Brusdar tortures YouTuber, ZiPS top prospects, PECOTA optimism, and was Yamamoto’s playoff usage risking his health? – Dodgers Digest

There’s a bunch of interesting info in these links, but yeah, of course the #Content highlight the Dodgers player torturing the YouTuber.

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Driveline Baseball: Everybody painted the decision by the Dodgers and Dave Roberts to allow Yoshinobu Yamamoto to pitch in Game 7 of the World Series on zero days rest as a massive health risk … but was it really?

It turns out adding an extra, one-time 32-workload unit effort during what would normally be a down day does not pose much risk.If Yamamoto did that once during a regular season, and then kept his normal routine, he would not have spiked his ACWR above our redline of 20% as we can see in the chart above.In other words, what Yamamoto did in Game 7 was not inherently dangerous. He had built up the capacity for such additional, emergency work.To cross a redline, to spike his ACWR by more than 20%, he would have had to reach 50 workload units in Game 7. In other words, he would have to throw full game-day workloads, 100-plus pitches, on back-to-back days. 

Really, you should read the whole thing.

But perhaps a takeaway from Yamamoto’s World Series performance is that managers can push their best arms when necessary. They don’t always have to be so conservative. Pitchers can be built for such a moment. They can be prepared by being over prepared and see benefits like improved quality of stuff.Managers should perhaps be more willing to allow pitchers to take on even greater workload in the postseason and when chasing history in the regular season – those no-hitters bids. The data says it’s reasonable safe, and that would be the far more entertaining option.

While it obviously does have to make a lot of assumptions in this specific instance — and that’s why leeway should be given to teams who do actually have data for decisions like this — it’s definitely useful in a general sense.

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Baseball Prospectus: Did you want more record predictions? Well, PECOTA has the Dodgers pegged at a massive 104.3 wins with a 99.9% chance of making the playoffs, 98.1% chance of winning the division, and 23% chance of winning the World Series. Seems good.

Baseball Prospectus: Did you have hope about the Jack Suwinski pickup? Well, maybe you shouldn’t.

Suwinski has a career 31% strikeout rate, which has driven DRC+s that haven’t crested 90 outside of ‘23. It’s not pure passivity, either—his walk rates are strong, and he did basically stop swinging last year (sub-40% zone swing rate), but he also whiffs too much in-zone, and especially out-of-zone (44% O-Con compared to 55% league-average) when he does opt to take a hack. Suwinski is already a lift-and-pull type, so that kind of fix isn’t available, which means he’ll require something closer to a swing overhaul. Those can work, but they generally require time, and given how the Dodgers have cycled through 40-man spots this offseason (just ask Mike Siani), well, it’s not clear how much of that Suwinski will have with the org.

Of course, if a turnaround wasn’t unlikely he wouldn’t be available for nothing, but I think the point is more that the road to usefulness in his case isn’t one pen session of teaching him a new grip like it was for others the Dodgers helped (Anthony Banda).

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FanGraphs: Another week, another Top 100 list, and they have four Dodgers on theirs: Josue De Paula at #17, Zyhir Hope at #41, Eduardo Quintero at #43, and Emil Morales at #61. Also, there’s River Ryan at #107 in their next 10. A bit lower on the downstream guys than other places, but nothing too surprising, IMO.

FanGraphs: For a different feel, ZiPS is always an interesting Top 100 list just because it’s based solely on numbers. The Dodgers end up landing five there: Morales at #17 (wow), Quintero at #41, Alex Freeland at #43, De Paula at #80, and Jackson Ferris at #95. Beyond that, the Dodgers add three more in the Top 200 (8 total) and 17 more in the Top 500 (22 total). Of those listed later, the only one whose ranking we know of is Hope at #151.

Baseball America: Outside of their Top 30 prospects, they did short blurbs on 10 more to know for the Dodgers: Ryan Ward, Adrian Marrero, Brady Smith, Justin Chambers, Paul Gervase, Jakob Wright, Rubel Arias, Ezequiel Melburne, Reyli Mariano, and Jaron Elkins.

Baseball America: Oliver Gonzalez and Marrero are named among the prospects they’re excited about who are making their debuts in the States.

When he signed, Gonzalez’s fastball sat in the upper 80s, but the 6-foot-4 righthander sat in the low 90s in 2025 and touched 95 mph with considerable extension and downhill plane.

He featured only a low-80s curveball in games last year, though [Gonzalez] has worked on a changeup and slider as well. Slated to join the ACL Dodgers in 2026, the Panama native also has the chance to be a trailblazer for the country, which has yet to establish a consistent lineage of homegrown pitching talent.

He works with a five-pitch mix fronted by a low-90s sinker that [Marrero] landed for strikes 67.5% of the time, but his calling card is a high-spin curveball that averaged over 3,100 rpm and generated a 54% miss rate. It could become a true bat-missing weapon to build around. His upper-70s sweeper also cracks 3,000 rpm of spin along with an astounding 23 inches of horizontal break on average, but corralling that pitch is a work-in-progress, and he’s still developing his changeup and two-seamer.

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Let’s close with a YouTuber going through Brusdar Graterol‘s grueling workout, resulting in a video that includes barfing, “he die”, and “you’re gonna shit”. It also has a great motivational speech from Bazooka while he is basically torturing the guy. Good stuff.