Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
Continued thoughts on the talk of the Dodgers dynasty being dead, Dave Roberts being graded on his playoff decisions, appropriately timed Dodger prospect updates, and interesting Dodger Stadium stuff.
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The Athletic: Tyler Kepner wrote about what to expect from the decline of a dynasty, comparing the early-00s Yankees with the current Dodgers.
The Yankees didn’t stop winning after Game 7 in Arizona. They topped 100 victories in each of the next three seasons, the longest such streak in franchise history. Three more playoff seasons followed, all with at least 94 wins.
Remember: before 2020, the Dodgers’ previous 13 playoff teams all failed to deliver a championship. Their luck was bound to change, and it did. Another course correction awaits.
It’s a great retrospective, but the problem with the central thesis is that it relies too much on just bad luck happening, basically. As he points out, the Yankees didn’t really become bad, and they were probably unlucky to not win a couple more in the next three or four seasons.
Meh?
I mean, sure, the whole reason the sport has so much parity despite having no salary cap is because having the best team means the least in baseball. But that can also work out in favor of the dynasty, and when people talk about a team’s era being “over” in baseball I don’t really picture stuff like “the unlikeliest series comeback in the sport’s history” and “losing a close World Series”. When they talk like that I envision something more like the 2013-16 Yankees, and I’m skeptical that’ll happen for the reasons Andrew Friedman laid out recently.
Semantics, I suppose, but all I know is that if the Dodgers do resume winning titles, I would like to be spared from a repeat of the crying about how the sport’s not fun anymore because everybody just absolutely knew the Dodgers were going to win all along and other nonsense like that.
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FanGraphs: The controversial playoff decisions of Dave Roberts gets a grade of C+. My initial reaction was that it feels generous, but it’s also true that the way both the Brewers and Dodgers were playing, it probably didn’t matter what levers he pulled.
Did Dave Roberts keep the Dodgers from making the World Series? No. It would be unreasonable to place the weight of four consecutive losses on a manager’s shoulders, unless he gave the starts to the FanGraphs writing staff. Roberts generally played the right guys, but he didn’t always play them at the right times, and given that he had what I considered the strongest hand of any manager this October, I can’t quite award him a gentleman’s B.
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MiLB: A profile from the Arizona Fall League on Chase Harlan‘s quest to improve his defense.
“It was never something I used to think was that big of a deal until I got to professional ball, because I grew up outside of Philly, so it was hard for me to get on the field because I was always stuck in a facility during the cold months of the winter,” Harlan said of his defensive work. “Being able to get out on the field out here is just a huge pro for me to get out there and get better at defense, because that’s something that I know is the next step for me to move up.”
“I think every player at some point realizes that the defensive side of the game is very important,” Caulfield, who also served as a coach for the Braves’ High-A affiliate in 2026, said. “Sometimes that’s earlier, sometimes that’s later, but I think at some point every player — especially an infielder — will realize, ‘Hey, my defense is very important.’ And so once that light bulb clicks and they learn how to translate what they do from an offensive standpoint as far as focus, routine, things like that, to the defensive side, and they see themselves get better on the field, then they start getting hooked on the work.”
If you’re like me, that all sounds a lot like Josue De Paula for better and worse.
FanGraphs: Early reports from the AFL on the Charles Davalan and second base experiment have concluded that it seems at least … plausible.
After playing outfield exclusively at Arkansas and as a Dodgers farmhand, Davalan is playing second base in the AFL. It looks like he’ll have the range for it, as he moves pretty well to both sides — he speared one ball with a full-extension dive up the middle that I didn’t think he’d be able to reach — and has plenty of arm. The finer points will take more time. On one occasion, he nearly turned a routine 4-3 grounder into a single by giving ground when the right play was to charge. We’ll see if those reads get easier with time, or if that play was a clue as to why Davalan has spent most of his career on the grass.
There’s also a bit of a mixed report on Eduardo Quintero in there.
FanGraphs: On the pitching side of that, Sam Horn looks surprisingly promising.
In his pro debut in the AFL, he looked sharp for a guy with very little high-level experience. He sat 93-96 with a sinking fastball and paired it with an average sweeping slider. He works with a slow, controlled motion with a crossfire delivery and a high-three-quarters slot. It’s very early days for him, but you can see a path to a couple above-average offerings and enough strikes to be interesting.
Luke Fox is also named as a potential Rule 5 Draft pick.
The Athletic: Continuing from the AFL, Brooks Auger showcased what he could do on the mound, while Harlan drew attention in the box.
Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander Brooks Auger had the best arsenal among potential starters, showing five distinct pitches, highlighted by a 95-98 mph fastball and a plus changeup with a ton of fading action. He has a cutter, sinker and curveball, and could stand to use all of them more, as he’s very fastball-heavy, and that especially leads to trouble against lefties. He also threw strikes in the one outing I saw, which will make any pitcher stand out in the AFL, although he’s walked 11.2 percent of batters he’s faced in his two pro seasons. He’ll be a starter if he can cut that walk rate and use his offspeed stuff more, especially that changeup.
The Dodgers take the AFL very seriously, sending significant prospects there every year, which I think should signal to other teams that there’s real value in using this league for development purposes. Third baseman Chase Harlan only turned 20 in July, and finished the year in High A, missing a month late in the season with an oblique injury. He showed huge power in high school but had a propensity to swing and miss. The latter has come down quite a bit so far in pro ball, with just a 21 percent strikeout rate across both A-ball levels this year. In three games with Harlan, I saw the power, with a homer hit 101 mph out to dead center and a ball he hit so hard (107 mph!) off the left-field wall that he ended up with a single, along with a definite vulnerability to sliders, even in the zone.
Quintero and Horn are also mentioned in the article.
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Defector: Loved this investigation of sorts into the origins of the concrete murals at Dodger Stadium.
The team’s plans remain opaque, but they have expressed some interest in preserving what’s survived. After I followed up about the art’s possible legal protection, they sent a more robust statement: “We love these original features to Dodger Stadium and while we have had little information on the artist and origin of the commission, we have protected the engravings in all of the renovations that have been done since 2012 and repaired the concrete frames around them to ensure their longevity.”
At least a little funny that even a whiff of legal stuff being mentioned gets a response.
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Speaking of the extremely unproblematic stadium, Architectural Digest highlighted it in a recent video.
