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Little Eddie making his ’26 season debut at 3B for the Dodgers today. He’s 0 for 3 with the bat in today’s game. Meanwhile, his teammate Big Freddie’s heating up and is now hitting .280. He ripped a 2 run tater to contribute to the Dodger’s 5-4 lead over Tampa at Dodger Stadium. Edman will in all likelihood receive his third piece of gaudy jewelry in 3 seasons as a Dodger this fall, which will make him 3 for 3 in WS championships.
Excuse me for hammering this home, but it occurred to me that the Dodgers of the last few years may well indeed be the best Big League baseball team of my lifetime and I’m pushing real close to 70 years old. From top to bottom and end to end they just don’t even hint at any sort of soft spot at all. The mid 70’s Reds or the Yankees and Cardinals of a couple of different eras were undoubtedly formidable baseball teams, but these Dodgers are put together like the man of steel. It ain’t hardly fair.
Roycroft not doing anything at all to make a case for keeping him around. I’d guess his is the next name to disappear from the 26 man.
1TD, you and I are in complete agreement on those statements, I’ve been thinking this since the start of the season. He can disappear completely and go elsewhere. And he can take Fernandez with him as far as I’m concerned, the roster spots are better off used seeing somebody else at this point so we can assess what we have coming up the pipeline. We should move on at this point. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. Our record and what might be at stake about late August demands it.
The talking heads keep telling us these guys have great stuff and are “close” to figuring it out, but I sure haven’t seen a whole lot of overall results other than giving up runs and muddying up an already bad situation when they come in with runners on. And way too many walks.
Bruill is here because he’s left-handed, and he’ll probably stay till about the end of the trade deadline where he’ll get DFA’d–unless–Romero gets traded. Every Cardinal pen for the last 30 years has had some left-hander who is so-so or painfully average, but fills a need to keep somebody a little better out there from having to come in too early in the games. (like Romero)Yeah, Pinballer, it’s a little bit of an insult when the guys who are “in the know” try to convince me that a pitcher who’s sporting a career ERA of 6.41 and a season ERA well north of 15.00 possesses what they term as good stuff…I don’t really even know exactly what “good stuff” is. Personally, if any pitcher for any team at all hangs a 15.00 ERA up on the board, I replace the word stuff with a different word that I won’t use on this forum. Baseball is an incredibly simple game that many youngsters start playing when they’re as young as 6 or 7 years old, so I do my best to keep things simple when assessing a pitcher’s performance. The net bottom line is that any pitcher’s performance is ultimately judged on his ability to record outs. “Stuff, whatever that is, doesn’t at all matter. Plain and simple.
Yeah, these Dodgers are a juggernaut alright. As a kid playing APBA baseball I got the 1966 season cards, and was thinking just the other day that the Boys In Blue had a rotation that year of Koufax, Drysdale, Osteen and Sutton. Three Hall of Famers and a darn good lefty who won 20 games at least once I believe.
Man, with those four going you just would not go into any kind of long losing streak. And this bunch today is the best team going. They have the best run differential in the majors.
I notice that none of the Dodgers starters have more wins than Pallante right now, and he makes minimum. He is our third best starter by ERA. None of Dodger sluggers have more homers or RBIs than Walker. He makes minimum too. No Dodger has as many saves as O’Brien or as many shut outs as May. Baseball is a funny game.
Yeah, Bikemike, those 4 names in a rotation spell W after W. However those Dodger teams didn’t feature anywhere near the offensive firepower put forth by the current Dodger teams of the last several years. I clearly recall names like Willie Davis and Maury Wills, but I just looked it up and names like Jim Lefebvre and Ron Fairly led several of those 60’s Dodger teams with 20 or so HR’s and around 70 RBI’s. Today, an opposing pitcher gets a look at a nightmare featuring names like, Freeman, Ohtani, Betts, Pages, Muncy and Hernandez to compliment their over the top outstanding SP’ing and BP…It never ends with these guys. And now, wait for it…they get little Eddie back…Haha! It simply ain’t fair.
Yeah, I’d have never guessed Pallante would be 8-4 so far this season. And in March if someone would have told me that 3 members of the 5 man would have turned in real nice work and the other two were nominally decent through to the middle of June, I would have simply assumed they’d spent too much time over the winter patronizing one of the several dispensaries that are now commonplace around the StL. area. I was convinced that this seasons’ SP’ing was going to be a veritable catastrophe. Like you mentioned, Bling, baseball’s a funny game.
I think one thing that is super interesting about our rotation is that zero starters have hit the IL this season after zero hit the IL last season. In the modern day, that’s got to be some kind of record. Brian should look into this!
Just looking at Opening Day rosters, the last time the Cards had no starting pitchers on the IL prior to 2025 and 2026 was in 2010. And that doesn’t even count numerous in-season injuries.
2024: Gray
2023: Wainwright
2022: Flaherty
2021: Mikolas/Kim
2020: Mikolas
2019: C Martinez
2018: Wainwright/Alex Reyes
2017: Reyes/Gant
2016: Lynn
2015: J Garcia
2014: Garcia
2013: Carpenter
2012: Carpenter
2011: WainwrightBrian – I remember you sharing this info above. I’m not sure how easy it would be to look up, but I am curious what the longest stretch of having zero starters on the IL is for any MLB team? At least for the last 25 or so years. I would imagine we are setting a record or at least getting near to one. Credit is due to the training staff first and foremost, but also some to Mozeliak, Bloom, and Marmol and of course those pitchers themselves. In a day when pitchers all break like crazy (see Dodgers for example), having a reliable pitching staff has been a blessing.
Not that it matters any longer but Miller was put bereavement list on Monday.
I noticed that after I had made that post but as you said it turned out to be a moot point.
The Dodgers are one of the better teams in recent memory but they are not infallible. On four different occasions in the 9th inning of Game 7 the Blue Jays were within an inch of winning the series but it didn’t happen. The end result is what that matters but the point is that other teams can compete with them no doubt.
I think people make it about the Dodgers being unbeatable, but that’s obviously not the case. Baseball is random and another good team (and usually well-financed team) could beat them, although it gets tougher to do it 4 times out of 7. I think the issue is that 15 teams or more start the season every year with a collective total of 1% odds to win. Those 15 basically have no chance against the Dodgers. Not quite zero, but close enough. That’s 15 franchises worth of fans praying for a miracle that they know isn’t going to happen. I think that’s overall bad for baseball because many of those fans eventually give up on being fans. But I’m not 100% sure because David vs Goliath can be a selling point and we always see at least a couple Davids sneak into the playoffs.
The Davids have struggled to win even when they are represented annually. We know Milwaukee hasn’t won despite some very good seasons. The last David to win was KC in 2015 and the ChiSox in 2005 before them. Two in 21 years isn’t all that good. And those were before the super-team Dodgers were built.
Money is obviously a factor when it comes to success but it isn’t the only factor. Some teams are just poorly run teams. It wouldn’t matter how much money they spent they would still screw it up.
I agree some teams appear to be poorly run. However, money often helps to buy better decision-makers. Paying for good scouting or good athletic trainers or good equipment or good coaching isn’t cheap. My point is that it’s a lot easier to look like you’re making good decisions when you have talented people all around you to help. I also realize you have examples like the Mets where this seems to not help them one iota.
I guess so. The Brewers, Guardians, and Rays aren’t considered to be in the wealthy category but they sure do have a lot of smart people running their operations.
I like the fact that the Cardinals shrank their payroll $40M from last year but got better as a team. Perhaps much better. I attribute it to a much smarter front office and a commitment to development. We are finally allocating our resources where they need to be.
I’m not real sure that it matters at all that Toronto came close to winning the 7th game of the ’25 WS. I’m also reasonably certain that if I asked any old Yankee fan if their memory of the Yankees outscoring the Pirates 55 to 27 in the ’60 WS erased the memory of Mazeroski’s tater in game 7, they’d tell me to take a walk. In any event, the books confirm that the Dodgers have been the best Big League baseball team for quite a while now and I fully expect them to remain so when the results of the ’26 WS are called in to the offices in NY. We all know that anything can happen in baseball, but the Dodgers are so good that it hasn’t happened for a long time.
I’m still trying to figure out who’s to be held accountable for neglecting to schedule a baseball game on a Saturday in June. It’s near to being a sacrilege.
That would be because of the World Cup Soccer Tournament having a game across the parking lot at Arrowhead Stadium on Saturday.
If that’s indeed the case, that meaningless soccer game should have been pushed ahead to sometime during the following Monday afternoon…
While there are probably half of the teams with basically no chance to win anything, isn’t t always that way in all big time sports? Obviously with more teams today that means more bad teams and a tougher hill to climb to win it all.
But I don’t see that as an issue. The Yankees ruled the American League, and baseball for 45 years. That will likely never happen again with the almost doubling of organizations today, but like a lot of things, nothing is really new. Just different in some ways.
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