“What if they made the whole pitching staff out of high-leverage relievers?” That line of thinking has infiltrated baseball over the past 15 years, and you can see why. The Dodgers built their team around it, and used it to perfection in the first three games of the World Series. When the Yankees weren’t dealing with three solid starters attacking the lineup in short bursts, they were facing an endless array of pitchers who sit in the upper 90s with venomous breaking balls. No wonder the Yankees only scored seven total runs across those three games.
In Game 4, the Dodgers asked another question: What if you made the whole pitching staff out of swingmen? Dave Roberts and the front office always planned on a bullpen game; they’ve been doing those all October. But this one was a wholly different animal than the efforts against the Padres and Mets, and the Yankees took advantage.
Want an example of how it was different? Ben Casparius drew the start, and Roberts gave him two innings, no questions asked. He was shaky as can be. Three walks, a 105-mph double off the top of the wall in dead center, and a few hard-hit balls besides; he spent the entirety of his two innings of work on the ropes, faced 10 batters, and was lucky to escape having only allowed one run.
The Dodgers had seized an early lead on the back of yet another Freddie Freeman home run, but Roberts was resolute. He sent in Daniel Hudson, inarguably at the bottom of the short-stint Los Angeles reliever pecking order, for the third. Hudson got in trouble almost immediately, loading the bases with one out. But Roberts wasn’t worried, or if he was, he certainly wasn’t showing it.
You can imagine this going differently under different circumstances. The Dodgers were staked to a 3-0 series lead, and they’d used six relievers the night before in Game 3. So instead of one of a variety of closers parachuting in to keep the Yankees off the board, Hudson labored on. He nearly made it! He hucked a few fastballs down the middle to Anthony Rizzo and got a weak pop out for his troubles. Then he threw a pretty good slider to start off Anthony Volpe, and Volpe flat out demolished it:
That was great hitting – and it was great hitting the Yankees absolutely needed. That single play was the pivot point of the game. Roberts wasn’t going to commit his top arms until he got into the middle innings with a lead or at least a tie. Volpe didn’t give him a chance. You won’t score a ton of runs against the sharp pointy end of the Dodgers bullpen. Winning bullpen games generally means teeing off on the less deadly arms. Miss that slider, and the Dodgers might have used their top four arms for five-plus innings. But Volpe didn’t miss.
From there, things were surprisingly academic. Los Angeles’ offense had some fight, clawing back two runs in the top of the fifth when starter Luis Gil ran out of juice, surrendering a homer and a walk to Will Smith and Tommy Edman, the bottom two hitters in the Dodgers lineup. But Roberts had a plan, and he was sticking to it: None of the good relievers go until we’re tied or ahead.
That meant Landon Knack and Brent Honeywell had some work to do. Knack, in particular, stepped up. He threw four innings of thankless, trailing-and-unlikely-to-catch-up baseball. It wasn’t pretty – the Yankees hit eight balls 95 mph or harder, struck out only twice, and homered. Giancarlo Stanton hit a ball 117.3 mph and missed a home run because he didn’t get enough loft. Knack only recorded two swinging strikes in 56 pitches. Given that backdrop, allowing just one run was a spectacular accomplishment.
It didn’t last. Honeywell, like Knack, is on the Dodgers to soak up innings when the team is comfortably ahead or behind. He, too, came in for about 50 pitches of work. The difference was, his 50 pitches all came in the eighth inning, when the Yankees poured on five runs to put things to bed. Honeywell couldn’t miss any bats either – he only got three swinging strikes out of his 50 pitches. He also gave up a raftload of hard-hit balls. The Yankees lineup is absolutely relentless when you can’t throw the ball past them, and the only real wonder is that Knack avoided Honeywell’s fate despite all the hard contact and traffic.
None of this is surprising in the abstract. Did you know the 2024 New York Yankees, who employ the two best hitters in baseball (by 2024 wRC+) and finished third in baseball in runs scored, can beat up on fringe major league arms? Of course you did. Knack spent half the year in Triple-A this season. Honeywell got DFA’ed by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Casparius has appeared for the Dodgers more in October than he did in the regular season because he walked too many batters in the minors to get a longer major league audition. Hudson is 37 and at best the fifth-best reliever on the team (I’ve got him seventh, for whatever that’s worth). That’s not your average World Series pitching staff; it’s more like what you’d see on a mid-week getaway day against a rebuilding team.
The surprising part of this is that it happened in the World Series. This would be a below-average group of Dodgers pitchers in the regular season, never mind the playoffs. They don’t trust these guys any more than they have to. Roberts has conspicuously stayed away from all four of them in big spots this postseason even as he tries to rotate his bullpen options and prevent opponents from getting multiple looks at the same reliever.
In an alternate world, this could have gone very differently. Yeah, Knack got hit around, but he went four innings and gave up a single run. The Dodgers, meanwhile, had a chance to get even. In the seventh, they had a runner in scoring position with one out and the top of the order up. They even had a good matchup: Mark Leiter Jr. still had a third mandatory batter to face, so he had to pitch to Shohei Ohtani with Ohtani representing the tying run.
Leiter’s command was inconsistent, to put it mildly. After getting ahead 0-2, he missed with three straight splitters, none close enough to bother Ohtani. Then he finally threw one that tickled the bottom of the zone, only for Ohtani to foul it off. The 3-2 call? Another splitter, and a bad one, low and outside – but Ohtani swung through it. With the three-batter minimum satisfied, Aaron Boone summoned closer Luke Weaver, and the Dodgers never managed another baserunner.
You could say that those are the breaks of the game: The Yankees got their cracks at the weaker side of the opposing pitching staff and did damage. The Dodgers sent the presumptive NL MVP to the plate against a middle reliever – Leiter wasn’t even on the playoff roster until Ian Hamilton got injured – and Ohtani struck out. Win some, lose some. That’s not really what happened though. The Yankees didn’t get one crack at a so-so reliever. They got 41, as in the 41 plate appearances they took this game. It’s just not reasonable to expect to beat one of the highest-scoring teams in baseball when you use this pitching staff and only back them with four runs. If anything, it’s a surprise that the Dodgers kept it close until the eighth.
I’m not arrogant enough to think I’d have some magically better plan. Roberts was in a bind. He used relievers no. 2-6 in his leverage hierarchy in Game 3, and to make this game a true oops-all-closers effort, he’d have to hammer every one of those guys again. That’s sketchy when you’re up 2-1 in the third inning, and became more or less untenable after that. Hudson against Volpe decided the game – after that, it was all damage control.
That said, the Yankees pitching staff deserves a mountain of credit for this game. Gil feels like a liability against the patient Dodgers; he led the majors in walks this year despite pitching only 151.2 innings. He didn’t exactly have a good game – four innings, four runs, one strikeout, two walks, two homers – but he lasted two trips through the order, which let Boone go to his lockdown bullpen. The bullpen answered the bell – they pitched four competitive innings, struck out seven, and allowed one hit.
Game 5 won’t look anything like this one. Gerrit Cole and Jack Flaherty are a fair sight better than Gil and Casparius. The entire Yankees bullpen will be available because it’s an elimination game with a day off afterwards. The entire Dodgers bullpen will be available because, well, none of the important guys pitched Tuesday. The Yankees don’t want the season to end, and the Dodgers don’t want to head back to Los Angeles with the series still going. Both teams will be pulling every possible pitching lever to limit their opponents.
For one night, though, the Dodgers rested. It was nice to see that the Yankees lineup is just as overwhelming as ever. They just needed some regular season style opposition to show it. Eleven runs later, I’m sure Roberts is disappointed with the outcome, even if he all but chose it after Volpe’s homer in the third. Those are just the kinds of decisions you have to make in a month-long playoff tournament, even if it looks a little weird on the biggest stage there is.
