The Dodgers are addicted to starters on short rest

Rich Hill, who spent most of his 30s alone and blindfolded, refining his curveball on a Himalayan mountaintop, will start for the Dodgers in a do-or-die Game 5 on Thursday. This makes sense, considering he’s been one of the best starters in baseball this year, when healthy. This makes a limited amount of sense, considering that he hasn’t been healthy very often in his career, and he’ll pitch on three days’ rest.

This is so damned Dodgers.

To be fair, the Dodgers are treating it as a Johnny Wholestaff game, counting on Julio Urias and the rest of the bullpen if things get out of hand. They had a choice to make that went something like this:

Clayton Kershaw (3 day’s rest) + Rich Hill (3 day’s rest, with entire bullpen available)

vs.

Julio Urias (full rest, no Rich Hill available) + Clayton Kershaw (full rest)

It’s a complicated equation. What does three days’ rest do to a pitcher? We know the stats haven’t been pretty, but does that apply to these specific pitchers? What is the value of getting yourself to a Game 5, where you can manage with a wild abandon that you couldn’t do in a Game 4? The Dodgers are here, so the evidence at least hints that they did something right.

Still, this is apparently embedded in the Dodgers’ DNA now. They’re an organization like no other, where their entire blueprint seems to involve at least one pitcher starting on three days’ rest in the postseason. If you think that’s hyperbole, note that after this series, five out of the last eight starters to start on short rest in the postseason will have been Dodgers. All of them will have been in the Division Series, where there are usually two travel days to help reset the rotation. They’ve used a starter on short rest in each of the last four postseasons, and this year they’ll use two.

Even if the Dodgers can’t get out of the NLDS for the third straight season, even if Hill can’t get out of the first inning, it’s hard to see how this would change if they make the postseason next year, either. Here’s the obvious disclaimer that a lot can change over a calendar year -- like, oh, Rich Hill being one of the best starters in baseball, and us all accepting it like it’s no big deal — but there might not be more than two or three free agent starters this offseason who would have started a Game 4 for any of the postseason teams, and that includes Hill. Even if the Dodgers retain him, they would still need a breakthrough season from Urias (possible) and sustained dominance from Kenta Maeda (less likely) to consider moving away from their short-rest strategy in the postseason.

It’s hard to see the Dodgers starting next season with a pitcher that anyone would immediately prefer to Kershaw on three days’ rest. This is who they are, for better or for worse. And while their ace’s record on short rest was good before Game 4, he’s also gone fewer than seven full innings in three out of the four. He throws at least seven full innings in a vast majority of his starts, which suggests three-day Kershaw might be a lesser version than the Dodgers are used to.

Or if you want 1,000 words about how Kershaw was tired in a very un-Kershaw way by the end of Game 4, you can find them here. Spoiler: He was very, very tired by the end, and he got away with a few pitches that you would never see him make in the regular season.

Two things can be true.

We’ll give the Dodgers Kershaw as a special case, and just because he’s had trouble finishing the seventh inning on short rest, that doesn’t mean short rest is the reason. To extend that second point up there to Rich Hill, though? A lot dicier. He was ineffective on regular rest in Game 2, and he’s never pitched on three day’s rest after a start before.

The Dodgers won three out of those four short-rest games, mind you. And the first four were started by Kershaw, who is a legitimate superhero. So maybe they’re onto something. This could be the start of a trend, not the end of an era.

On the other side, the Nationals had a chance to start Max Scherzer on short rest, then come back with Tanner Roark on short rest. They started Joe Ross instead, and he wasn’t sharp at all. The Nationals lost the game. Maybe they’re most certainly not onto something.

Or maybe we should wait until Scherzer’s full-rest start to make up our minds.

If it feels like this game is a referendum on pitchers starting on three days’ rest, that’s fair. Just know that we won’t get an answer that will satisfy us at all for the next time this comes up. The Dodgers have consistently approached the postseason like no other team in baseball, using short rest to target what they see as a market inefficiency, in which “market inefficiency” is defined as “we have Clayton Kershaw and you don’t, suckers!” They’ve also won just one postseason series out of their last five, with a chance to go home in the first round on Thursday. While I would have preferred Urias in Game 4 and a fully rested Kershaw in Game 5, the Dodgers are pretty sure they know what they’re doing.

Pretty sure. With another early exit, though, and no obvious rotation heroes available on the open market, it’ll be fascinating to watch how they approach this in future seasons. More importantly, it’ll be fascinating to watch the Rich Hill gambit in real time on Thursday. It’s a fine line between innovation and desperation, and I’m not sure exactly which one describes the Dodgers best right now.