It feels odd to say the Dodgers have done more with less than the Rays in any arena. It runs counter to financial reality, in which the Rays piece together cheap, winning teams, breaking every norm they have to along the way, and the Dodgers, as it’s been put, “play moneyball with money,” combining efficient signings with superstars like Mookie Betts.
In terms of pitching, though, that sentence is true: The Dodgers have accomplished more with less. FanGraphs’s depth charts offer a good look at how teams compare on paper. It isn’t perfect, but it offers one of the best projections at an individual player level you can get, and it aggregates those projections into numbers like the following:
Rays Starting Pitching, 162-game projected fWAR: 19.2
Dodgers Starting Pitching, 162-game projected fWAR: 17.4
Rays Relief Pitching, 162-game projected fWAR: 4.8
Dodgers Relief Pitching, 162-game projected fWAR: 3.9
It’s not an enormous gap. Not quite three wins over even a full, conventional-length season. But it’s meaningful: The Rays have three projected sub-4.00 FIP starters. The Dodgers, absent David Price, have only two. The Rays bullpen features Nick Anderson, whose 2.75 projected FIP is among the best in baseball, better than even those of Josh Hader and Aroldis Chapman. The Dodgers bullpen has plenty of options, but its projected best are Kenley Jansen and Joe Kelly, both of whom have struggled to find consistency. The Rays’ pitching staff, on paper, is better than that of the Dodgers.
On the field this year, though, that isn’t how things played out. The Dodgers’ staff amassed 8.3 fWAR over 2020’s 60 games. The Rays’ amassed 7.3. Again, not an enormous gap, but meaningful.
Which brings us to Tony Gonsolin.
Mookie Betts was, far and away, the most valuable Dodger this season. 3.0 fWAR. A 149 wRC+. 16 home runs (a 43-HR pace extrapolated to a full season). Behind him, though, the race for the second-most valuable Dodger was tight. Corey Seager’s massive season at the plate gave him the edge, but one tenth of a win behind came…Tony Gonsolin, a 26-year-old who pitched just 40 MLB innings in 2019 but managed a 2.29 FIP and a nearly identical 2.31 ERA over eight starts and one relief appearance this 2020.
Gonsolin was a well-regarded prospect at his debut. Like many well-regarded prospects, he throws hard, with a fastball velocity in baseball’s top quintile and a fastball spin rate that grades out even higher, raising the pitch’s effective velocity. He’s more than his fastball, of course—he leads his offspeed arsenal with a splitter and compliments it effectively with sliders and curveballs. Tony Gonsolin is, overall, what you would expect from a mildly hyped rookie in 2020. But not all mildly hyped rookies live up to even their mild hype, and fewer still end up among the leaders in a Rookie of the Year race. Gonsolin is among the few to have achieved the feat. In his limited postseason appearances so far, though—two outings, both in the NLCS—Gonsolin has disappointed, walking six in just over six innings, allowing two home runs, and sporting an unsightly small-sample 9.95 ERA.
The Dodgers are strong enough to win this series without contributions from Gonsolin. But getting production from their most valuable regular season pitcher would, of course, help. Does Dave Roberts trust Gonsolin? By the numbers, he should. But there’s psychology to this. Projections don’t always rule the day. The legitimacy of the suggestions of recency bias have yet to be fully ruled out in the game of baseball. We don’t know whether Dave Roberts still trusts Gonsolin. We don’t know if he should. And while we won’t get a definitive answer to the latter (how a move works out doesn’t determine how smart the move was), we’ll almost certainly get an answer to the former. Possibly as early as tonight.
