting pitchers. They thought at one point they’d have Julio Urias and Trevor Bauer going 1-2 in their rotation. They picked up Max Scherzer, who started the clinching game of the 2021 Division Series at San Francisco. They got an excellent year out of Tyler Anderson in 2022. Last season their most frequent starters were Urias, Clayton Kershaw, Bobby Miller, Tony Gonsolin, Michael Grove and Noah Syndergaard, with a dash of Lance Lynn and Emmet Sheehan thrown in. This year they got the bulk of their starts out of Miller, Tyler Glasnow, Walker Buehler, Gavin Stone, James Paxton, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and James Paxton, with 10 from Jack Flaherty after the trade deadline. No, it never occurred to team president Andrew Friedman and general manager Brandon Gomes that Justin Wrobleski would get only one fewer start (six) than Kershaw in 2024.

But necessity is the mother of invention, and emergency is the stepmother, and Dave Roberts managed to keep his head while all about him were losing theirs and blaming it on him. Please note that the Dodgers won this six game NLCS over the New York Mets by scoring 46 runs and drawing 42 walks, as they finally found a support group in the back half of the batting order. But Roberts, and his advisors had to discover a way to take a squirt gun into a forest fire and emerge with 27 outs. They did it in a month when bullpens were falling into the ocean in nearly every other series. It was a tricky piece of Whack-A-Mole, and it will have to happen again to beat the Yankees in a retro World Series that starts Friday, the same matchup that was practically embossed on calendars in the 50s. Cue up Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers.

The Dodgers know they need to do something about their pitching casualty list. When you generally have at least eight pitchers, young and old alike, on the 60-day injured list with arm problems, it has gone beyond the realm of occupational hazard. But that’s a long-term project, and the Dodgers had to figure out how to win series when Yamamoto, Flaherty and the comebacking Walker Buehler were the only viable starters. All three did more than what was asked, especially when Flaherty went seven innings in Game 1, which makes him seem like Frank Shorter in the current environment. But the rest of it was a Blue Parade of snatch-and-grabbers who disappeared into the night before anything was revealed.

For the Mets to win, Francisco Lindor had to be MVP-like. He faced 13 Dodger pitchers in the six games and had two extra-base hits. He had six tries at Flaherty, against whom he tripled in Game 5, four against reliever Brent Honeywell, and three against Yamamoto. He didn’t face anybody else more than twice. It’s hard to get a book on anybody when you only see the preface.

Detroit did the same thing with its pitching and nearly beat Cleveland in the Division Series. It did beat Emmanuel Clase, the best closer in baseball and the MLB save leader in each of the past three years. Clase was a green light to the Yankees by then, but he was being asked to pitch, sit and pitch again, the way he didn’t do in the regular season. Juan Soto won the ALCS with a 3-run homer off Hunter Gaddis, which he could do to anybody, but Gaddis had made three previous appearances in the series and thrown 74 pitches overall. There were days off, true, but the issue isn’t as much rest as familiarity.

The Dodgers threw them all into the breach but didn’t ask any single individual to be heroic. Ben Casparius, for instance, was called three times in the series and got 11 outs. He gave up two hits. He had three major league appearances before these playoffs. But he looked right at home, with the masses assembling behind him, and he has an unusually good support system. His girlfriend is Erin Matson, the 3-time national field hockey player of the year at North Carolina, which won four NCAA titles when she was there. Except she’s still there, because they named her the coach the year after her eligibility ran out, when she was 23, and this year she became the youngest coach in Division I history to win an NCAA championship.  

Stories like that come bursting out of this bullpen. Brent Honeywell, whose dad is the cousin of ex-Dodger relief star Mike Marshall, had four arm surgeries between the time he was drafted and his first major league pitch. The Dodgers are his sixth major league team. Anthony Banda, the lefthander who is filling the role vacated by Alex Vesia, is in his ninth major league organization. Until this year he had given up a composite batting average of .283. This year he held batters to .238.

There have been better Dodger teams with smoother regular seasons who did not get this far, and maybe that was the problem. These Dodgers had to fight through the underbrush throughout. Freddie Freeman’s son was hospitalized with Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Mookie Betts broke his hand. Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter and confidant stole money from him to pay a bookmaker and has been convicted, and Ohtani had to go through a harrowing investigation. And pitchers were breaking, like glassware in an earthquake, on a weekly basis.

Aware of their inability to win a full-season World Series with a team that has been baseball’s best since 2017, the Dodgers changed up their routine. According to the Los Angeles Times, they got together to watch wild-card playoff games during their bye week, to stay engaged. On their Division Series trip to San Diego, they went down together on a bus instead of drifting in as individuals, fighting I-5 traffic and treating each other like office partners. Again, if the Dodgers don’t win, you never hear about any of this, but they at least faced their ghosts and attacked them. They also never quit attacking the opposition, and their comeback from a 2-1 hole in the Division Series was the grittiest thing they’ve done since they won Game 7 of the 2018 NLCS in Milwaukee, back in the days of Jansen and Seager and Bellinger and Puig.

The Yankees possess a clear edge in starting pitching, and the reconstituted monster Giancarlo Stanton just makes Soto and Aaron Judge more of a problem. There will be heavy nostalgia and the most starpower that MLB can summon, with Judge and Ohtani. But it all comes down to whether Roberts can get his relievers through more nine-inning forests, without leaving footprints.

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