It’s Game 4 of the World Series, and at the top of the marquee in bright lights is the Los Angeles Dodgers’ starter tonight: TBA. Even if they announce it, it won’t feel right. Ryan Brasier? Really? That’s the plan?

Yes, while it may not be fun for fans, a reliever is the plan, and has been the plan all along. In the regular season, a bullpen game usually represents a quirk in the schedule where a particular team may simply be unable to field enough healthy starters and must try to remain competitive. But it has become a postseason strategy, perhaps because of the off days built into the schedule, or perhaps because assigning multiple substitutes to a lineup can be a successful way to win a big game.

But is it successful? Or do you only do this if you don’t have enough starter? That’s the current state of the Dodgers, although other teams in the past may have simply put Landon Knack in the starting lineup and kept him in the game as long as he was successful. If you add up all the times a starting pitcher recorded fewer than 30 pitches in the postseason, you get a record of 16-24 in 40 games since the start of 2015. But that also includes games like Luis Severino’s wild-card blast. 2017 American League game – not really the point, this is the unplanned version.

When the Oakland A’s used Liam Hendriks as the starting pitcher in their 2018 wild card game, it was the first time in the Statcast era that a team opted to play a bullpen game in the playoffs. That was the plan. If you go through all of those 40 games again by hand and remove the cases where a traditional starter just had a miserable time in the first inning and was removed, you get 32 ​​games that were bullpen games in the way they were we understand them. The record in this The bullpen team’s game count is 14-18, which seems like it’s a slightly better but still worst-case scenario strategy.

As far as the numbers tell us, this is similar to what happens in the regular season. STATS Perform looked at all games since 2015 in which the starter threw fewer than 30 pitches and found that teams in those games were 428-449 with a 4.52 ERA – but when you narrow that down to games only , in which the starter threw 30 or fewer pitches *and gave up three or fewer runs* in an attempt to eliminate the blowups and find the “scheduled” bullpen games, the team’s record improves to 422-403 with an ERA of 4.19. Scheduled bullpen games are a viable strategy from April through October.

But not all teams are the same. While the Dodgers have been in the postseason many times since 2019, they have also played a whopping nine bullpen games in the last 10 postseasons. The Houston Astros have played in more postseason games and have only thrown two bullpen games. If you add up the postseason bullpen games of the New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Guardians — they have had a combined 145 playoff games since 2015, compared to the Dodgers’ 102 — you get to five.

Oh, and the Dodgers’ record in those nine bullpen games in the playoffs? Six wins, three defeats. They have won six of the seven series in which they used the bullpen game. They win those games at a rate of 67 percent, while everyone else has won 35 percent of their postseason games started by a reliever who threw fewer than 30 pitches.

Why?

One reason is probably simply the depth of quality. We’ve only had the pitch modeling numbers since 2020, but over that period the Dodgers probably had the best bullpen in baseball based on the movement, speed, spin and locations of their pitches.

The Yankees had similar stuff over the same period (108 Stuff+) but showed worse command (98 Location+), which kept them out of the top five here by Pitching+, which combines the elements of Stuff and Command to create a third process-based metric .

This year’s Dodgers team is led in play by Michael Kopech, but went deep with average or better players, 15 pitchers, and included key relievers with both command and players like Alex Vesia, Daniel Hudson and Ryan Brasier. This is a team that is active on the waiver wire (Evan Phillips) and makes both big (likely counting Kenta Maeda for Brusdar Graterol) and small (Dylan Floro for Vesia and Kyle Hurt) trades to stock up their bullpen for moments like this strengthen. They don’t often spend top dollar on this one aspect of the team, perhaps because they spend generously on the rest of the team, or perhaps because things don’t age as well and they prefer younger flamethrowers to their more experienced counterparts.

Part of their plan appears to be tied to the old “dial” idea with the Tampa Bay Rays: Each reliever is a little different than the last, although not as obviously defined by release timing as Tampa Bay has done in the past has. Kopech throws a four-seamer with great ride and a power slider with little movement. Blake Treinen throws a super sinker and a sweeper and everything seems to go wrong. Brasier may have a similar fastball to Daniel Hudson, but their sliders are very different and Brasier mixes in a sinker. The idea is that even if they’re all right-handed, they don’t throw the same shapes at you.

Familiarity with shapes can be an important way for batsmen to become comfortable against relievers. We’ve seen research suggesting that familiarity is the cause of the third-time penalty through the order, and now that we’re dealing with a third-time penalty against a reliever, it’s safe to assume that it is the case is The source is the same for excipients.

The third time through the order penalty, where pitchers get worse results because batters see more of their pitches, shows up as a residual in my models.

It is decorrelated with my xRV, showing that it is due to familiarity and not pitchers throwing lower quality pitches. pic.twitter.com/HN0JxWOnyG

– Cameron Grove (@Pitching_Bot) November 21, 2021

A final reason may have nothing to do with the tools used. The Dodgers allowed the second-lowest batting average on balls in play (BABIP) this year. If you include last year, they are the top three. Including 2022, they are the first. Go back to 2015 and they allowed the lowest BABIP in baseball. According to some defensive statistics, the team has been underperforming over the same period, and yet they still gobble up balls in games. This may be because they can position their defenders better than other teams. Here’s how they were ranked during the regular season by defensive value derived solely from player positioning, courtesy of Sports Info Solutions:

The Dodgers have a huge research and development team with great minds driving their strategy. So perhaps their success in bullpen games is due to something other than material modeling, shape variance, or defensive positioning. However, the reality is that they have had the most success with this type of game. Just because they go to the bullpen in Game 1 doesn’t necessarily mean they give up the pitching advantage in Game 4.

(Photo of Dodgers manager Dave Roberts taking the ball from Anthony Banda in the fourth inning of Game 6 of the NLCS: Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)