Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
See that picture of Carlos Frias above? That’s the face my cat makes when she sniffs her own behind and realizes it was a terrible idea.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Listen, I’m certainly not going to offer much in the way of analysis on this one. To be completely honest, I stopped watching closely after the first inning, when Brim started dropping “Boots Poffenberger” references on Twitter and pounding out facts like this:
This is the first time in major league history that a starting pitcher has recorded fewer than three outs and allowed ten hits.
— Daniel Brim (@DanielBrim) September 17, 2014
One of the two outs Frias got was Tim Federowicz cutting down an attempted stolen base. Another was a forceout at home. He got zero outs on the mound. Really, there’s nothing to take away from this one, other than that baseball is dumb sometimes and rookie pitchers can easily perform poorly in Coors Field, especially when they inexplicably decide not to vary their pitches at all. Seriously, though. Look at Frias against Corey Dickerson:
What do you see there? Six pitches, all fastballs, all, save for one, in approximately the same spot; all almost exactly the same speed. Maybe Aroldis Chapman can get away with that. Frias can’t. Frias threw 38 pitches, and Gameday classified them all as fastballs or cutters. Gameday isn’t perfect on pitch classifications — it’s often far from it — but even though it probably meant to call a few of those “sinkers,” which Frias had thrown 28% of the time entering today, it was clear from watching it there was nothing offspeed. No sliders. No change ups. No plan. No idea. I’m not sure if this game was called from the bench or behind the plate, but I don’t imagine A.J. Ellis would have done the same. But, you know, batting average is all that matters.
Anyway, there I go pretending that this game ever happened, because it didn’t. The Dodgers lost, and that’s all. We saw it last weekend when the Dodgers got whomped 9-0, then came back to destroy the Giants 17-0. What did it mean? Nothing, other than a win and a loss in the standings. It meant that Hyun-jin Ryu was awful one night, and then Tim Hudson was awful the next night. It doesn’t have much to say about the season or the roster when your pitcher goes out and gets lit up; as I joked on Twitter, this one goes down as another “Dodgers can’t come back after 7 innings loss,” which tells you all you need to know about that ridiculous stat.
We always knew this was going to be a tough trip, after all. Besides the usual “Coors Field is the worst,” the side effect of lining up Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke for the Giants was going to be that the back third was going to have to manage this series, and really that’s starters 4/5/6 with Ryu injured. These starters weren’t going to do well, and they didn’t. Fortunately, the Dodger offense managed to buy one of the games on Monday.
The fun thing is, the Giants and D-Backs are tied at 2 in the seventh right now. The magic number might go down. (Update: Nope. Stupid D-Backs.) Greinke and Kershaw pitch the next two days in Chicago. This game was so ridiculous and stupid and horrible on a million levels, but the only thing to take away from it is a real question about whether Frias gets another shot to start when his turn comes around next week. Considering the alternatives — Kevin Correia? A bullpen game? — my feeling is that he will, though we’ll have to see. Ryu isn’t likely to be available, and even if he would be, I can think of better ideas than rushing your sore-shouldered No. 3 starter two weeks before the playoffs.
This game was dumb to the point of absurdity. Now let us never speak of it again. Sorry, Darwin Barney.
