Hi friends-
Thanks to everyone who joined our Opening Day chat yesterday! It topped out at 720 comments, which I think is a record for a non-playoff chat. It probably would have been orders of magnitude higher had half the NL East not been rained out yesterday, but we still had a blast.
As a reminder: We chat all season long, every Friday during Dodgers games, for paid subscribers, and every Sunday during the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball game, for all (free and paid) subscribers.
Substack has been a little wonky lately with the email alerts, so just be sure to head over to the chat app at tonight at 7 PM PT for Dodgers vs. Cardinals if you don’t receive the email. We’ll be there! This week’s Sunday Night Baseball game is also… Dodgers vs. Cardinals lol. I guess people are, um, interested in the circus surrounding Shohei Ohtani? That game will start at 4 PM PT this Easter Sunday, so I hope to see you all in that chat, too.
Anyway, I PROMISE you this will not become a Dodgers-only newsletter, because that would be incredibly boring for me and for you. Next Sunday, we’ll have the Rangers vs. the Astros. And, of course, we will chat during any special, one-off games that we decide need to be watched as a group. (Milestone games, spicy rivalries, somebody trying to break a record, etc.). I had so much fun in the chat yesterday and continue to be so impressed by the kindness and intelligence and humor you all bring to the table, so we’re going to get together to talk as often as possible. <3
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I counted down the first five of my 10 Bold Predictions for 2024 on Wednesday, and if you missed those, you can check them out here. I decided to break them down between American League and National League, and since I already did the AL, we will move on to the NL today.
Keep in mind that I would be happy to get 1-2 of these predictions below correct. The flipping Diamondbacks made the World Series last year. This is a dumb sport, and we are even dumber for letting it dictate our emotional states from March through October. It is a sickness, but here we are!
MY NL BOLD PREDICTIONS
Spencer Strider will win his first Cy Young award.
You may think I’ve not gone too far out on a limb here, but the fact is I picked Strider last year to win this award and he placed fourth. He led the NL in wins, strikeouts, strikeouts per nine and FIP, but it wasn’t enough.
Then he went out in October and got beat by the Phillies and jeered mercilessly by their fans. These dueling insults seemed to activate the god mode switch within him, because he came back this spring looking more dominant than ever. He struck out 35 hitters in 22 2/3 innings while allowing just two runs.
Counting on a pitcher for anything in 2024 is a terrifying proposition. The ones who throw the hardest fry their arms out every other day. Tyler Glasnow looked incredible in his start yesterday, but he has never thrown more than 120 innings in a season in his career, so he’s not a Cy Young threat. Justin Steele already hurt his candidacy by blowing a tire while trying to field a ground ball last night in Texas. Corbin Burnes was as dominant as I expected him to be, but he’s now in the AL. This is Strider’s award to lose, and only an injury will take it from him.
Mookie Betts will win his second MVP award.
I don’t know if you guys remember that Mookie and Ronald Acuña Jr. were neck-and-neck in a thrilling race for the MVP last August. This is because Betts faded in September and Acuña cruised to the award.
There are three reasons why I’m picking Betts over Acuña and the rest of the field this year. The first is that I’m scared Acuña’s knee is going to explode. The second is that Betts MOVED FROM RIGHTFIELD TO SHORTSTOP AT AGE THIRTY-ONE to clean up the mess the Dodgers’ front office made by letting Trea Turner, Corey Seager and Manny Machado all leave in free agency and expecting (without evidence) that Gavin Lux could field the position. Betts will play short against right-handed pitchers this year and second base against lefties. He’s also available to play Gold Glove defense in right if called upon.
The third reason I’m so bullish on Betts? This is a guy who usually starts slow each spring and April before turning it on in the summer.
Betts’ career OPS is .902, but his April OPS is just .847. In his first three seasons with the Dodgers, his April OPS was .768 (2021), .731 (2022) and .767 (2023).
His career April average would be lower, except that in 2018 he raked and posted a 1.255 OPS. That was also the year he posted the highest position player WAR (10.9) for any player since Barry Bonds in 2002 (11.8).
Betts whacked the ball this spring, and has two homers through his first three games. He’s an incredibly streaky hitter. If he pads his stats early, like Cody Bellinger did in 2019, it’s possible nobody will catch him—even if he does cool off again in September.
The Padres will miss the playoffs—again.
The NL West is going to be a chicken fight for second place between the Padres, Giants and D-Backs, I expect it to come down to the season’s final week. Since I believe the Braves, Phillies and Dodgers will absolutely make the playoffs, that leaves only two playoff spots left (since we have to allow the NL Central winner into the postseason by law). This means that San Diego, San Francisco and Arizona will scrap all season for those two final slots.
Arizona has earned our respect after winning the NL pennant last year. In theory, they got better for 2024 by adding Jordan Montgomery, Eduardo Rodriguez and Eugenio Suarez. Plus, their young team got a taste of October success, and should not be intimidated down the stretch this weekend.
The Giants also improved, singing Blake Snell, Jorge Soler, Matt Chapman and Jung Hoo Lee.
The Padres… lost their best starting pitcher (Blake Snell), their best relief pitcher (Josh Hader) and their best hitter (Juan Soto).
It’s true that they grossly underachieved last season. Their ability to outscore opponents by 104 runs and somehow finish 82-80 will be studied by disaster experts for centuries.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto will win NL Rookie of the Year.
(deep breaths)
This would not be a bold prediction at all had Yamamoto not given up five runs and gotten only three outs in his first start for the Dodgers in Korea a week ago. This is a dude who signed a record-breaking, 10-year/$325-million free-agent contract with the Dodgers back in December, after spurning similar rumored offers from the Yankees and Mets.
It’s possible that all of the smartest people in baseball were wrong about Yamamoto and he stinks. It’s more likely that he’s experiencing some hiccups while adjusting to baseball (and life) in a country halfway across the world from where he lived his whole life until three months ago.
I haven’t spent much time around him yet, but he does seem to be less isolated from his teammates than Shohei Ohtani was over the first six years of his career. When walking into the Dodgers clubhouse yesterday, I noticed a half-dozen golf bags with his name on them directly outside. I feel like I’ve heard he’s already gone golfing with teammate Joe Kelly, though I can’t find proof of that online anywhere. I know he has gifted the reliever a nice bottle of Japanese whiskey, and played ping pong with his young son.
I mention these little details because Asian players have often spoken about how terribly lonely moving away from friends and family to play here in the states can be, and it’s a good sign for Yamamoto as a person and player if he’s already making friends despite the language barrier.
The other reason I’m picking Yamamoto to win the Rookie of the Year award is that his main competition, Jackson Chourio, was born in 2004. I’m not ready for someone born just months before George W. Bush’s second term began to win Rookie of the Year. I’m just not.
The Braves will win the World Series.
I picked them last year, and I’m picking them again. Yes, the Dodgers are a better team top to bottom, especially if/when bullpen pieces like Blake Treinen and Brusdar Graterol get healthy and they trade for a shortstop (ahem, Willy Adames) at the deadline.
But the Dodgers have made the playoffs for last 11 years and have one ring to show for it. The best team rarely wins. Plus, none of us know how the Ohtani-adjacent gambling scandal is going to shake out. He has not shown that this mess is distracting him at all, but it’s distracting me! Maybe he truly was the victim of a multimillion-dollar theft. Maybe he’s so good at compartmentalizing that it won’t affect his on-field play, and there won’t be enough evidence of wrongdoing to warrant any punishment, anyway. I just don’t know.
I do know that the circus surrounding this team is bigger than anything I’ve experienced, and I lived through the era where Zack Greinke and Yasiel Puig shared a locker room. It would be hilarious if they fought through it all to win 115 games, and they very well might!
But the baseball gods hate the Dodgers in October. And until that changes, I’m picking the Braves. Their lineup is better one through nine, and I expect Strider to turn in a 2014 Bumgarner-esque run through the postseason.
Unless the Phillies, uh, knock them out again in the Divisional round.
Molly, I sincerely hope that your picking the Braves is the kind of jinx that I create by going to games. We lose. So here's hoping. :)
In fairness to the Dodgers' front office, it seems letting Machado walk to poison the San Diego clubhouse might have been some excellent four-dimensional chess.
(Mostly a joke but only *mostly*)