'Dodgers are Pressing' is a Fair Guess
It might not be correct, but a lot of things line up.
There are a lot of possible explanations for the Dodgers’ sudden inability to ever score seven runs anymore, and I don’t want to say any or all of them can’t be correct: The Blue Jays have been making great pitches. Performance clusters are often illusions and five-game slumps are incredibly normal. It’s the end of a long season and maybe the Dodgers—the oldest lineup in baseball, coming off an 18-inning game, etc.—are just a little gassed. Or maybe they’re not gassed at all, just unlucky: Their expected wOBA on contact in this series is higher than the Blue Jays’ is. Add just few feet to just a few fly balls, or subtract a few inches from a few Blue Jays’ diving catches, and maybe we’re all sitting around talking about free agency by now.
But “they’re pressing” is a reasonable hypothesis, with some persuasive evidence behind it.
**
The Blue Jays are not an elite fastball-throwing team. Their average fastball thrown in this World Series is 2 or 3 mph slower1 than the Dodgers’ average fastball. But the Dodgers are continually getting beat by those fastballs, even when they’re in the middle of the strike zone. If your mind had to distill all the Dodgers’ swings this series into one average outcome, you’d probably come up with something like this:
Hitting is complicated and there are different ways to get to any outcome, but generally speaking a pop up on a fastball tells you the batter was late. The typical bat path is coming up to meet the ball, and if the batter isn’t on time he’s going to arrive under the pitch. If we focus on just fastballs—about half the pitches thrown by each team—you get a crazy launch angle discrepancy between the two teams:
Dodgers: 30 degrees
Blue Jays: 14 degrees
Fly balls can be good, fly balls can be dingers, but 30 degrees implies a ton of useless elevation. The league average launch angle on fastballs this year was 15 degrees. (The Dodgers’ launch angle on fastballs in the previous three postseason rounds was 15 degrees, and in the regular season it was 16 degrees.)
Another way to tell they’re late on these fastballs is which direction their fly balls are going. The Blue Jays have flied 14 fastballs to the opposite field this series. The Dodgers have flied 28. Their batting average on those balls is .074. Fly balls hit the opposite way are rarely dangerous.
**
So far, all of the alternate hypotheses in the first paragraph of this piece could still apply. But the bat-tracking data from Statcast certainly points to a real problem here, one that’s starting before contact is made.
