We’ve had a relatively busy last few days, with Shohei Ohtani finishing second in National League MVP voting
and climbing up the all-time award share leaderboard, Yoshinobu Yamamoto voted fourth place for the NL Cy Young Award, and old friend Evan Phillips joining the Atlanta Braves bullpen for three years, $35 million, outpacing several contract projections.The Dodgers this week also hired Pedro Guerrero as a hitting coach, replacing the departing Aaron Bates on the major league staff. Guerrero has
coached the last nine years in the majors, and before that was a minor league player and coach in the Dodgers system.
Fabian Ardaya at The Athletic talked to Guerrero and others about the new hire, including Miami Marlins manager Clayton McCullough, the Dodgers former first base coach and previous minor league coordinator:
“(He can) meet guys where they are,” McCullough said. “He is a good listener. That’s where he really does his best work. Some of those conversations, either in the cage during the day, with just trying to have a guy be in the best spot mentally that he can be for that given day. Then in the game, not letting some of the anxiety or some of the stress (pile up) for a player, he helps alleviate a lot of that.”
Links
Sam Miller at his Pebble Hunting newsletter wrote about various ways the Dodgers have been beatable, and along the way detailed the various ways baseball is essentially impossible to guarantee a particular outcome.
What has become an annual treat is Davy Andrews at FanGraphs perusing various baseball news items to chronicle various instances of teams saying essentially “we tried” as a way to placate an unfulfilled acquisition. This offseason’s first such instance appeared to come this week.
