Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
It’s been a while for this feature, but a day off seemed like a perfect time for everybody catch up on their reading. While you may have seen some of this before, there should be at least something here for you to sit down with and digest.
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USA Today: Can’t tell if Bob Nightengale defending the Dodgers is a harbinger of doom or not, but the quotes from the team were worth reading at least.
“Having the payroll and the depth that gives you,” Roberts says, “certainly is a benefit. No one’s debating that. But I do think that the players we acquire, how we play the game every night, getting younger players to assimilate in a star-studded clubhouse, that’s important. That’s hard to quantify, but that’s of value.”
This quote from Max Muncy goes especially hard because it’s absolutely true.
“People are always going to talk about us,” Muncy says, “and even when the CBA is over, they’ll talk about us. It is what it is. It’s for the union and the owners to worry about.
They will always add new criteria and move the goalposts — NFL/NBA have caps and their fans still add asterisks or whine about fairness — so all you can do is win in the moment and by the rules at the time.
ESPN: A profile on Andy Pages and the background that makes him mentally tough.
“Anything can happen to me in a game, and it won’t be harder than all of that,” Pages said. “I have a bad game with four strikeouts, I tell myself, ‘I’ve gone through worse than that.'”
This anecdote in particular read as unintentionally humorous from Pages.
Three months later, at the start of spring training in early February, a group of Dodgers coaches called Pages into a conference room in Glendale, Arizona, for their version of a debriefing. The goal was to figure out why Pages’ production began to fade in the second half and why it snowballed when it mattered most, but first, they wanted to restore his confidence.
They assured him that every player, even the best ones, struggle. They reminded him that the team’s second straight championship wouldn’t have been possible without his game-saving catch in Game 7. They told him, most of all, that this slump would not define his career.
“What they didn’t realize,” Pages said, “is that as soon as the season ended, that was already over for me. To me, it was as if that never happened.”
California Post: Roki Sasaki‘s improvement has a lot to do with his pitch mix improving — and that has been covered a lot — but it’s also just being stronger, as he’s bought into the gym program and gained around 20 pounds.
In some ways, that made Sasaki’s four-month stint on the injured list last year a blessing in disguise.
During that time, Smith put him through what was effectively a full offseason workout program, designing four- to six-week phases that focused on everything from lower-body strength to shoulder stabilization.
“The biggest thing was consistency, getting him to buy into the process and be consistent and do it day after day,” Smith said. “Getting him to understand that this is helping his performance, I think that was huge.”
Los Angeles Times: It’s also just been part of the typical growing pains that comes along with the adjustment to the style of communication, the way the Dodgers do things, and the culture in MLB.
1. MLB teams want to know about every physical ailment their players are dealing with in real time.
Sasaki had first-hand experience with this one last season when he hurt his shoulder.
In Japan, if he were to flag discomfort in his shoulder, Sasaki said, the coaching staff’s response would be to point out that everyone’s dealing with aches and pains, so he doesn’t have to bring it up.
“But here, if something happens to your body, you have to tell them right away,” Sasaki said. “You don’t want to hide it.”
2. Americans put a high emphasis on confidence in their professional athletes.
Breaking down what went right in a bad outing (along with what went wrong) during postgame interviews has been new for Sasaki.
In Japan, after a rough start, he didn’t feel the need to talk about silver linings.
“Nobody tells you about the culture,” Sasaki said. “So I couldn’t really tell what you guys wanted in an interview, or when I talked to you guys. So, if I knew that kind of stuff earlier, then I could have reacted in a different way, so that I could make you guys understand a little more.”
“In Japan, being humble is … really important,” Sasaki said. “So whatever happens, and whatever I do, I’ve got to be humble. But here, once you make it, you have to be like, ‘I’m the one.’ It’s not showing off, but you don’t have to be really humble. You’ve got to show what you’ve got.”
All of this should really help at least Dodger fans realize that Roki really was something more like a prospect when he came over. There was a clear gap between the expectation that he would be a ready-made world-beater and the reality that his stuff had ticked down and he’d come over at least partially compromised. If he was 29 or something and making big money, then having to do all this would surely be a potential problem. But for a 24-year-old making the minimum, perhaps things always should’ve been tempered, and at least we’re seeing the hype fulfilled more often now.
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The Athletic: Emmet Sheehan, Justin Wrobleski, and the aforementioned Roki are three of the top five Stuff+ gainers in the last month, part of that due to velocity increases, but there’s other stuff as well.
Both Sheehan…
But there’s more going on. He’s added more cut to his slider and leaned into its usage. He seems to be de-emphasizing the changeup. And lefties slug .496 against him. These things seem related, since the changeup should be a big weapon for him versus lefties.
…and Wrobo…
Two things stand out at first when you look at Wrobleski through the lens of Stuff+. For one, his slider is two ticks harder than it was at the beginning of the season. And two, his changeup is dropping three inches more than it did to start the season, thanks to a new split-change grip that he’s refined. Of course, the first is more important as he’s throwing the slider two-fifths of the time and the changeup a handful of times a game. But they’ve both contributed to his run of success.
…have adjusted their pitch mix as well, even if those are less covered than Roki’s changes.
Everything about what those three are doing now feels more sustainable, as there’s concrete evidence that things have changed.
Los Angeles Times: Climate change appears to be partially responsible for Dodger Stadium becoming a homer haven.
A Dodger executive had told him that over the last several years, “in general, the marine layer is gone, and the ball has started to carry at night, and you can see it now in the numbers. It is a great home run hitters park.”
I had noticed the shift in park factor before, but I didn’t really think of this as the reason.
“There is absolute truth to that,” said McGregor, explaining that “when oceanic temperatures are warmer, the marine layer is weaker.”
McGregor broke down the aerodynamics: “Cold air is dense, so a baseball has to push more atoms out of the way as it travels deep. Warm air has lower density, so balls travel farther.”
UC climate scientist Daniel Swain said this pattern will accelerate “for the rest of our lives as air continues to warm and baseballs continue to meet less and less resistance.”
This doesn’t mean that an infield pop-up will become a home run, but Swain said balls travel four inches farther per 1 degree Fahrenheit increase, “meaning that the average hit goes about 1-2 feet further than it would have in the early 20th century.”
Overall, this likely is a net positive for the Dodgers, I think. They have a staff that misses a lot of bats and a lineup that hits a lot of homers, which probably means at least one good thing has come out of our world increasingly turning into a hellscape.
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Baseball America: If you’ve followed our Prospect Notes, you already know Josue De Paula is putting it all together, turning potential into reality in a breakout season in AA. But like … it’s really really good.
The underlying data for De Paula is excellent, as he runs a 14% in-zone miss rate with an 18% chase rate, 105.8 mph 90th percentile exit velocity and good numbers against all pitch types. Breaking into the Dodgers’ everyday lineup is one of the toughest things to do in sports, but De Paula might be the rare Dodgers prospect with the skills to meet the standard of their MLB club.
Just Baseball: Speaking of prospects breaking out, Mike Sirota continues to tear through the minors, and this is actually the first I heard about what his injury was.
“It was a small tear in my patellar tendon,” Sirota said. “I’d had that the whole year, a little bit of pain in my knee, and I was playing through it.”
The patellar tendon connects your kneecap to your shinbone and impacts everything from climbing stairs, running, jumping and straightening your knee.
I thought it was a minor thing, but now the conservative rankings in the preseason make more sense.
“[My knee] feels really good, the best it’s ever felt,” Sirota said. “I’m not going to say I’m glad that [the injury] happened, but I’m going to say I learned a lot from the the injury on how to manage my body and things like that.”
A step at a time and learn what you can along the way.
“He just needs to stay healthy,” the American League scout said. “The stuff is there. He’s going to be a guy. He just has to stay healthy.”
Healthy now at least, and the rankings are starting to respond to his own breakout year.
Baseball Prospectus: Former first rounder Kellon Lindsey has been a bit of a forgotten man in a deep Dodgers system, but he’s still just 20 and he doesn’t seem long for A-ball if he keeps up his current play.
While still early in his professional career, Lindsey features the tools to develop into a dynamic two-way contributor. His combination of athleticism, instincts, and emerging offensive upside gives him the ceiling of an everyday middle infielder capable of producing 20-home run and 20-steal seasons.
Embarrassment of riches down on the farm, man.
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Not exactly breaking news, but Muncy loves the Dodgers.
God I love him pic.twitter.com/USA005CqY2
— Lindsay Adams ? (@LAtweets22) June 17, 2026
That clip comes from an appearance on The Mental Game, where he discusses … well, the mental side of the game. Some of the stuff he’s talked about before, but I thought he was more open and vulnerable than elsewhere due to the nature of the podcast. Good stuff.
