Every year around this time, with the MLB postseason playing out, we can count on certain types of stories to appear like the autumn leaves.
We can count on stories that appear like the too-tight shorts busting seams because of the extra pounds gained by digesting massive slabs of smoked meat in cookouts all summer long.
My favorite angle is the “What Can We Learn” stories.
As in …
“What Can the St. Louis Cardinals learn from the Los Angeles Dodgers.”
There’s an easy answer to this one.
What can the Cardinals learn from the Dodgers?
Well, have a $415 million payroll inflated by the luxury-tax penalties. Then you can have immaculate starting pitching that gives your team four or five No. 1 starters in your postseason rotation… and with other primo starters moving to the bullpen to help out.
In fact, just keep adding pitchers all season and pay them well just in case you need a 12th starting pitcher for the postseason run.
Do all of that, Cardinals, and you’ll be in a fabulous position to celebrate another World Series championship.
But seriously now … aren’t the Dodgers something else? Oh sure, big money can buy big-time pitchers. But if that’s so easy to do, then why have the Mets, the Yankees, the Phillies and other huge-payroll franchises repeatedly come up short in the postseason?
The Cardinals will never have a $415 million payroll, or a $350 million payroll or a $300 million payroll. Well, at least not for a long time … decades … unless the baseball team owners do away with payrolls altogether by putting together teams of AI superstars engineered by the most advanced technology in world history. The enterprise will be led by Commissioner Andrew Ng. (Google him, kids.)
So, the boring (but accurate) answer to the Cardinals’ problem is an old-fashioned style solution. Want an imposing set of starting pitchers? Well, pour abundant sums of money into your player-development system, and grow your own down on the grange.
As for another solution to another serious question about optimizing your postseason roster for maximum success, there’s a question of power. Home run power.
What to do? How about buying a truckload of androstenedione? That won’t work. Travel to the Dominican Republic to find your own Juan Soto or Junior Caminero. Get lucky by pulling your own version of Cal Raleigh in the 3rd round of the MLB draft. Aaron Judge was a second-round pick.
But home runs are very, very good for your team’s postseason health. After the Dodgers went into Milwaukee and took the first two games of the NLCS from the Dodgers, teams that have out-homered opponents in a game are 18-4 this postseason.
What’s different about this postseason, so far, is the supremacy of the Dodgers’ starting pitchers. And that’s really what I wanted to focus on in today’s column.
The Dodgers, 7-1 in the 2025 postseason, require two victories over the Brewers to advance to the World Series for the opportunity to repeat as world champs.
In downing the Brewers over two nights, Los Angeles starters Blake Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto combined to pitch 17 innings, allowing four hits and one run. Milwaukee hitters struck out 17 times against the two Dodger starters and drew one walk.
When Milwaukee and Los Angeles resume play on Thursday in LA, the Brewers will encounter Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani in the next two games.
In their eight postseason starts so far, here’s what the Dodgers have received from Snell, Yamamoto, Glasnow and Ohtani:
– 52 and ⅔ innings
– A yield of 9 earned runs
– 1.54 ERA.
– 32% strikeout rate.
– A strikeout rate that is 25.4% higher than their walk rate.
– An average of 0.70 walks-hits per inning.
– .132 batting average by opponents.
– Only two home runs allowed to the 197 batters the LA starters have faced so far this month.
In Game 1, Snell controlled the Brewers through eight shutout innings. He permitted one hit, did not concede a walk, and struck out 10 Brewers.
In Game 2, Yamamoto went the full nine innings. He allowed a first-pitch homer to Jackson Chourio, Milwaukee’s first hitter of the game. After that only two more hits and no runs in Yamamoto's final 8 and ⅔ innings.
“They were both great,” Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy said of the left-right combination of Snell and Yamamoto. “Both those pitchers were as dominant as two pitchers have been. We chased way more than we've chased all year. We've been the best in baseball at not chasing. These pitchers brought out the worst in us.”
Yamamoto’s win was the first postseason complete game by a starting pitcher since Houston’s Justin Verlander struck out 13 to beat the Yankees in 2017.
There have been only five postseason complete games over the last decade, and the first three came in 2016. Once upon a time, major-league starting pitchers turned in 51 complete games in a decade of postseason ball.
It happened twice – 51 complete games from 1970 through 1979, then another 51 complete games from 1980 through 1989.
The Dodgers are trying to take baseball back in time when big-boss pitchers took charge of postseason games and wanted to go a full nine – or at least a full eight – every time out.
The Dodgers have seven quality starts in eight games, and we’re still just two games into the championship-series round. In 2024, no team had more than four quality starts during the entire postseason.
I guess you could say the Dodgers are getting value for the dollar. Or that they’re getting exactly what they wanted when investing a fortune to put together this incredibly expensive (and talented) rotation.
* Yamamoto signed a $325 million free-agent contract that pays an average of $27 million per season.
* Snell signed for $182 million and will be paid an average of $36.4 million annually.
* Glasnow signed for $136.5 million and averages $27.3 million in salary per season.
* Ohtani’s deal is complicated. Basically he agreed to a 10-year contract for $700 million. That averages to $70 million annually, but $68 million of that is deferred. For luxury-tax purposes, his average annual salary goes on the books at a price of $46 million.
The Rolling Stones told us that we can’t always get what we want. As a principle, that’s true. But the Dodgers? They are different.
When it comes to starting pitchers, the Dodgers not only get everything they want, but they also get things they don’t really need – like stowing starting pitchers Clayton Kershaw and Roki Sosaki in the bullpen for postseason insurance to protect a messy bullpen that has a 5.91 postseason ERA so far.
What can the Cardinals learn from the Dodgers? Nothing unless the Cardinals can use Artificial Intelligence to recreate peak-form versions of Bob Gibson, Dizzy Dean, Chris Carpenter, Adam Wainwright and Pop Haines.
Maybe order up an AI Steve Carlton to be sure. Then again the Dodgers would use a more expensive Artificial Intelligence process to replicate Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax. I'm lost.
Thanks for reading …
–Bernie
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him weekdays on the “Gashouse Gang” or “Redbird Rush Hour” on KMOX, and Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast on the Cardinals with his longtime pal Will Leitch.
Bernie joins Katie Woo on the “Cardinal Territory” video-podcast each week, and you can catch a weekly “reunion” segment here at STL Sports with Bernie’s appearance on the Randy Karraker Show every Friday morning at 10:30 am.