“We are outgunned
Outmanned
Outnumbered, outplanned
We gotta make an all-out stand.”
My eight-year-old son recently discovered the musical Hamilton as his school was preparing for Constitution Day, the commemoration of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. The lines come from George Washington, recruiting Alexander Hamilton to be his “Right Hand Man” as he tries - unsuccessfully - to repel British General William Howe’s invasion of New York.
But it’s pretty fitting for Atlanta’s NL Division Series matchup with the Los Angeles Dodgers this weekend.
Former Reds first baseman and current commentator Joey Votto agrees, telling MLB Network on Friday that the Braves are playing from behind this weekend. "They're going to be outpitched, outoffensed, not (out) defensed, but overall I think that the Dodgers are the clearly better team."
But the Dodgers advancing to a third consecutive NL Championship Series is not a fait accompli. The Braves have the ability to challenge a Los Angeles team that coasted through much of the regular season - rarely pushed to its limits, and not always responding particularly well when someone managed to do it.
Let’s talk about it.
Outgunned: the rotation gap
The Braves have faced great rotations this season - hell, they just took down one of baseball’s best in Philadelphia. Against the quartet of Jesús Luzardo, Cristopher Sánchez, Aaron Nola, and Zack Wheeler in the NL Wild Card round, Atlanta scored nine runs in 17 1/3 innings, tagging the quartet for 14 hits and 11 walks.
But Los Angeles is another level of elite.
Manager Dave Roberts confirmed Friday that Los Angeles would be giving the ball to trade deadline acquisition Tarik Skubal, the back-to-back American League Cy Young winner, for Saturday’s game one. That elite lefty will be succeeded in Sunday’s game two by yet another left-handed two-time Cy Young winner in veteran Blake Snell, with righties Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow pitching games three and four in Atlanta next week.
And even against the bar that Philadelphia’s rotation set, this is still a murderers’ row of talent. The fifth starter that’s being relegated to the bullpen for this series, youngster Justin Wrobleski, had a 3.66 ERA this season and was an All-Star.
Three grade out as plus-to-elite overall by Stuff+, and even Glasnow’s merely above-average 101 comes with a curveball that grades at an absurd 153. Snell’s curve is right up there at 147, as well.
Three of the four have strikeout rates above 28%, with Yamamoto’s roughly average 25.7% strikeout rate being counterweighted by one of the league’s lowest walk rates (5.9%), an impressive 81st percentile ground ball rate of 48.6%, and a Statcast card without a single bit of blue on it.
Outmanned and outnumbered: The lineup depth
LA’s 5-1 loss to the Padres on September 23rd wasn’t that notable - San Diego was in the midst of a heater at the time and was destroying everyone in their path - except for one overlooked detail: The lineup LA rolled out.
SS Mookie Betts
DH Shohei Ohtani
C Will Smith
1B Freddie Freeman
LF Teoscar Hernández
RF Kyle Tucker
CF Andy Pages
3B Max Muncy
2B Tommy Edman
It was LA’s intended “A” lineup as they entered spring training. It was also the first time all season that those nine players were in the same lineup.
The Dodgers dealt with injuries that impacted the availability of almost everyone this season, from losing Ohtani to biceps and knee issues to Edman recovering from ankle surgery, Smith’s neck inflammation, Teoscar’s hamstring strain, and Pages missing a month with a broken hand.
It’s reminiscent of the 2024 Atlanta Braves, who got exactly five innings of their Opening Day lineup before injuries started subtracting pieces.
The difference is that 24’s Braves never got fully healthy again, limping into the postseason as the first playoff team to lose three different Opening Day starters for the final 35+ games of the regular season and still make the dance.
LA’s lineup is fully healthy, and they’ve started to overcome their slumps, too.
Kyle Tucker has been one of MLB’s biggest disappointments this season, signing for an absurd $55M AAV (plus another $45M in tax penalties, given LA’s bloated payroll) and returning a .233/.330/.385 line with just 17 home runs.
But in the month of September, Tucker’s hitting .262/.354/.536, walking three percent more than he’s striking out (13.1%/10.1%), and hitting six of those 17 home runs in the month.
Both Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernández are red hot, putting up lines that begin with 3/4/5 and scoring a combined 33 runs with 40 RBI. Even Max Muncy, normally a lower-average slugger, is hitting .260 with a 125 wRC+.
LA’s offense, for the month of September, has baseball’s 2nd-highest wRC+ at 121 and was fourth in runs with 131.
Atlanta has stars capable of matching Los Angeles at the top of the lineup. The problem is what happens after that. There are very few places for a pitcher to breathe against the Dodgers when Max Muncy is hitting eighth and Tommy Edman ninth. The Braves haven’t consistently had that luxury.
Outplanned: Los Angeles got to prepare for this
While the Dodgers did not know who they were facing until the Braves won on Thursday night, they haven’t played a game since Sunday. LA had the luxury of low-intensity workouts at Dodger Stadium all week, getting in their work during the day and holding their now-trademark in-stadium watch parties for the Wild Card round at night.
Among the highlights of the week for Los Angeles has been extra work on their Trajekt pitching simulator, both to stay prepared for high velocity in general and to specifically get looks against Braves ace Chris Sale. The lefty threw a complete-game shutout against them in September, striking out eleven with no walks and only five hits.
They’ve also been resting their banged-up veterans, with Freddie Freeman specifically being singled out as someone who needed the time to get healthy. He got extra rest in September, a response to a sore knee that’s dragged down his offense to a mere .658 OPS across his last 66 games. Shohei Ohtani claims he is in a “better place” with his bothersome right bicep and left knee, which both impacted him down the stretch.
As we know from Austin Riley early this season and others in recent years, there’s a difference between being on the field and being fully healthy. LA still isn’t fully healthy, and likely won’t until the games are over, but they’re closer now than they’ve been at any point this season.
Los Angeles got to prepare for October. Atlanta had to battle all week just to get there.
We gotta make an all-out stand
Okay, so how could Atlanta win?
Well, it’s simple: The Dodgers enter this series better prepared. The Braves may enter it better rehearsed. Atlanta can’t magically become more talented than Los Angeles by this afternoon. But they can make the series messier than LA wants it to be.
Atlanta spent September playing the sort of games Los Angeles was preparing to play. The Braves went through a series of one-run battles with Philadelphia, repeatedly faced elite starting pitching and still found ways to win, and then survived an actual Wild Card round to get here.
They’ve also already gone into Dodger Stadium once this season and won three times. That doesn’t mean much once Game 1 starts Saturday, but it does mean Atlanta isn’t arriving in Los Angeles wondering whether it can beat this team.
More importantly, it has spent weeks learning how to win when Plan A doesn’t survive contact with the enemy.
The obvious game plan for Los Angeles here involves a long outing from an elite starter, backed by Ohtani and Freeman and Betts et al. mashing, and then turning the final two innings over to a strong back of the bullpen. Edwin Diaz is finally healthy, while Tanner Scott’s rounded into form as the fill-in closer most of the year, backed by injury returner Evan Phillips and breakout righty Edgardo Henriquez. LA’s had to ride starters in their bullpen in the postseason in the past, but with four elite starters capable of carrying six or seven innings, the Dodgers might be able to treat the postseason like just another game for their pitching plan.
If Atlanta lets LA stick to the game plan, the Braves are probably in trouble.
But what if they can make this messy?
If Atlanta can find a way to get to one of these starters and make them struggle early, even knock them out and force LA to call on the pen much earlier than ideal, this gets complicated for the Dodgers. If they’re running through their bullpen leverage arms and it’s a one-run game in the 7th, with Atlanta throwing out pinch hitters (including, potentially, outfielder Lane Thomas (oblique), who is a possibility to make the roster) to counter LA’s relievers, the Dodgers may suddenly have to find the last six outs from pitchers they didn’t intend to ask for them.
That’s a version of baseball that Atlanta has been playing for weeks.
LA hasn’t had to. Sure, they’ve run some bullpen games as they were waiting to get some of these injured starters back, but their hearts weren’t in it. They haven’t played with the intensity Atlanta has - they’ve been in cruise control, waiting for October.
The Braves have been playing postseason-caliber opponents, in postseason-caliber environments, with postseason-caliber intensity, for the last month.
The Braves are outgunned. They may be outmanned and outplanned, too.
Fortunately, October doesn’t ask which roster looks better on paper.
It asks who can find three wins.
Atlanta has spent the last month practicing how.