The Pitching Depth. It’s Gone.

The starting pitching depth chart is bumming me out too, Dan

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Well what a bummer that was. Dodgers take 2/3 in San Francisco, win the first one in Colorado, then drop the series to the Rockies, none of the pitchers in Colorado make it through 6 innings, Ryu’s replacement loses in historic fashion, Fauxto is Fauxto, Dan Haren somehow reminded everybody that he’s not really a good pitcher anymore. KEVIN CORREIA IS EMPLOYED AND PITCHING IN GAMES IN MID SEPTEMBER HAHAHAHAHahah hhhhhh.

Well. That’s a lot of wrong things.

It’s also what happens when you refuse to trade for a starting pitcher at the July 31st, and August 31st trading deadlines. The Dodgers could have prevented this, it could have been “okay lets try and go after John Lackey, Bartolo Colon, some mid-back of the rotation starter so Dan Haren and Josh Beckett (Carlos Frias, Roberto Hernandez, and Kevin Correia) aren’t the difference between a division title and a wild card berth”. Did they do that?

Nope.

But it’s okay, they had another chance to rectify this, during August, Ryu went down, Kevin Correia exploded (the same day Bartolo Colon destroyed the Dodgers at Dodger stadium), Roberto Hernandez wasn’t really all that great, Dan Haren seemed shaky, so clearly they should have traded for a piece to shore that up, right? Bartolo Colon cleared waivers, Scott Feldman would have been okay, did they do anything?

No.

I think this is an excellent time to remind people that a team source once told Nick Cafardo this

So clearly they were happy with the team they had and were counting on Ryu, Greinke, Kershaw to be okay, and for Haren to just “push through” in a playoff scenario. Not terrible, since Kershaw, Greinke, and Ryu will get rest during a

fairly easy September

. Scratch that, the Giants are right behind them. Well hey, that’s cool, they should all stay

reasonably healthy

. Ryu is on the DL with the same injury that cost him 23 days last time (NLDS game 3 is 23 days since he got hurt in San Francisco).

Welp that’s a lot to go through. Make no mistake, the Dodgers have 2 legitimate starters. Carlos Frias is considered by everybody to be a reliever, Roberto Hernandez is a dumpster fire, I don’t want to talk about Kevin Correia and Dan Haren just is not a major league starter anymore.

Everybody wants to be comfortable with Dan Haren starting a playoff game, especially since he’s been “so good lately”, but the reality is Haren has started 17 times in Dodger stadium or Petco Park, and owns an ERA- of 117. This means that he’s 17% below league average when it comes to stopping the other team from scoring runs. Which is pretty terrible alone, but you’ll notice that Dan Haren has given up 17 EARNED RUNS which easily leads all of baseball, and if you tack on 17 earned runs to his already mediocre 80 earned runs given up, you get a pitcher who has given up 97 earned runs (math!). I mean i’m still against a David Price deal after the fact, but pretty interesting and scary to think that Price has given up 97 total runs also… With 58 more innings pitched. I know if we added unearned runs to the total ERA of every pitcher everybody’s total runs allowed would look a lot worse aside from Clayton Kershaw, but Dan Haren’s total runs allowed jumps nearly 0.9 of a run to 5.02 runs given up per 9 innings, which is somehow worse than last season’s 4.89 total runs per 9 innings allowed.

It’s easy to absolve a pitcher of all blame when Hanley Ramirez throws a ball into the stands, or A.J. Ellis throws one into center field, or Matt Kemp overthrows Juan Uribe, but runs are runs, and giving up 5 runs per 9 innings you go out there is putrid, leading the league in unearned runs says that you’ve been lucky your team has made errors at crucial points in the game to “save” your ERA.

And that’s what I want to highlight, one of the top 4 teams in all of baseball is probably going to end up starting a pitcher who has given up 5 total runs per 9 innings in game 3 of the NLDS (game 2 if they start Kershaw in the wild card game), it’s not a comfortable position to be in. It forces the team to essentially win every single time Kershaw and Greinke go out there (which thankfully happened last night), and outscore the other teams when they’re not pitching. Not trading for a starter at the deadline appears to be something that will haunt the Dodgers for the biggest stretch of games they’ll play this season.