Alright, time for one last Dodgers Roundup before the season starts. One last time (before every other time to come) looking back at the 2025 season and Dodgers projections for 2026.
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The Athletic: Tyler Kepner goes through Game 7 of the 2025 World Series with Dave Roberts.
The gap between what many of Dave’s critics think he does (an analytics robot controlled by the front office) and what his players think (moves based on trust and with a personal touch) is gigantic, and ultimately what the latter believes is the only thing that matters.
Dave defended leaving Shohei Ohtani in for the 3rd inning despite knowing he didn’t have it, which is a bit disturbing since learning when he’s gassed seems like it’ll be pivotal in the future.
He also confirms that he was going to Clayton Kershaw for Daulton Varsho if Yoshinobu Yamamoto didn’t get Alejandro Kirk to ground into a double play to end it right there.
The highlighting of the pivotal decisions Dave made by using instances where similar choices went wrong for other managers was neat in its depiction of the razor-thin margins (and just plain luck) involved in baseball.
It’s well worth your time.
Sports Illustrated: Also worth your time is Stephanie Apstein’s piece on the evolving role of the baseball manager.
The job gets harder as you become more notable, too. “I have to fight harder to stay connected to the thing that matters most, which is the relationship with the players,” says Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “The irony is the thing I got into this because I love, which is coaching, is the thing that you do the least of as you climb the ladder.”
The part about in-game decisions being like 10-15% of the manager’s job is especially relevant for everybody that wants to fire Dave after a move backfires.
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Baseball Prospectus: A late position-by-position breakdown of the massive 104-win projection that PECOTA bestowed upon the 2026 Dodgers (as well as what could end their dynasty/empire).
FanGraphs: It’s simply not true that money can buy rings in baseball, and that’s largely thanks to the playoff system. What it can buy — assuming a competent front office — is tickets to the playoffs, even if things go wrong. One could argue we saw something like that happen in both 2024 and 2025 with the Dodgers, but it didn’t matter in the end because it wasn’t of world-ending magnitude.
It’s really hard to kill the Dodgers. I argued after the 2024-2025 offseason, a very busy one, that the Dodgers weren’t really improving their average outcome so much as drastically raising their floor. I stand by it; they’ve added Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz while losing nobody who was crucial to the 2025 team. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be projected to win 105 games or anything, but it does mean that in most of their worst projected outcomes, they’re still a playoff contender. Their 10th-percentile projection, for example, is 86 wins. Their 2% chance of finishing below .500 is the smallest percentage I’ve ever projected, a record that now goes back more than 20 years. Doomsday for the Dodgers may require an actual doomsday scenario like societal collapse, nuclear war, or a vacuum metastability event. Since I do not know how to prevent any of those, there’s nothing more I can add.
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MLB Pipeline: The Dodgers were named the #2 ranked farm system in baseball.
They also excel at acquiring and developing prospects, with industry executives ranking them as doing the best job of developing both hitters and pitchers and rating them second-best at gathering talent via the international market and trades. No system features better outfielders, and while Los Angeles has a fairly hitter-heavy Top 30, River Ryan and Jackson Ferris could contribute to the big league pitching staff this year.
Down On The Farm: Zach Ehrhard was named as their Dodgers prospect to watch, and they essentially explain why they feel he’s underrated.
Ehrhard is just…a good player. He does everything well. He pretty clearly has the makings of a guy who can hit 20+ home runs over a 162-game season once he finishes putting on muscle (14 home runs in his age-22 season last year), doesn’t strikeout all that much (18.0% of the time), gets on base a lot (.374 OBP), is great at keeping the ball off the ground (29.8% ground ball rate), and steals a lot of bases at an extremely efficient rate (41 SBA, 90.2% success rate).
They also gave noteworthy takes on Josue De Paula, Zyhir Hope, Alex Freeland, and Emil Morales.
FanGraphs: While Roki Sasaki and a relief projection will get the most attention, 2024 pick Cody Morse is the most interesting mention here.
Morse was a mid-round pick from a Texas JUCO in 2024, and the low-slot lefty had an uneven debut season. This spring, though, he’s looked sharp and has gotten a lot of work in big league games, where he’s struck out seven in 3 2/3 innings. In both stadium and backfield settings, he’s been sitting 93-95 with two east-west breaking balls. He was able to reliably hit the box with the slower sweeper and elevate to get whiffs with the fastball. Credit the Dodgers evaluation group for finding another interesting player late in the draft.
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Baseball America: Thought this was an interesting piece on the correlation between velocity increases and pitcher injuries from Nick Serio.
But correlation doesn’t always point in the direction we assume. The professional injury epidemic might not be solely or even primarily caused by professional-level velocity demands. It might be the inevitable result of what adolescent bodies had to endure to create professional-level athletes in the first place.
Maybe the question isn’t how do we protect professional pitchers from velocity. Maybe it’s how do we protect developing athletes during the biological window when their tissues can’t handle the velocity demands that baseball’s recruitment and advancement systems require.
Feels like this has been a talking point across every sport I follow, that the relatively modern norm of overworking and/or overtraining of teenagers leads to cascading injuries later in their careers. This tracks, basically.
Now how do you convince kids — and more importantly, their parents — to take the foot off the gas at the point where arguably their incentives are highest? That’s probably the harder thing to solve.
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Los Angeles Times: The Dodgers have had Andrew Toles on their restricted list since 2019 so he could maintain his health insurance as he worked to take care of his mental health. However, recently that was revealed to no longer be possible, and so the Dodgers are now looking into another way to help.
“We’ve been in contact with the Toles family and have worked together on how to best move forward,” the Dodgers said in a statement to The Times. “Continuing with the previous setup was no longer possible due to eligibility. The Toles family has asked that Andrew’s privacy be respected. Out of respect to the Toles family, we will not comment any further.”
Hoping the best for him, as always.
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A bit belated — but in a way perfect timing before the season starts — as a recent video documents the 2025 World Series through the viewpoint of The Greyhound bar in Highland Park.
