163 thoughts on “Dodgers win! Dodgers win!”

  2. Headlines first 2 news items @ dodgers.com:

    Seager to miss 1-2 weeks with knee strain

    Wood scratched from start with forearm tightness

    Prediction: Chicken Littles will be out in force.

  3. Sobering thoughts. Hard to have a smaller sample, but here your go: Keith Law not convinced by Maeda and DeLeon based on breakdown of pitches so far in ST. (the details are behind the wall, but for Maeda he says that arm speed tips making his only adequate fastball fair game for big league hitters). Says that price is right for a back of the rotation starter, but that Maeda will not perform well enough to reach incentive levels. As regards DeLeon, based on the 3-4 innings that Law saw he would drop the guy out of his top 100 prospect list (now at #60). http://espn.go.com/blog/keith-law/insider/post?id=5095

      • Yeah, at least one commenter noted that he had panned Ryu, much in the way he is doing to Maeda, when he first came over to the Bigs.

    • If I recall correctly, Maeda should reach incentive levels by merely remaining healthy.

  8. Only 2 short ST starts for Kazmir, so have to give him benefit of doubt given his record. But at what point should ST results be given more weight? He said this after getting shelled yesterday.

    ““I honestly think I’m on the right path,” Kazmir said. “If you look at the game and not the box score, it tells a different story.”

    Kersh sees it differently. “While others might say they put zero stock into spring training results, Kershaw is not in that group. Not by a long shot.

    “I mean, the whole goal of being down here is getting hitters out so you know where you stack up,” he said. “That’s how you get better. You don’t bet better by working on your mechanics, you get better by getting hitters out.” ( Kersh snippet from ESPN.com )

    • I can’t completely agree with Kershaw on this. Spring is a time that pitchers and position players can experiment to see what works (and what doesn’t), since the results don’t count. If you have a new pitch, you don’t want to throw it in the regular season without having worked on it earlier.

    • It should only happen in the World Series and, with luck, the Yanquis will never reach it again.

  12. John from Aus will note that his countryman Jack Murphy (or is he really an Irishman?) had a two-run double and drew a walk. Fast-developing prospect Cody Bellinger has three of the Dodgers’ 20 hits.

      • Well, Harper may be available and moving into his prime at just about the same time the Dodgers will be taking $40 million in outfielders off the books

  19. Crazy busy lately….
    But, in an actual moment of freedom this afternoon, I decided to check out the blog here….
    As always, a mosaic of contributions, editorials, news, and opinions…. That’s what makes it fun.
    ….
    However, rather unfortunate to read of any ‘angst’ among some of you guys here on a baseball blog…. Yes…. We’re all grown adults….. who can’t get along on a baseball blog….. Really ?
    ….
    From what I’ve read, seems a little bit like a school yard where pettiness and snarkiness abound towards this guy one day… .that guy another…. Grow up, people ! 🙂
    …
    Perhaps I just came swingin’ in here half-cocked because I haven’t see what all led up to the recent posts of unrest… but… could there really be anything that truly divisive one could read on a baseball blog where everybody is rooting for the same team? A little self-reflection, por favor. 🙂

  21. Folks who want to criticize Link and what he does or doesn’t do here need to keep in mind that this blog doesn’t pay him very well for posting and keeping it up. He started it to try to fill a bit of the void when DT went dark and has devoted considerable time to it out of the goodness of his heart.

    I think it’s high time he had a raise. But I can’t reach him to pick him up! ;-])

    • As the article notes there is a bigger issue as regards the allocation of the riches between owners and players. Not clear to me that the QO has a major impact on that, say compared to the luxury tax, but we will hear all about it as the negotiate the next CBA. Ian Desmond is a particularly sad tale for a player’s perspective.

    • Not a lot of defensive support – Seager the culprit – but the two dingers didn’t help.

  25. Does anyone think that Jon Weisman would have tolerated, much less joined in, in the harassment that Package is forced to endure? Shame, shame…

    • Look, if package ignores Rule 8 consistently, he’s liable to become a victim of Rule 3. If I tossed people out there’d be even less activity than there is between seasons.

      • Package doesn’t bother me. What I don’t like are the barbs thrown back at him and the continuous attempt to change his mind. Just let him be.

        He doesn’t make long rambling comments and he doesn’t use crude language.

        • Probably the best way to get discussion during the off-season is to put up a new post every three days that is controversial.

          • I see someone complained on LaDodgersReport about 4 new posts in one day. Think he’d be happy here, a new post only when Discus cuts off comments on the old one, about one a week? Controversial post? Just post anything, someone will find it controversial… I see your name a lot over there, it’s a good site. I read, very seldom say anything there. No more here now, I was just trying to get Package to a place where he’d be happier but maybe he likes to fight…

          • I asked before and you may have missed it. Why don’t you like Disqus?

            As to the small number of posts here, I have obligations elsewhere and very little happened during the off season that we didn’t touch on here, I hope. We have some commenters who read other sites and post links when I don’t, which is a good thing.

          • It loses posts when you refresh, and a lot of links don’t work right. And it sometimes loses memory of our sign-ins. No matter.

          • He also could find some fellow souls who don’t like FAZ and say so quite often in comments under some stories at dodgers.com.

    • IIRC correct package was booted off of DT for constantly violating the rules. If anything, Link has been very patient.

    • I’ve very likely read every comment on this site since its launch. Not once have I seen Link “harass” anyone. He gets frustrated–like most of us–with Package’s one-trick pony FO bashing to the exclusion of almost all else.

      And sometimes says so, as he has every right to, as either commenter or moderator.

      Package brings the static he gets on himself. He’s not “forced to endure” anything.
      Nor is he forced to stay if his situation is intolerable.

      What Jon wouldn’t have tolerated is the sheer number of Rule #8 violations. Link has been very forgiving, for his own reasons.

  27. AJ’s pitch-blocking skills appear to have deteriorated even more over the off-season.

  28. By the way thank you to all the people on this site who patiently explained how to post links to me.

  30. While ST stats are meaningless, very nice to see Maeda and DeLeon looking good out there. Would guess that Snake fans less excited about Shelby Miller’s debut, who cost them the number 1 guy in the 2015 draft and Inciarte.

        • Nice to see Seager in the right spot. Not sure how much shifting they do in the minors.

        • Nor in Japan. “It was my first time experiencing that, seeing that happen in front of me, so I was a little bit surprised at first,” Maeda said

    • Great analyst and writer, but seemed to attract frat house commenters for some reason.

      • Mike is a fine analyst, but I’m less impressed with his writing. And indeed, but for a few, his commenters indulge their juvenilia.

      • Apt description for almost all DoDi commenters, from what limited amount of comments I’ve seen there.

  35. “SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — There’s a theory floating around in the industry that Zack Greinke
    was never realistically going to remain with the Dodgers. That a deeply analytical front office with little stomach for the gargantuan acquisition cost for premier pitching — be it in dollars or in prospects — was never going to give him that sixth year or that last dollar. That Greinke himself was a little leery of the way the Dodgers tried to get creative, rather than aggressive, in patching up their rotation behind him and Clayton Kershaw midway through what was, for Greinke, a historic 2015 season.

    “Maybe it’s accurate, maybe it’s not.”

    http://m.mlb.com/news/article/166238758/zack-greinke-debuts-for-d-backs-after-la-exit

    Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if FAZ breathed a sigh of relief when ZG didn’t take their offer, tho they had to have been unhappy he went to AZ (but happier it wasn’t SF). I think their approach of 80% of the same results at 50% or way less player cost is going to hold at least until they get out from under paying millions in luxury tax and getting exactly nothing for those millions. If he’d taken their offer they’d have remained in high luxury tax neighborhood for a good while, probably.

    • Lots of speculation. They’ve always said, though, that the long term goal was to create a sustainable stream of top talent from what is now baseball’s No. 1 farm system.

  36. SVS with the dinger yesterday. His resurgence from last year’s down would be a great boost to the offense. He is in his prime and hope that he can stay away from the injury bug that snagged him last year

  37. In Padres-Royals game, Kemp just looked awful on consecutive plays in RF to give Royals 1-0 lead. Both rightly scored doubles, but he looked helpless on them.

    • They will all get their work, but my take would be that Lee is the lesser known one on the depth chart so he is likely to get a lot more scrutiny. Ballslinger and Frias have already shown some ability already to pitch in the Bigs.

      • I think Ballslinger is more suitable to starting than Frías, who looks like a reliever to me.

        • That’s my understanding as well. In any event they may want to have Frias stretched out and starting the the minors as inevitably another starter is likely to go down with an injury of some sort

  42. Package, I think you will enjoy the site http://ladodgerreport.com/ . The writer is most definitely not a FAZ fan. There are one or sometimes two new posts a day and lots of comments after the posts. It uses the WordPress software, not the lame Discus you’re handicapped with here. So far, posters get along good and if someone started abusing someone else, there would be lots of support against the abuser. Blog owner is there every day.

  44. Trayce Thompson took an awful route on Sands’s deep fly ball double (which, in fairness, he probably would not have caught anyway).