Dodgers Analysts Say Everyone in the League Knows L.A. Doesn't Make In-Game Adjustments

David Vassegh and Jerry Hairston Jr. say the whole league knows how to beat the Dodgers, which makes you wonder why no one used that knowledge until the NLDS.

We know the Dodgers lost to the Padres in the NLDS. What we don't know is exactly why. Well, that's not totally true. We know they lost mostly because they couldn't hit with runners in scoring position. But we don't know why they struggled so badly with RISP. Was it bad luck? Was it bad approach? Was it something else? That's what L.A. will spend time trying to figure out this offseason.

Over on SNLA's Access: SportsNet, David Vassegh and Jerry Hairston Jr. think they know the answer, and they think everyone else in the league knows it, too. First Vassegh:

"At Dodger Stadium in the month of September, you see the press box crowded with scouts from all these teams that you're going to see in the postseason. They know these players' tendencies inside and out because they're following them every single day. And the one thing that a lot of them noticed was the Dodgers hitters don't make in-game adjustments. They're very married to the percentages that they see before the game.

"But here's the trick, the other teams know the Dodgers are married to that and they flip the script on them, and the Dodgers have not had great fortune adjusting in game.

"We saw that during the 2019 NLDS when (Stephen) Strasburg and Patrick Corbin pitched backwards against them. We saw that with Blake Snell in this series where all he had was his fastball. Yet for some reason, Dodger hitters are taking strike three with a fastball. That's the only pitch he had working for him. So they know their tendencies."

There's a lot to unpack there. The Dodgers had three looking strikeouts against Snell, all against his fastball. One was Freddie Freeman in the first inning. Presumably, even the most in-game-adjusty team in the world isn't going to be adjusting in the top of the first. The next one was two batters later, to Max Muncy in the second inning, when he took a fastball down the middle when he was clearly expecting something else. Fooled, for sure. Should he had made an adjustment based on Freeman's strikeout?

The third was Trea Turner in the third inning, when Snell threw him five straight breaking balls in the dirt, two of which he swung at, before freezing him with a fastball at the bottom of the zone.

Realistically, it seems like Muncy's strikeout was the only one you could really make a case for a lack of in-game adjustments.

(And to be nice to Vassegh, we'll gloss over his use of 2019 Patrick Corbin as an example, since Corbin was 0-2 with a 7.88 ERA in that series.)

Hairston agree with Vassegh:

"I get text messages and calls a month before the start of the playoffs, they go, 'You know, you guys aren't gonna win the World Series, right? It's well known. You guys don't make in-game adjustments, especially offensively. We all know that.' ... It's around baseball, that we don't make offensive adjustments and they flip the script on us."

The big question is: How did the Dodgers win 111 games in the regular season if everyone in the league knows how to beat them? Did they just choose not to use that knowledge in meaningless regular-season games? Or did the Padres not know the secret until sometime between September 29 and October 12?

Smells a lot like someone looking for an easy answer when the true answer is much, much more complex.