Dodgers’ $350M Payroll Faces Test: Will LA’s Rotation Dominate October?

This has been a good regular season for those who were worried the Los Angeles Dodgers were going to use their financial might to dominate Major League Baseball for the foreseeable future.

Despite a $350 million payroll, Los Angeles is a merely very good 88-68 and two games ahead of the San Diego Padres in the NL West race. The Dodgers are four games behind the Philadelphia Phillies in the race for the final bye, which means they are likely to begin the playoffs in the anything-can-happen best-of-three wild card round scheduled to begin next week.

Which also means we are a week away from finding out whether or not the Dodgers have figured out the life hack that allows them to treat the regular season like a six-month spring training yet win it all anyway.

While most of us have focused our attention this month on baseball’s most obvious stories — including the feel-good Milwaukee Brewers and Seattle Mariners aiming for their first championships and the free-falling Detroit Tigers and New York Mets trying to avoid the worst collapses in baseball history — the Dodgers have tuned up for the playoffs by quietly offering a preview of a potentially devastating postseason rotation.

Los Angeles starters have posted a sturdy 2.48 ERA this month — a figure that grows even more impressive upon subtracting the 13 runs allowed over 18 1/3 innings by opener Anthony Banda and the great Clayton Kershaw, neither of whom are likely to throw a first pitch in the playoffs.

The remainder of the Dodgers’ rotation — Tyler Glasnow, Emmett Sheehan, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani — has combined to post a 1.68 ERA over 15 games and 90 2/3 innings in September.

And even that doesn’t indicate how the Dodgers might have a couple modern-day Orel Hershisers lurking. Ohtani tossed five hitless innings in his most recent start Sept. 16 while Glasnow threw seven hitless frames on Sept. 8. Yamamoto has allowed just one hit in each of his last three outings — another way to put it: he’s allowed three hits in 21 innings this month — while Sheehan gave up one hit in two of his four outings, including one bulk relief stint behind Banda. Snell has surrendered two hits in each of his last two appearances spanning 13 scoreless innings.

The Dodgers aren’t going to use five starters in the playoffs, which means at least one is going to be available to help a bullpen that ranks 20th in the majors with a 4.28 ERA.

None of this guarantees the Dodgers are going to be unbeatable over the next four weeks. With a big league-best 1,217 regular season victories — 95 more than the second-place New York Yankees — but just two championships since 2013, Los Angeles knows better than anyone how regular season dominance doesn’t translate to success in the small sample size of the playoffs.

A sore arm during a pregame bullpen session or a misplaced early-inning comebacker can derail even the most finely tuned of plans. And a wild card series is particularly fraught with peril. There’s a chance the Dodgers are out of the playoffs before October is rung in along the west coast.

But what if a rotation full of pitchers who saw relatively minimal action in the regular season dominate in October and lead the Dodgers to another championship?

The only likely Dodgers postseason starter to even reach 100 regular season innings is going to be Yamamoto. Glasnow, Sheehan and Snell have combined for 215 innings so far while each spending time on the injured list. Ohtani, of course, has been slow-played in his return from a second Tommy John surgery. And we haven’t even mentioned rookie Roki Sasaki, who hasn’t pitched since May due to a shoulder injury but could be available as a reliever in the playoffs.

If the Dodgers win it all again, Rob Manfred’s salary cap hawks are going to be further emboldened — with better evidence than they’ve ever been able to muster before — to declare the game’s financial structure needs to be blown up, 2027 season be damned. Nobody else, not even the Yankees or Mets, can afford to treat the regular season like 162 Wednesday matinees on Broadway.

Randomness of the baseball playoffs means there’s a good chance the Dodgers are going to head home next month wondering if they could have done more between April and September to help themselves in October.

Baseball-Reference.com assesses the Dodgers enter Tuesday with only the fifth-best odds of winning the World Series.

But like so many other worst-case scenarios of far more import, this only has to work once in order to change everything forever.