The Dodgers had the second highest expected winning percentage in the NL West and had no chance at the playoffs. What happened?

Following up on my prior post about the Postseason Odds Report, I wanted to take a closer look at at where the Dodgers could have made a big difference. I think it comes down to James Loney and Matt Kemp.

Loney vs. Garciaparra
The first case is Loney versus Garciaparra. Loney came up in June. He had 50 AB in June, 94 in July, 90 in August and 91 in September. Garciaparra has played 68 games at first base, with an average of 3.84 plate appearances per game.

How to measure their value? One of the best ways is to use Baseball Prospectus’ Marginal Lineup Value (”MLV”) metric. This metric measures the additional run value of each plate appearance that a player has in an average offensive lineup. This can be multiplied by the number of plate appearances to give us an idea of the value, in runs, that each player generated, which can then be translated to wins by the standard 10 runs per win finding of sabermetrics. More info can be found here.

The metric MLVr is essentially equivalent to MLV per game, so we will use that. Let’s work from the assumption that Loney could have gotten 75% of Garciaparra’s games at first base this season.

Loney’s MLVr is .301. So, with 51 games for Loney at a rate of .301 MLV per game we get 15.35 or 1.5 wins.

Garciaparrra is at -.073, meaning that he is costing his team 0.073 runs per game. Over 51 games, he has cost his team 3 runs or 0.3 wins. So Loney is roughly equivalent to 2 wins better that Garciaparra over those 51 games.

Kemp vs. Gonzalez
Let’s work through the same exercise here. Matt wrote about Kemp earlier in the year pointing out his great power potential.

Gonzalez has played 127 games at OF. His MLVr is at least positive at .054. Kemp has put up an MLVr of .224. Again let’s take 75% of Gonzalez’ playing time and give it to Kemp. This is 95 games. The difference in MLVr over those 95 games is the difference in their MLVrs multiplied by 95, or 0.17* 95, which is just over 16 runs, or 1.6 wins.

Kemp versus Pierre
One last item. Let’s assume the Dodgers wised up and allowed Ethier to play every day instead of Pierre. This means they would likely have left Gonzalez in and played an everyday outfield of Ethier, Kemp and Gonzalez, so the net effect woudl be to replace Pierre with Kemp.

We have seen that adding Kemp in place of Gonzalez was worth almost 1.6 wins. What about comparing Kemp to Pierre? Pierre has an MLVr of -0.08. Taking 75% of his games and giving them to Kemp (and letting Gonzalez keep his full value) nets us .304 over 75% of Pierre’s 157 games, or .304 * 118, which is 35.8 runs, or 3.6 wins.

So by leaving Gonzalez in the OF, benching Pierre in favor of Kemp and benching Garciaparra earlier in the year in favor of Loney would have netted the Dodgers about 5.6 wins!

So what we have here is a difference of just under six wins primarily due to nothing more than allegiance to veterans. The Dodgers are 6 games out of the wild card and 8 out of the division right now. So just these two changes would have put them right into both races.

With a little better luck in terms of their expected WP versus their actual one, if they had made these two moves and just performed at their expected winning percentage, which was a scant .003 less that the Rockies’ division leading .547, the Dodgers likely win the division.

This may be speculation, but the Dodgers are also 2-8 in their last ten, having packed it in. Perhaps this result changes also if they had the lead as opposed to being on the verge of elimination.

At the TrueBlueLA blog, the most recent entry summarizes the feeling of Dodger fans. The title, “Nihilism” says it all. And referring to Jeff Kent as “Jefferson Davis” will win points with me, since I just wrote about Davis in my latest Hardball Times column.

When you see just an absolute refusal to be creative, and the adherence to the “old boy network” that the TrueBlueLA guys point out, it is not hard to understand their angst. What could have been a playoff season was ruined by poor managerial and front office performance. Makes you wonder why the LA media had to run DePodesta out of town, and for this?

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