In a sport that rarely produces dynasties, the Los Angeles Dodgers are world leaders. They are among the smartest teams among the biggest, but also among the richest. Aggressive, but pragmatic. Decorated with star talent, but strengthened by considerable depth. His movements over the last half decade have rarely been motivated by need, but more so to improve on the sidelines, either to seize the opportunity or, when the time comes, to make noise. This offseason turned into a perfect snapshot.
While eager and tough divisional rival San Diego Padres and their hyper-competitive director, AJ Preller, worked to consolidate a growing roster, acquiring a number of high-level starting players, the Dodgers, certainly even better today and more. sustainable. , they waited for an opportunity they seemed content to miss. When it actually came to the New York Mets on Friday afternoon to duel with Trevor Bauer, the best free agent starter by a wide margin, they let it be known:
It’s us and then everyone else.
Remember this: Last year, the Dodgers lost to Kenta Maeda and Hyun-Jin Ryu, who finished second and third, respectively, in the AL Cy Young competition with new teams. They let Rich Hill continue his illustrious career elsewhere, received nothing from the set with David Price, who gave up the season shortened by COVID and went on to win the World Series with a group of starting players. who finished. the sport.
Bauer, who agreed to a three-year, $ 102 million deal that includes exit options after each of the first two seasons, joins that group after his best season, bringing a fifth Cy Young award to a staff who might have more in your future. He joins a revitalized Price and a revitalized Clayton Kershaw, who rediscovered some of his best forms in his 32-year-old season. He joins Walker Buehler, who could very well be the best pitcher in the game for the next three years. And he joins a collection of talented young arms led by Julio Urías, Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin, two of whom no longer have a safe place in rotation.
Teams across the league are agonizing for the half-jump needed for an additional 102 games in the 2021 schedule, but the Dodgers and Padres each have seven legitimate starting pitchers. All seven parents – Yu Darvish, Blake Snell, Dinelson Lamet, Joe Musgrove, Chris Paddack, Adrian Morejon and MacKenzie Gore – are planning to have 16.5 WAR according to FanGraphs, according to ZiPS. All seven for the Dodgers project – Kershaw, Buehler, Price, Urias, May, Gonsolin and now Bauer – project at 17.8.
Padres employs eight position players projected to be over 1.5 in the WAR in 2021:
Fernando Tatis 4.4 Jr .:
Manny Machado: 3.8
Ha-seong Kim: 3.0
Trent Grisham: 2.4
Jake Cronenworth: 1.9
Tommy Pham: 1.7
Jurickson Profar: 1.6
Wil Myers: 1.6
The Dodgers have seven (eight if Justin Turner returns, which seems more likely):
Mookie Betts: 5.9
Cody Bellinger: 5.4
Corey Seager: 4.7
Will Smith: 3.2
Max Muncy: 2.5
Gavin Lux: 2.4
Chris Taylor: 2.2
The Padres-Dodgers games provided some of the most memorable moments in baseball last year: Grisham brought in Kershaw, Machado played a Brusdar Graterol, Bellinger stole an HR from Tatis in a huge place and will be on TV throughout the summer. Choosing the best team seems impossible.
But maybe it’s pretty simple. It’s perhaps just as easy to remember that the Dodgers added Betts, the game’s second-best player, to a roster that was already a favorite to win the World Series in 2020. And that Bauer, the current winner of Cy The National League’s Young Award was added to a 2020 team that won everything after one of the most dominant seasons in recent memory.
Bauer finished the 60-game season with an ERA of 1.73, beaten only by Shane Bieber and placed in the top five at WHIP (0.79), hit percentage (36.0) and opponents’ OPS (.522), increasing this . many wonder if their breakup was abnormal.
Bauer, 30, joined the league as general election no. 3 of a draft class loaded in 2011 and evolved more like a workhorse at medium rotation than a true ace, with an ERA of 3.99 and an average of 181 innings in 2014-2019. We can give up his 2020 season as a by-product of a small sample size or an unconventional program that made him constantly face weaker lines in the Midwest or the alleged use of the same foreign substances he once regretted, as evidenced by significantly high spin speeds. Or we can say it to an imaginative and meticulous worker who thrived in a welcoming environment with the Cincinnati Reds, finally returning before the end of the 1920s.
Andrew Friedman did not issue a nine-figure contract in his first five years as Dodgers president of baseball operations. After the 2019 season, with the most manageable salary under the baseball luxury tax, he made a strong but unsuccessful effort to make Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendón, then switch with Betts, sign him with a 365 extension millions of dollars and saw it. The Dodgers to a .712 winning percentage and their first title in 32 years.
Three weeks after a captivating victory over the Tampa Bay Rays, Friedman joined the Dodgers and expressed a keen desire to repeat in 2021. He recalled the mantra that populated the team’s text message chains:
– Let’s be pigs.
The dodgers are here to eat.