Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
July 30th, 2022 Scoreboard
- Triple A Oklahoma City 0, Sugar Land 6
- Double A Tulsa 2, Arkansas 7
- High A Great Lakes 0, Lansing 1
- Low A Rancho Cucamonga 2, San Jose 3
- ACL Dodgers 1, ACL White Sox 9
- DSL Dodgers Mega 2, DSL Dodgers Bautista 1
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Saturday wasn’t the best day in the history of Dodgers minor league baseball, but there were a couple of notable things.
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Peter Heubeck, albeit in very limited action, is looking like the real deal:
The recently turned 20-year-old from Baltimore, MD, has been mostly utilizing the fastball/curve combo, but he is doing so to great effect, with opponents batting just .109 vs him thus far. Heubeck doesn’t quite turn sideways and disappear, as Vin was wont to say, but lithe righty gets it up to 95 already, and that’s with room for another 15-20 lbs on his 6’3 frame. A 5000+ calorie a day diet in the offseason, along with some lifting, and he will really turn some heads come Spring.
As an aside, though I have never heard Heubeck speak, I hope he has a Baltimore accent, as that would be a fantastic addition to the postgame interview mix, especially if he really owned it. An example:
Peter, you have one job.
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Another talented, young righty in the system, Carlos Duran, had an outing that featured a little bit of everything:
I like to think that Duran more than balanced things by striking out the beer batter twice, giving the fans half off brews two times for a brief stretch. He’s a man of the people!
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July 31st, 2022 Scoreboard
- Triple A Oklahoma City 5, Sugar Land 4
- Double A Tulsa 16, Arkansas 2
- High A Great Lakes 4, Lansing 1
- Low A Rancho Cucamonga 3, San Jose 7
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Ryan Pepiot had himself a week:
Pepiot threw the slider 32 times, a whopping 37% of his total pitches. It’s the right thing to do. You’re at Triple A. You were at the big leagues, you saw that what you currently have, while good, could use a little more, so you polish the fine edges even moreso, until they’re pristine.
Ryan Pepiot is doing everything he can to get to a point where he can stick in a rotation. You love to see it.
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Ryan Noda put on a show of his own on Sunday, though not in the way you’d expect from your typical 1B/OF type:
OKC Dodgers speed demon Ryan Noda turned a dropped third strike into a double, and he stole third on the very next pitch 😂 pic.twitter.com/JNxX4Yt5v7
— Josh Thomas (@jokeylocomotive) August 1, 2022
Baseball is beautiful.
Noda did a little more of the traditional type of damage as well:
Noda’s 16 homers have him in second place on the club. His 13 stolen also have him in second place on the club. Athlete!
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Diego Cartaya left Sunday’s game after taking a foul ball off the left hand/wrist area. He spiked the baseball, clearly frustrated, before the Great Lakes’ manager, Austin Chubb, and the Loons’ trainer came out to check on him, before sending him off for the day for (hopefully) precautionary reasons.
To be clear, Cartaya seemed more mad than anything. He walked off carrying some of his catching gear in his left hand as well, which is hopefully an indication of a lack of injury to the paw. Just the same, I will be hitting refresh on the Dodgers transactions page on Tuesday from approximately 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM PT when they usually announce minor league IL-related moves, to prep for the upcoming week. Like any normal person would.
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Gavin Stone picked up the W in Tulsa’s romp, and he had to battle his way through 5.1 innings, allowing four hits and issuing four walks, with two unearned runs coming across. This outing highlighted a potential issue that was raised here in the Prospect Notes back on June 13th. To whit:
What is notable about Stone’s outing today — it’s the first time a Texas League lineup has gotten a second look at him. While he will have a reprieve from this situation for the month of June, come the 4th of July, 10 of the remaining 11 series will all be against clubs who will have faced him before, assuming he’s still at the level. Stay tuned!
For the first time since Stone has been in the Texas League, on Sunday, a club faced him for a third time. The biggest difference? They took a lot more pitches. Gavin Stone has attacked with the old saw — throw strikes that look like balls, and balls that look like strikes, though he has been able to utilize the latter a bit more than normal due to the quality of his secondaries. That said, in July, he issued 16 walks, which is more than his total from April thru June combined.
He has the stuff and command to adjust to the change in how lineups approach him, but the next thing to stay tuned for is whether and how he does so in the coming weeks.
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Jerming Rosario was one of my breakout candidates for 2022, and it hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. He has an ERA of 7.45, he walks more than six per nine innings, and in his last outing, he allowed five runs, four earned, while getting just one out.
At times, though, he makes me feel like I’m living in a shitty romcom, because I just can’t quit him:
He just turned 20 in May, so it’s entirely possible that I was a year too early. It’s also possible that it never coalesces. In the interim, I’ll cling to his potential like Arte Moreno does to hopes of getting Mike Trout to the playoffs.
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Ben Casparius had what might have been his best outing of the season on Sunday:
Like with Rosario, Casparius has seen his share of ups and downs this season as well, but the 2021 5th round pick out of UCONN has missed bats, he hides the ball well, has one of the better sliders in the system, and he gets flat plane on his low to mid 90s heater. He hasn’t beaten the High A level, yet — but, Sunday’s outing in relief (more on that below) was encouraging.
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The Dodgers pulled a trick on Sunday — they altered their starting pitcher methodology a bit, which left folks like me scrambling.
The scheduled starting pitchers for Great Lakes and Tulsa on Sunday were the aforementioned Stone and Casparius, but they were not listed when lineups were announced:
Pepiot also ended up entering after Dellin Betances tossed the first inning.
With the trade deadline looming, this sent many of us prospect huggers into a tizzy. Thankfully, Dodgers Director of Player Development Will Rhymes chimed in:
This is a new developmental tactic for the organization, but it definitely has its merits. For a minor league pitcher, it is often less important to get the same top of a lineup out three times, and more important to get up and down, say, five or six times. It’s tough to balance seeing the same lineup twice in a week, which is largely an unrealistic prospect at the big league level, apart from the playoffs, with player development goals. If the Dodgers go about this in a way that optimizes said development, it’s hard to blame them.
It’s also dirty pool to pull this shit when hug watch is going on, so I’ll blame them anyway.
But, I digress. I get it. For future Prospect Notes pieces that will go up on Sunday, I will take care to note that scheduled starters for Sunday games may be on bulk inning duty.
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By the time this column returns on Wednesday, it’s entirely possible that a significant number of our favorite prospects to follow are gone. Or, the deadline could be a gigantic nothing burger. We just don’t know. In the meantime, take solace in the fact that, while you might be stressed, there’s at least one person who’s got 10% more maniac going on than you, and you know who they are. And you can laugh at them. Right there in the comments.
Enjoy your Monday, folks. Pray for me.
