The Dodgers Are All About the Playoffs

The Dodgers are acting like an NBA team this year, like the Cavs or Warriors or Spurs. In the NBA, the season is long and meaningless and teams have sewn up spots halfway through the schedule. In baseball, it's not so cut and dried a) because the distribution of talent is not nearly as lopsided and b) because making the playoffs is significantly more difficult and fraught with challenges.

Still the Dodgers have won their division and secured a playoff spot each of the last four years, but they've been stymied on the way to the World Series. A big part of that has been the relative ineffectiveness of all-World starter Clayton Kershaw in the post-season. Could he just be gassed by season's end?

It may be that Dodger brass thinks so. This year, with help from the truncated 7-day and 10-day Disabled List, something new is going on with the Chavez Ravine pitching rotation. Combining a quick hook (average start - 87 pitches) with liberal use of the DL, the team is stashing pitchers between starts and employing six starting arms. Of their first 46 games, Dodgers pitchers had 34 times rested more than four days between starts.

This puts more stress on the relief corps, but again, creative use of the DL can help spell relievers while rostering their temporary replacements. There has never been, and doesn't appear to be now, much patrolling by MLB of DL use.

You might think of this as prophylactic employment of the DL. Rich Hill, Kenta Maeda and Alex Wood have had their injury issues, so limiting their usage by shuttling them back and forth is a clever way of protecting their health.

The purpose of this would seem to be keeping arms fresh for a long playoff run, which can last 21 additional games for a team that gets to the World Series. And frankly, that makes sense, because for the Dodgers, just as for the Cavs and Warriors, it's not a successful season unless they get to the championship series.