FanPost

How to make the Dodgers an average offense



In MLB each position in the line up generally bats 4 or 5 times. The Dodgers use a hard platoon for those batters in 3 positions in its line up -- right and left field and first base. That is 33% of their at bats. They are very good hitters when hitting on the strong side of the platoon. They are not as good when hitting on the week side of the platoon.

When batting against the opposite handed pitcher the OPS for each of these platooned positions is 1.028,1.331,.828,1.001,.921,556. When batting against the pitcher who is the same handed these OPS become .786, .273, .828, .529, .628, .512.

The average OPS with the platoon is 1.111. The average OPS of these batters when forced to face the same handed pitcher is .590. For comparison purposes, Orlando Arcia's OPS is .576.

The secret of this series may be the Brewers use of short starts and opposite hand relief pitchers to limit the platoon split depth. Just like the Brewers, the Dodgers only get 25 players on their roster.

If the Brewers start a left handed pitcher to get the Dodgers to start in the right handed hitting platoon and then quickly insert right handed relievers it forces the Dodgers into a decision: Do they pinch hit early and use their left hand hitting platoon players or do they leave their righties in against the right handed relievers. If they do pinch hit early, the Brewers have the ability to bring in lefties out of the bullpen for two or three subsequent at bats.

Either way, the Brewers should be able to limit the effective use of the platoon to approximately half of those player's at bats with players having to bat against same handed pitchers the other half of the time. The other benefit of this effort is it substantially limits the ability to pinch hit for the pitcher. If the Dodgers use three of their starters to facilitate switching for platoon splits than that leaves at the most one or two hitters for other pinch hitting.

The most effective way to do this would be to use Gonzalez as an opener or at most have him pitch three innings. The goal is to have half of the Dodgers platoon players bat against same handed pitching. This reducing an imposing Dodgers line up into something much more similar to the Rockies line up.