How a tattered Dodgers pitching staff can conquer October

In last year’s National League Division Series, the 100-win Dodgers didn’t lose to the 84-win D-backs because of rust collected during the bye. It was largely because Arizona played well and neutralized the Dodgers' best bats – can’t forget to give credit to a team that made it to the World Series, after all.

But it was mostly because of what was so clear headed into the series: That a tattered Dodger rotation featuring, at the time, a clearly diminished Clayton Kershaw, a back-end veteran in Lance Lynn and a rookie in Bobby Miller was going to be enormously vulnerable.

It was – and then some. The three starters combined to allow 13 runs in 4 2/3 innings. Mookie Betts’ first plate appearance of the series came with his team already down 6-0. As it turned out, the full-season team record didn’t matter; the fact that they didn’t have a strong rotation at that time did, and it sank their entire year.

Surely, then, headed into the 2024 postseason, the Dodgers won’t have similar issues, right? No, let’s say, echoes of what caused 2023 to end so abruptly? Ah, yes. We’re sorry to report that the 2024 Dodgers head into the playoffs with markedly different names on the mound, yet a lot of the same concerns.

How, then, will the Dodgers piece together a pitching plan? With magic, glue and duct tape, mostly. But let’s see if we can do better than that to help them sketch out some options.

At this point, we really only know three things for certain.

1) The top starters for the NLDS will be Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty and Walker Buehler.

Manager Dave Roberts has all but said these will be his top three starters, even though each comes with a caveat. Yamamoto missed months with a shoulder injury, and while he’s been effective since his return (3.38 ERA in 16 innings), he also hasn’t yet made a Major League start on fewer than five days' rest. It’s hard to think that changes now. Flaherty was outstanding in his first seven Dodger starts (2.61 ERA) but struggled considerably more in his final three (6.43 ERA).

Finally, Buehler, in the past the ace of this staff, has struggled all season to remain healthy and find consistency, leading to a 5.38 ERA. He’s here more out of necessity than performance, and his final start provided more questions than answers – it’s great, to be clear, to allow just one run over five innings to the playoff-bound Padres, as he did on Sept. 26. But it’s a lot more worrisome to do so with just one strikeout, especially when that one came looking on an outside pitch that Fernando Tatis Jr. didn’t exactly agree with.

It’s also expected that Landon Knack will play a big role, but he has at times functioned more as the “bulk pitcher” behind an opener, as happened in Game 162, so we won’t consider him to be a starter right now.

2) A number of other big names are unavailable.

Gavin Stone and Tyler Glasnow already have been ruled out for the season. Kershaw, out with a toe injury, is trying to get back and might be available later in October. Perhaps Tony Gonsolin could be as well, but neither is ready right now.

3) It’s not so much about “starters” as it is about “pitchers.”

This, really, is the key.

The Tigers just spent two months riding one starter (albeit a very good one in Tarik Skubal) and various combinations of relievers and openers to surge into the playoffs. (“Our plan is Skubal tomorrow and pitching chaos the rest of the way,” said manager A.J. Hinch before the Wild Card Series began.)

As much as you might want the game to still be played as it was when the Dodgers won a title in 1965 behind three starters (Sandy Koufax, Claude Osteen, and Don Drysdale) throwing 80% of all team innings, it just doesn’t work that way anymore. Last October, starters were on the mound for only 52% of plate appearances.

That’s a big deal for the Dodgers, who have three high-performing late-inning relievers in Alex Vesia, Michael Kopech and Blake Treinen -- a trio that combined for a 1.04 ERA over the final two months of the season. (No, we’re not seriously considering Shohei Ohtani here. Yet.)

So as we work out a pitching plan, let’s think less about starts and more about innings. If the Dodgers are going to get to the World Series, how many innings do they have to cover?

It depends, obviously, on how many games they might need to advance in each series, if they do at all. If we look at the first two postseasons under the current format, we can get an idea of what kinds of innings they need to get through.

NL Division Series
Innings needed: ~35

The Dodgers decided on Thursday that Yamamoto will start Game 1 on Saturday, followed by Flaherty in Game 2. After a day off, it's most likely Buehler in Game 3 on Tuesday. This means Yamamoto and Flaherty could both be available in a possible deciding Game 5. Knack, or an opener like Anthony Banda, would be needed for Game 4.

Thirty-five innings, give or take. In a best-of-five series, with days off before Games 3 and 5, if the Dodgers could get 20 innings out of their four starter/bulk guys and 10 more out of their Big Three relievers, that doesn’t seem so hard.

If the series goes a full five, there’s a one-day break before ...

NL Championship Series
Innings needed: ~55

Obviously, the trick here is that we don’t know if Flaherty or Yamamoto would be needed to win an NLDS Game 5. If not, you can pencil in Yamamoto like this:

• Game 1 (seven days' rest)
• Game 6 (six days' rest)

You know Flaherty would be available for two other starts, with those dates dependent on if he pitched an NLDS Game 5 or not. That would probably be 3 and 7 if he did, or 2 and 6 if he did not. Buehler could start Game 2 (if Flaherty can’t) or Game 3 (if Flaherty can). Knack, or Knack plus an opener, would start one of the middle stretch of Games 3/4/5.

Which then potentially causes something of an issue. Yamamoto won’t pitch on less than five days' rest. Flaherty certainly won’t be asked to pitch on three days' rest. Unless there’s a sweep, then the Dodgers will have to play five games in six days. The only way Flaherty starts two of them is if he doesn’t have to go in a NLDS Game 5. If he does: Then the Dodgers will have to drum up another starter (maybe Kershaw, by this point), or perhaps a bullpen game – a second such game, if that’s what you consider Knack starts.

It might be hyperbole, but it might also mean the Dodgers winning the NLDS in three or four games is key to their entire October.

There’s still one more series after this, though, and that’s …

World Series
Innings needed: ~50

… the big one, but this gets even more complicated, for a brand-new reason.

For the first time in recent memory, we don’t actually know for certain what day the World Series will begin. That’s because there’s a new wrinkle in the postseason schedule, which states that if both the NLCS and ALCS are finished by Oct. 19, then the currently scheduled Oct. 25 start to the Fall Classic moves up by a full three days to Oct. 22.

Because of that, and because of the possibility that the NLCS could be short and the ALCS could go long -- giving the Dodgers time to completely reset their rotation -- we couldn’t begin to guess what it would look like day by day in the World Series. Still, there are three main takeaways from this exercise:

• It is absolutely vital that Flaherty/Yamamoto be healthy/productive.
• It’s mildly difficult that Yamamoto needs the extra day, but doesn’t hurt much.
• The linchpin to the entire thing is avoiding a fifth game in the NLDS.

In total, that’s roughly 140 innings, give or take a game or two, and works out relatively well with what we saw from the four World Series teams in the last two seasons – the 2023 Rangers and D-backs, as well as the 2022 Phillies, threw 150-155 innings across 17 games. The 2022 Astros threw only 126 innings, but played just 13 games to do it. There’s more than one way to get there; the 2019 Nationals had 65% of plate appearances coming from starting pitchers (not counting starters working as relievers), while the 2021 Braves were at only 47%.

It's not, obviously, how the Dodgers drew it up, when they hoped Glasnow or Kershaw or both would be here, soaking up some of these innings, or when they saw Stone having a breakout season. It never seems to be how they draw it up, really, on the pitching side. But this is what they've got -- in addition to Ohtani atop the lineup, of course -- and it's doable. It's not easy, maybe not even probable. But it's possible.