Steve Webb
LOS ANGELES, CA — It’s been a near perfect season for the Dodgers. They’re closing in on 100 wins and still have three weeks left on the calendar. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that they will set the franchise record for wins (they need nine more) and they may just set the record for best winning percentage in a full Dodgers season (they’ll have to hit 111 wins to do that, which would best the marks set by 1899 Superbas and the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers). Still, there is one nagging problem that has plagued this team and manager Dave Roberts all year: what in the Sam Hill are we going to do with closer Craig Kimbrel?
Until Wednesday night, things seemed to be trending in the right direction. Kimbrel hadn’t been scored on in nearly a month, and his stuff was seeing a lot more life in the zone than at any point during the year. Before the Sergio Alcantara‘s walk-off homer in the 10th inning, Kimbrel had been riding a streak of nine straight scoreless appearances. It was enough to sink his ERA from 4.57 on August 16 to 3.73 after the 1-2-3 inning to clinch the division on Tuesday night.
Kimbrel remains positive that the dinger in Arizona will be just a speed bump on his road back to elite status. “Just keep getting my foot down, keep making my pitches,” he said when ask about what he needed to change. “Sometimes, they swing and miss at pitches right down the middle, and sometimes, they hit them out.”
As for Dave Roberts’s part, his support of his closer remains steadfast. “If Craig continues to throw the baseball like he has, I have all the confidence that he’ll finish games for us,” he said. “But again, that’s contingent on what he’s been doing. He’s been striking the breaking ball and commanding the fastball, and tonight, it just wasn’t there for various reasons.”
Still, Roberts is a realist. He knows he’s got a historically good team on his hands and his not going to let Kimbrel bring the whole enterprise down in the postseason. Roberts suggested that as a closer, Kimbrel is used to coming in with a clean inning, and that perhaps the circumstances of the placed runner at second might have thrown off his closer’s mojo a bit. This is a situation that will not exist in the postseason, where there is no placed runner during extra frames.
“I’m not saying he’s never going to have to deal with a guy on second base,” Roberts said. “But to inherit that changes the whole mindset and the landscape of that inning off the get-go.”
So what does Roberts and the Dodger brain trust do with Kimbrel? Obviously, Roberts is banking on the possibility that sooner or later the back of the baseball card will kick in and Kimbrel will turn into the guy who came into this year with more save than hits allowed in his career. So I’m sure he’s gonna get run out there every couple of days and his playoff usage will be very much dependent on how he’s throwing a month from now (The first game of the NLDS is Friday, Oct. 11).
But if he falters, even a little, Roberts has got to move on. He knew enough in 2020 not to trust Kenley Jansen with the final outs in the NLCS and World Series. Oddly enough, I though he probably should have trusted him in San Francisco in 2021, because using Max Scherzer to pitch the final inning basically threw him off for the rest of the playoffs. He only made one more start in the Atlanta series and left the game after just 4.1 innings, and then we know what happened with the “dead arm” incident in Game 6. So using a starter as a closer is a sub-optimal plan. However, there are plenty of bullpen arms that can get the job done for the Dodgers.
Here’s a look at some bullpen ERA’s since the All-Star break:
- Evan Phillips (0.93 ERA since the break)
- Alex Vesia (0.95)
- David Price (1.13)
- Chris Martin (2.04)
- Caleb Ferguson (2.37)
- Craig Kimbrel (3.54)
- Phil Bickford (4.07)
In addition, Brusdar Graterol, Blake Treinen, Yency Almonte, and Tommy Kahnle all have a second-half ERA of 0.00, but none has pitched enough to really take a lot of stock in that. Hopefully once these guys are back on the active roster (Kahnle was just activated on Wednesday), there will be a chance to look at all of them enough to make some decisions.
But best case scenario, we keep running Kimbrel out there in hopes he can rediscover the magic in time to be the shutdown guy he’s been most of his career. If not, Roberts has got to break the glass and put in Plan B pronto. The Dodgers season, and its place in history, could depend on it.
