LOS ANGELES — In early May, Ben Casparius struck out seven Springfield Cardinals over 5.1 scoreless innings, leading the Double-A Tulsa Drillers to a dominant 11-0 victory. Five months later, he was ripping filthy sliders to close out Game 1 of the NLCS for one of the richest teams in the sport.
This is life in the Dodgers bullpen at the moment. After a cursed season for injuries, one where they’ve deployed Plans A, B, C, and D, their Plan E involves a trio of talented-but-unproven arms picking up more innings than Dodgers manager Dave Roberts would like. At points, it has worked out incredibly well — the Dodgers ripped off 33 consecutive scoreless innings between the end of the NLDS and the start of the NLCS, tying a postseason record. But yesterday’s Game 2 revealed the downside of relying on Evan Phillips, Blake Treinen, Michael Kopech, and a bevy of backup options. The designed bullpen game went off the rails early, as the Mets put up six runs in the first two innings and cruised for the remainder of the contest.
Out of necessity, the Dodgers have thrust pitchers like Casparius into the spotlight. According to RosterResource, the Dodgers currently have seven starting pitchers on the injured list, including Tyler Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw, and Dustin May. That list does not include Bobby Miller, who was slated to be a big part of the rotation in April but was demoted to Oklahoma City in September after struggling with various maladies all year. It doesn’t include Shohei Ohtani, who is still rehabbing from elbow surgery. And it doesn’t include Alex Vesia, Michael Grove, Joe Kelly, or Brusdar Graterol, all off the postseason roster due to injuries suffered in the last few weeks.
Those injured pitchers constitute an entire staff’s worth of unavailable talent, requiring some unexpected minor leaguers to ascend. Prior to Game 1 of the series, Roberts gave the rotating cast of pitchers an apt nickname: The Machine.
“We’ve tapped into depth — goodness, you look at the roster right now and you look at, certainly on the pitching side, there’s three or four guys that I didn’t know if they were going to get major league service this year,” Roberts said. “They’re on a postseason roster in the CS. That is a lot on the front office… their biggest thing is trying to plan for the unforeseen and have depth and have young players continue to emerge, so the machine keeps going and doesn’t take a step back.”
The newest inputs in the machine are three pitchers who were considered deep organizational depth at the beginning of this season. There’s Casparius, a 35+ FV prospect who Eric Longenhagen ranked 43rd in the Dodgers system in March. There’s Edgardo Henriquez, who Eric had as a 40+ FV prospect and who started the season in A-ball. And then there’s Landon Knack, a 40 FV guy who was supposed to be the bulk reliever for the Dodgers in a Game 2 victory but instead allowed five runs over two innings in a 7-3 loss.
None of these guys ranked among the organization’s top 20 prospects. And yet all of them find themselves on the postseason roster, handling innings for the odds-on World Series favorites. All three bring something special to the table — and also have flaws that keep them outside the Roberts circle of trust.
Casparius features one of the nastiest pitches in the playoffs: a hard sweeper. It averages -2 inches of induced vertical break and 11 inches of sweep, and Casparius can manipulate it to attack hitters both vertically and horizontally. Check out this two-pitch sequence to Luisangel Acuña, where he gets a whiff on an east-west bender before drawing out a weak popup on an 88-mph slider dropping below the zone:
There just aren’t that many pitches with that type of movement and velocity:
Henriquez lights up the radar gun with 100-mph fastballs and hard breaking balls with glove-side action. Neither pitch gets exceptional movement, but a 92-mph slider doesn’t need to move much; it’s a 92-mph slider. Roberts called on Henriquez to keep the Mets in check with a three-run deficit in the eighth inning of Game 2, and he equipped himself decently, allowing a run over his two innings of work.
Both Casparius and Henriquez can be placed in a reductive box: big stuff, questionable command. Knack is a bit different, more of a high-floor backend starter type with a four-pitch arsenal:
The key for Knack is a fastball that averages 19 inches of induced vertical break, ranking among the best carry fastballs in the sport. He generates all of that carry from a 5.6 foot release height, meaning that hitters perceive the pitch as coming in at a much lower level than where it ultimately arrives (this plot is courtesy of Max Bay’s dynamic dead zone app):
Late in the season and in the playoffs, Knack unleashed a new wrinkle: a depth-y changeup. As the plot shows, most of the changeups Knack threw this season looked more like a straight change, carrying through the zone on roughly the same plane as his four-seam fastball. But he has recently started throwing a changeup with serious depth, fooling some high-quality Padres hitters in his playoff debut during the NLDS:
Not much of that mattered in Game 2, as Knack showed almost no ability to challenge hitters in competitive locations. Entering in the second inning, he was immediately under pressure, allowing a single to Starling Marte on his first pitch. After walking Jesse Winker, allowing Marte to score on a Tyrone Taylor double, inducing a couple popups, and then intentionally walking Francisco Lindor to load the bases, he nearly escaped with minimal damage, getting to two strikes on Mark Vientos. But Vientos punished the ninth pitch of the at-bat, a center-cut 95-mph fastball, sending it into the right-field bleachers for a grand slam.
Prior to Tuesday’s game, each of these three pitchers has been perceived as a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option; all three made their playoff debuts in situations where the Dodgers were either winning or losing by at least eight runs. But their importance may grow as the postseason progresses. Roberts does not appear to trust Walker Buehler to go through a lineup twice, meaning that there are only two starters (Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Jack Flaherty) expected to go deep into games. Over a seven-game series with just two off days, that means each member of the pitching staff will need to pick up innings at some point.
Assuming the offense does enough, the Dodgers’ playoff run might well hinge on the bullpen’s more unexpected contributors — not just the trio of Casparius, Henriquez and Knack, but also breakout lefty Anthony Banda and longman Brent Honeywell — helping to right a season where the team’s health luck has been about as bad as one could expect. No matter what happens, the machine has to keep chugging along.
“For me, personally, it’s been my most challenging season,” Roberts told reporters prior to Game 1. “Obviously with the injuries and introducing a lot of young players in critical roles, it’s always kind of tough. And I think you’re in a position where you just have to trust and run guys out there in spots that you don’t normally feel good about, and keep this whole machine moving forward in a good, positive direction.”
