Introduction/2014 Capsule
The 2014 Los Angeles Dodgers in many ways were one of the great enigmas in baseball history. Ned Colletti was their general manager, and Don Mattingly their manager (and still is today). Neither is an analytics-friendly/sabermetrics guy.
Yet, the Dodgers ended up as the most sabermetrics-friendly team in baseball. And THEN they went and got Andrew Friedman to run the front office—who is one of the most analytically-minded decision-makers in baseball.
Of course it didn’t matter a whole lot in 2014 as the Dodgers had the game’s best pitcher, Clayton Kershaw, embarking on one of the game’s most dominant stretch of pitching.
Despite Kershaw’s best efforts, though, the Dodgers were at times a bit confounding. If not for Adrian Gonzalez, the Dodgers’ offense would not have been nearly as good as it was. Though Kershaw ended up National League MVP, Gonzalez may really have been the Dodgers’ MVP.
Still, it’s safe to say that the Dodgers were a solid baseball team. After all, they won 94 games—and their Pythagorean expected win-loss record had them at 92, so it’s not as if they greatly outperformed their talent level, or got lucky.
2014 Record: 94-68
2014 Run Differential: +101 (2nd best in NL; 5th best in MLB in 2014)
Other Key Stats:
-6th in runs scored with 718
-3rd in batting average at .265
-1st in on-base percentage .333
-6th in slugging percentage at .406
-6th in MLB in ERA at 3.40
-6th in quality starts at 100
-5th in WHIP at 1.21
Lasting Memory from 2014 season: Common sense may say that Clayton Kershaw’s 15 strikeout no-hit beauty (which was nearly a perfect game) should land on the list as the Dodgers’ most memorable moment of 2014.
It’s terrifically memorable but not as much as the excited tension which presided in Dodger Stadium during Kershaw’s magical 41-inning scoreless streak. That’s when this happened:
At this point, MLB Network and ESPN were broadcasting just about every inning of Kershaw’s streak. It was huge, and most everyone expected Kershaw would pull off something unseen at any time in the game.
In some ways his relative failure in that moment served as a foreshadowing sort of metaphor for the way the season would end for he and the Dodgers, as they were embarrassed by their postseason nemesis, the St. Louis Cardinals, in the NL Divisional Series.
Next: Looking at key lineup changes for Dodgers from 2014