2015/16 Offseason: More active than Shakira's hips

[Ranma]

[tweet]https://twitter.com/latimessports/status/704728704652447744[/tweet]

[Quake Griffin]

lawd!
hes a fireballer. get well Josh

[Quake Griffin]

Chapman gets 30 games.

Some Dodger fans are upset.
I've been in the Ranma camp from jump.

Move on from this turd and don't look back.

[Ranma]

From what I've gathered, Manfred was poised to suspend him 35-40 games but Chapman's agent negotiated for 30 by agreeing to not appeal. ESPN also doesn't think Puig will be suspended at all in his case. Reyes, on the other hand, is expected to be suspended at least half the season.

Chapman loses just under $2 million in salary due to his suspension. Barring injury, he should also be an unrestricted free agent after the 2016 season. Also assuming no injury, the Dodgers will offer Kenley Jansen the qualifying offer, which he will reject thus making him an unrestricted free agent as well. The front office may not be inclined to sign or re-sign a high-priced reliever--even if he is a proven closer--but it will have the choice between Chapman and Jansen if it is interested.

[Neddy]

lawd!
hes a fireballer. get well Josh

at least it isn't his pitching hand. I don't buy him driving at 20 mph tho.

[Quake Griffin]

http://m.dodgers.mlb.com/news/article/165944336/turner-wards-first-goal-to-help-joc-pederson

I've been waiting to hear from him and the first thing I hear from him is exactly what I want to hear.

[Ranma]

[tweet]https://twitter.com/alannarizzo/status/705134876169613312[/tweet]

[Quake Griffin]

Brett Anderson out 3 to 5 months with surgery for a bulging disc in his back.

Not a new injury.
Should have steered clear of this guy and should not have gotten the QO from us.

[Quake Griffin]

I've got Brandon Beachy regaining form after using last year to get the cob webs out and being a part of this rotation to start the season.

Kershaw
Kazmir
Maeda
Wood
Beachy

still not bad…but smfh.

[Quake Griffin]

Kendrick 2B
Ethier LF
Puig RF
Van Slyke 1B
Grandal C
Seager SS
Hernandez DH
Guerrero 3B
Thompson CF
(Kershaw P)


The lineup we're throwing out there today.
Howie in the leadoff role.

[Neddy]

Brett Anderson out 3 to 5 months with surgery for a bulging disc in his back.

Not a new injury.
Should have steered clear of this guy and should not have gotten the QO from us.

well this QO will be the biggest payday for Anderson's career. not just to this date but for the future remaining years as well. I'm sure we wanted someone else to take a flier on him and give us a pick but it just ended up being Brett's Christmas gift. hope he manages the funds well and wisely and have a good life for him and for his children, which I can't say the same for Cespedes.

[Ranma]

I'm not really that bummed about losing Brett Anderson, the pitcher. That may change once we get deeper into the season, but I've been wanting the 5th spot in the rotation to be open for De Leon, Lee, or possibly even Urias. Urias is not realistic while both Lee and De Leon are long-shots at this point. It should come down to between Bolsinger and Lee unless one of our top pitching prospects breaks out in Spring Training.

Our vaunted depth certainly looks taxed given injury concerns to Ryu, McCarthy, and now Anderson. Even Maeda has some flags. However, I anticipate Wood to regain his superior form from before his arrival to the Dodgers. I also think Lee is close to ready for big-league starts if he isn't already albeit as a 4th or 5th starter. De Leon and Urias could possibly be ready this season but they still seem to need more seasoning.

I'm actually concerned with the likelihood of losing a first-round pick that we would have gotten for Brett Anderson in presenting him a qualifying offer before free agency. I guess that's still a possibility but it doesn't look very wise now. Frankly, I don't expect much from either Anderson or McCarthy for this season.

We obviously wanted him to hit free agency this past winter, so we aren't really losing much since we didn't anticipate bringing him back before the off-season started. I suppose we could have signed someone else but I don't see anyone who would have fit the bill unless you think that we would have been more aggressive with Iwakuma, which would not have been a wise course of action. The way I see it, we're only losing money had we not offered him a qualifying offer in the first place.

Plus, supposedly there was only a 10% chance of Anderson's back becoming a recurring problem. It just didn't work out for us this time. Dave Roberts is downplaying Ryu's recent discomfort with his shoulder but he also did the same thing with Anderson's back ailment before the bad news hit.

Given how weak the next free-agent class looks for pitchers, there is still the possibility that Anderson could represent value for teams willing to give up a first-round pick for him, but that is doubtful now. In any case, I'm hopeful that one of our young pitchers seizes at the opportunity this spring.

[tweet]https://twitter.com/alannarizzo/status/705515867115638784[/tweet]
Mike Petriello, MLB.com (3/1/16)

Wood's notoriously funky mechanics had deteriorated to the point that his vertical release point was nearly a half-foot lower than it had been during his successful 2013 and '14 seasons:


Wood's vertical release point dropped by nearly half a foot in 2015.

Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt reportedly had some ideas about how to fix those mechanics, but as Wood told a local paper last week, a bruised right ankle suffered in his final start for Atlanta impacted him to the point that he "was basically trying to find a way to not crush my foot every time I landed on it," making it impossible to implement the changes.

Now, Wood's ankle has healed after a offseason of rest, and regular mechanics video work has allowed him to say that his "arm is way higher … a lot of major differences for sure."



This is veering dangerously into "best shape of his life" territory, of course, but consider what we know. Wood turned 25 in January, and as his velocity dropped from 92.5 mph to 89.8 mph between 2014 and '15, the vertical movement on his curve dropped from six inches to a mere 1 1/2 inches over the same span. We don't know his spin rate from previous years, but we do know that none of his pitches topped 2,000 rpm in 2015.

That's not the pitcher we saw with Atlanta. It's not hard at all to believe that Wood's mechanical issues played something of a role there, and the foot injury exacerbated it further. With Ryu out until May, he'll get a chance to prove it.

Statcast Sees Porcello, Wood Poised for Rebounds


Jeff Sullivan, FanGraphs.com (3/3/16)

Plenty of people over the years have questioned Alex Wood‘s ability to remain a starting pitcher, but what you at least couldn’t question, for a time, was how Wood as a starter performed. He was effective as a rookie in 2013, and then the next year, he posted numbers that, from an objective perspective, looked like they could’ve belonged to Cole Hamels. Wood struck out a quarter of the batters he faced, and while he’s never going to totally escape the skepticism, Wood looked like he was on to something. Then 2015 happened, and everything got worse. Wood found himself on the outside of the Dodgers’ rotation, looking in.
...

Now we’ll see where Wood has gotten back to. To this point it’s almost all still talk, but this is clearly something he’s worked on, and it’s not like he’s a pitcher who was trying to find a reliable changeup for the first time in his life. Wood was just trying to get his mechanics back to where they were, after they mysteriously slipped. It’s promising — and it’s promising that he himself set out to do this — and given what Wood was once, he could be in line for a major bounceback. The Dodgers wouldn’t mind the stability.

There’s one more thing, that might have to do with the mechanics. Something has happened with Wood’s breaking ball. In the following table, you’re going to see how his breaking ball has compared to his fastball, in terms of speed, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. The fastball and the changeup have remained more or less in lockstep, but the breaking ball has changed.



Over three years, the speed difference between the two pitches has dropped from 13 to nine miles per hour. There’s been a small reduction in the difference in horizontal movement, but when you look at vertical movement, the change is pronounced — where once there was a difference of 14 inches, last year it was about half that. Last year, Wood’s curveball behaved a lot more like a slider, perhaps because a proper curveball can be more difficult to throw from a lower slot. It will be interesting to see if Wood’s curve goes back to what it was in 2014 or even 2013, because that was a pitch he was able to use inside against right-handed hitters. It was an important pitch for him, and last year it was strange.

There’s plenty to look for, here, as spring training gets going and the season approaches. Wood has made some mechanical adjustments he intends to carry into competitive games. When he’s going well, he’s a legitimate No. 2 starter, which is something the Dodgers presently lack. So while I don’t want to just declare that Wood is fixed after having read a few articles, I like the potential significance of this. And though people love to point out how Wood’s velocity has dropped from when he was a rookie, he was pretty damn good in 2014 when his fastball was around 89 – 90. That’s about where he was pitching a year ago before hurting his foot, so Wood shouldn’t need to get back everything he’s lost. He’s proven he can be good with reduced velocity. Now he just needs to prove he can throw like himself.

Alex Wood and Self-Recovery

[Ranma]

[tweet]https://twitter.com/Adrian_ElTitan/status/705784255071191040[/tweet]

[Quake Griffin]

Olney has a couple Nationals winning it all picks in his history.
No surprise he made those picks and ran with the Cubs and incumbent AL winner.

Glad A-Gon isn't easily moved by the loss of Brett Anderson.


I want to see DeLeon or Urias but neither of these guys have thrown a pitch at AAA.
I'm just gonna cross my fingers for Mike Bolsinger to have another repeat performance and hope my man Beachy regains form. He's been back a year now. His velo is there. His stuff should be back.

[Neddy]

we have some serious roster spot issues and hope we resolve it sooner than later.

first, if you look at our position players, say 13 spots as usual, then

Grandal/Gonzo/Howie/Seager/Turner/Andre/Joc/Puig thats 8 starters, with a must have guys on the bench of Ellis/****/SVS, that leaves only two spots left with a guaranteed contracts of Carl Crawford, Chase Utley, and Alex Guerrero. and none of them play MLB level of SS defense.

[Neddy]

secondly, who's gonna start the season in our pen? I would hate to see guys like Garcia and Baez sent down because we have options on them. if Blanton can't perform, then what? I would rather have Magic Mike, Wood, and Lee on the major league roster if they outperform Blanton. I know he did welll as a reliever last season, but so did Jim Johnson before coming over. we have 7 spots open on the pitching staff, considering that the first five are locks, of Kershaw, Kazmir, Maeda, Wood, and Jensen. the last 7 have to have can become a problem when guys like Frias, Garcia, and Baez have options to be sent down but they may out perform the guys we can't be sent down.

[Neddy]

and going back to the bench, I would much rather find a room for Austin Barnes and have a third catcher who can also play middle infiled. I would love to have Grandal be our DH when playing in AL ballparks and have a backup catcher still available on the bench. I feel that SVS and Guerrero are redundant offensively but one can't play defense at all.

[Quake Griffin]

Looks like we've told CC he'll back up Andre in LF.

So, whether we like it or not, we can pencil him in.
I'd also think that we can pencil in Utley and that Guerrero is gonna be cut because nobody is gonna deal for him.


My gut says we're going with Hatcher as well. Solid after injury. Good in the playoffs. I think he has the trust of our FO and coaching.
So that should be 6 more spots left, not 7.

[Quake Griffin]

Looks like Frankie Montas is back throwing as well.

This is great. Hopefully the time table is closer to 2 months than 4 months.
And hopefully we can get a couple of outings at AAA and we can call him up.

[Neddy]

glad Frankie is able, but he is a bullpen arm at this point. **** is a great piece to have, but we can really use a defensive SS backup off the bench. it's like we have a bench full of Wyatt, Gary and Chet but we really need a Lisa.


























for those of you too young, that's a reference to the Weird SCience, 1985. Nerds rule.