The article raises some good points. The pitching was really weak going into the playoffs. Mostly injury related. Trevor Bauer maybe changes that equation.

I'm not a big fan of the "need to show emotion " logic. Sounds good but I doubt it matters

Bottom line for me is that they don't have a championship caliber manager and Kershaw is mostly a post season liability.

They lost 3 consecutive games by a total of 5 runs. It's not more complicated than that.

Apparently the concept of small samples is very hard to grasp.

Take their season as a moving window of 5-game series (Games 1-5, 2-6, 3-7, etc), they won 77% of the series they played this season, 121 of 158, and that's against every team on their schedule. If they played only playoff teams for 162 games, I figure that number is going to drop to around 67% since they played .604 ball against playoff teams. They had a 2/3 chance to win and rolled a 3. Sometimes that just happens.

Nobody's #### works in the playoffs.

If the Astros sweep, they'll finish with a better winning percentage than the Dodgers in all games toward the World Series this year.

And with an arguable, though not inarguable claim of being the better team.

Agree with all the comments above. What would the author of this piece (or others who say the Dodgers aren't built for post-season success) do differently?

At one point, the Phillies were 23-29 - and then went 64-46 the rest of the way. At another point, the Dodgers were 56-29 - and then played even better after that (55-22). Think about that - it took the Dodgers 33 more games to lose their 29th game than the Phillies...and the Dodgers didn't even get out of the NLDS, while the Phillies are in the World Series.

I think the lesson the Dodgers might take from this is that there is zero incentive to win as many games as possible during the regular season. Load management is where this is probably going, especially with pitchers and position players with injury histories.

They missed Buehler.

Stuff like this is always weird. Of course there are specific proximate causes, which you can describe if you think someone is interested in hearing it. But if you're trying to diagnose, it's hardly any more helpful than zooming out 10% and saying 'they didn't win because the other team scored more runs than them in three games' which is equally true and almost as explanatory.

Is there a more overhyped statistic bandied about today than "batting average with runners in scoring position?"

And of all the things that doomed the Dodgers to another October faceplant this year, situational hitting — specifically, a five for 34 mark (.147 average) with runners in scoring position — tripped them up most once again.

In the regular season they hit .233 with runners in scoring position against the teams that eventually made the playoffs. That was good for 16th in MLB. They were 3rd in OBP (.347), 16th in slugging (.373), and 12th in OPS (.720), the last one sandwiched right between the Orioles and Rockies. Again, that's against the teams that made the playoffs.

If we exclude the Padres from "playoff teams" - the Dodgers' regular season record against playoff teams was around .750 against the Padres and .500 against the others - those numbers drop to .211/.328/.299/.627, which ranked 26/9/28/25. Twenty-five teams had a higher batting average with RISP against the set of {Braves, Mets, Phillies, Cardinals, Dodgers, Mariners, Astros, Guardians, Yankees, Rays, Blue Jays}.

With RISP against all opponents they were .272/.365/.459/.825, and ranked 1/1/2/1. Their season ranking with RISP resulted from absolutely punishing the worst teams. And, like, absolutely punishing the worst teams is a skill. It's not the kind of skill that comes in handy in the playoffs. Their league-average showing against the better teams seems to be fueled entirely by exceptional performance against the Padres - which, if it was a skill, you'd think would have been relevant in the playoffs. Playoff teams, in the regular season, generally turned the Dodgers into an ordinary-hitting team at best, with RISP.

All this might be hooey, and small sample flukes in the playoffs (but somehow not the regular season), or whatever. But as I've said before the only team in the playoffs that consistently beat the better teams in the regular season was the Astros, and they have yet to lose a playoff game this year.

Apparently the concept of small samples is very hard to grasp.

"The playoffs are random" makes for an unsatisfyingly brief headline, much less article.

Hey, if the press and fans want to convince the Dodgers that they need to win fewer games in the regular season because that will help them do better in the postseason, I'm all for it.

With RISP against all opponents they were .272/.365/.459/.825, and ranked 1/1/2/1. Their season ranking with RISP resulted from absolutely punishing the worst teams. And, like, absolutely punishing the worst teams is a skill. It's not the kind of skill that comes in handy in the playoffs.

this is what the non-dynasty Orioles of 69-71 were accused of--beating up on bad teams and being above average against good teams--they were 20-4 against the 2 expansion teams in 1969

And, like, absolutely punishing the worst teams is a skill. It's not the kind of skill that comes in handy in the playoffs.

The 1954 Indians went 75-13 against the Orioles, Red Sox, A’s and Senators. Didn’t help much against the Giants in the WS.

Baseball has long had a legacy of historically great regular seasons going *poof* in October. The 2 teams that won 116 games (1906 Cubs and 2001 Mariners) failed to bring home championships. Cleveland in 1954 joins L.A. in 2022 as teams that won 111 games but didn't take the title. For that matter, even before they officially started playing the World Series in 1903, you had the Temple Cup in the 1890s, when the old Baltimore Orioles of John McGraw and Wee Willie Keeler fame dominated the National League during the regular season but came up short during the playoff series. So this has always been a thing, what the Dodgers did this season was nothing new. For those who say the Dodgers need to change something to make the team perform better in the postseason, I say it's not necessary to change things too much. If you keep going to the playoffs every year, sooner or later you're going to bring home a title and they have actually won one in recent years. There is no guaranteed formula for winning titles, just put the best team you can on the field and play the games. That's all you can do.

13. Except they aren't random really. The same teams make the LCS every year. Astros, Yankees, Dodgers. They have been in 13/24 LCS slots. When you get down to 4 it gets pretty random in the same way that you never knew which team would win the World Series prior to 1969. If you look further at the rest of the teams making the final four in the last three years there have only been 3 out of 24 random teams: Milwaukee, St. Louis and Tampa Bay. The rest all make sense: Braves (2), Red Sox (2), nationals, padres and Phillies. These are all high salary teams or in the Braves case - a great young team whose best players haven't started earning large $$$.....yet. The final team: the Cubs which are finishing their three year run (2015-2017).

If you go back and do 2010-2016, there is more randomness.

The Jeff Luhnow /Theo Epstein era changed everything. We now have teams rebuilding from nothing : Astros, cubs, Braves and now the orioles and soon the Pirates. And the changes to the playoff structure in 2012 and 2022 have forced other teams to start spending heavily to max out chances of getting through the gauntlet. We'll be seeing more and more of the same teams in the LCS - who wins the World Series from there looks completely unpredictable.

Who is going to make the playoff slots? Mostly teams from the East and West. The Central will rarely contribute more than a division winner. I'm guessing we will see mostly East and West Coast wild cards. Why? Payrolls in the central are so much lower and will continue to be.

13. Except they aren't random really. The same teams make the LCS every year. Astros, Yankees, Dodgers. They have been in 13/24 LCS slots.

Which is not far off the expectation of random chance if you stipulate that those teams are in the playoffs every year.

The rest of your post is--sorry to say--a long demonstration of a failure to grasp, or refusal to accept, the applied concepts of randomness and small samples.

"The playoffs are random" is of course an inaccurate statement, or at least asserts the unknowable. "The playoffs are functionally random" or "the playoffs are entirely non-predictable and non-retrodictable" would be an accurate statement. You can predict with some confidence, say, 8 or 9 of the 12 teams that will be in the playoffs, but once the playoffs begin, the samples are too small to mean anything or to be predictable.

Compare to any other sport--hockey has the weakest correlation between regular season and playoff success of the three, football slightly but not much better than hockey. But you can still point to 4 or 5 teams out of the 16/14 team field and say with great confidence that one of these teams will win the championship. Not so in baseball. Any team that's in the playoffs might get hot and win it all. There simply aren't enough discrete events in a baseball game for a short series to yield a meaningful result.

I think I understand random fine and the results aren't particularly random In the last six years. And with an extra round of three game series the chances of lowish payroll teams like cardinals or brewers or rays going though are getting vanishingly small. Will it always be the Astros/Yankees/dodgers dominating 50% of the LCS spots ---no? But there will be other high payroll teams that cycle in like the cubs and the Red Sox did for awhile. The Padres, Mets, Blue jays all seem keen on spending their way in.

I'm not sure you even understand what you believe. You laugh at my assertion that things aren't random, then say "we'll actually saying thing are random is inaccurate" then close with baseball is functionally random

Given economics, new balanced schedule and 3 rounds of play:

1. Most of the teams making it for the foreseeable future will be east and west division teams
2. Most of the teams in the LCS will continue to be high payroll clubs and those names will repeat often and there will be fewer and fewer one season wonders
3. There is likely zero predictably of who wins once you make the final four

If they add yet two more teams it will exacerbate this trend further

The 1954 Indians went 75-13 against the Orioles, Red Sox, A’s and Senators. Didn’t help much against the Giants in the WS.

Or against the Yankees and the White Sox in the regular season, against whom they went 11-11 each. The Giants also had beaten the Indians in the Cactus League that Spring by 13 games to 8, and oddsmakers aside, the Giants knew that what they did to the Indians in the World Series was no great upset.

the Dodgers' regular season record was .750 against the Padres

This is what is unusual. If you assume that the regular season is representative then winning 1 game out of 4 is quite unlikely.

Is there any reason to believe that teams that win a disproportionate number of regular season games against weaker foes are less likely to perform in the postseason, or are we just picking a handful of memorable examples and extrapolating into something meaningful? Has it been studied?

If you assume that the regular season is representative then winning 1 game out of 4 is quite unlikely.

But as with any small sample, you're almost surely better off regressing to the mean. In baseball, a sport where a 650 winning percentage overall is virtually unheard of, it's simply not very credible that one good team is a "true 750" against another good team. That specific set of 19 games (or whatever) must have included an extra large amount of "luck." They were 15-14 against the other playoff teams, incl Cle, so the "truth" probably lies somewhere between that 500 and the 750 vs the Pads. If you weight those roughly 3 and 2 (based on 29 vs 19 games), you get a crude projection around 600. Leaving aside things like adjusting for playoff PT distribution vs reg season and other confounders, that would put the Dodgers winning 3 of 5 about 68% of the time.