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This Tankapalooza deliberately left blank,
Having disposed of the Rockies' hopes of playoff baseball, we now turn to the reigning champions of the West, the Dodgers, to see if we can pull a Woody Harrelson on their post-season chances too. Except, LA is less a shambling zombie, than one which fell into a wood-chipper at the All-Stat Break, and whose remnants have been sitting in the sun ever since. Frankly, it's more than a bit off, and now looks about as healthy as the prospects for a McCourt reconciliation. The Dodgers are 25-40 in the second half of the season, an NL record that is ahead only of the Pirates, and they look likely to suffer the biggest drop in wins from last year of any team in the league.
Good time to sweep them out of town too, then...
- Chris Young CF
- Tony Abreu SS
- Kelly Johnson 2B
- Mark Reynolds 3B
- Adam LaRoche 1B
- Rusty Ryal LF
- John Hester C
- Cole Gillespie RF
- Barry Enright RHP
Bit of a B-squad out there; without Stephen Drew, Miguel Montero, Gerardo Parra or Justin Upton [though we have likely seen the last of the latter this season]. Kershaw has been the Dodgers' ace this season, and his W-L record has been hurt by some tough luck - he had a streak of four quality starts where he went 0-3. He has beaten Arizona twice already, allowing two runs in eleven innings of work, so this will be quite a tough test for the new, improved (we hope, and about time too!) Diamondbacks.
Here's also to Barry Enright getting his game back on track, after a series of wobbly outings that have been the baseball equivalent of Wile E. Coyote getting an anvil dropped on his head - and here, the anvil is marked "Regression." Nine homers and 17 earned runs in 12.2 innings? Ouch. It can't last forever, Barry: that's about the only thing that's certain. Hopefully, it stops here.