The Los Angeles Dodgers ruined baseball this past weekend when they attempted to make their team better, an unforgivable crime in the world of modern online baseball fandom.
With Shohei Ohtani nursing a nagging knee injury, injuries to Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow, and inconsistent performance from some of the team's other starting pitching options, the Dodgers used some of their impressive outfield prospect depth to acquire reigning American League Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers.
This set off a firestorm of criticism from fans online, who announced they were quitting the sport, that the season should be canceled, that owners should lock players out indefinitely until players agree to allow billionaire owners to keep 99.9% of revenue, or that the outcome of the 2035 World Series was already determined or something.
SENDING ACE PITCHER TARIK SKUBAL TO THE LOS ANGELES DODGERS WOULD OFFICIALLY RUIN BASEBALL
Well, Skubal made his Dodgers debut Tuesday night in Chicago, facing the Cubs at Wrigley Field. The Dodgers lost their fifth straight game, 5-1, falling to 3-7 in their last 10 games. Baseball is ruined.
Skubal, for his part, pitched well, allowing two runs on four hits over six innings while striking out six and walking two. His first run allowed came on a Dansby Swanson home run in the third inning, with the second coming on an unlucky break.
After striking out Pete Crow-Armstrong to start the sixth, he walked Seiya Suzuki, before Alex Bregman hit a ball to right field that Kyle Tucker wasn't able to make the play on. The Dodgers got Suzuki at home on a Michael Busch grounder, before Nico Hoerner hit a swinging bunt that bounced too high for anyone to make a play on, bringing in Bregman.
The Dodgers offense never got much going against Cubs starter Javier Assad, outside of a Kyle Tucker home run, then did even less against their bullpen. On the rare inning with a baserunner, a Dodger hitter would work tirelessly to hit into an immediate double play.
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The LA bullpen, however, was extremely accommodating. Chicago added two runs in the seventh inning when Pete Crow-Armstrong threw his bat at the ball to drive in Swanson, then Seiya Suzuki blooped another single in to bring in the fourth run of the game. Nico Hoerner homered off Edwin Diaz in the ninth to cement the win.
With baseball ruined, the Dodgers will look to avoid their second consecutive series loss via the sweep on Wednesday, sending superstar starter Eric Lauer to the mound against Shota Imanaga.
This game, and this series, is a microcosm of the absurdities of online baseball discussion. Skubal, arguably one of the best two pitchers in baseball, was outpitched by Javier Assad, a 29-year-old with such mediocre stuff that he's struck out just 51 hitters in 75.1 innings this year. The Cubs are so terrified of starting Assad in a postseason game that they traded for two starting pitchers at the deadline in hopes of avoiding it. Dansby Swanson entered the series on an 0-21 streak, only to go 5-8 with a home run in the first two games.
Meanwhile, Pete Crow-Armstrong's reality defying streak continues, with a .415 batting average on balls put in play since the start of June, an impossible number when league average is around .300. But therein lies the problem with ruining baseball and predicting the World Series in August. You just don't know who will be hot, cold, or underperforming when October rolls around.
A baseball season of 162 games gets compressed into a best-of-five or best-of-seven, the definition of a small sample size, that does quite literally nothing to determine the better team. Good teams often slump. Bad teams sweep good teams.
Since the start of June, the Dodgers have the seventh highest winning percentage in baseball, worse than the Cubs, Red Sox, Astros, Brewers, Tigers, and the... Miami Marlins. That's not in a postseason series, that's over a two month sample. You can't ruin baseball because the gaps between teams are so small. Even now.
Edwin Diaz has now allowed nine runs in 8.2 innings, with a whopping 20 baserunners. Kyle Tucker's been a league average hitter. Mookie Betts, for all his prior accolades, is hitting .223 with a .280 on base percentage and .390 slugging percentage. His OPS has dropped nearly 200 points from 2024. LA's bullpen since the start of July has an ERA of around 5, and the 27th best FIP in MLB. Ruining baseball indeed.
[Image text:] MsAngeles edners 29