Dodgers: Quantifying the season of walk-off magic

The Dodgers have 12 walk-off wins in 2019. I decided to analyze how they’ve done it. Have they simply had the best hitters in baseball in the late innings?

The Dodgers have 12 walk-off wins in 2019. If they went say .500, in games in which they walked off, they’d have a record much worse than that of the Yankees. But with these wins, each one of them as important as the last, they have remained in the hunt for the best record in baseball.

If you’re a Dodger fan, hopefully, you got the chance to witness the big walk-off win courtesy of Max Muncy back in Game 3 of the 2018 World Series against the Red Sox. And if you did, you’d realize that the Dodgers really haven’t been matched in terms of walk-off wins in that span.

But even in comparison to their 9th-inning offense from last season, in which they finished 7th in all of baseball in 9th inning OPS, they have been unequivocally better this season in that department.

So in this vein, I decided to analyze how they’ve done it. Have they simply had the best hitters in baseball in the late innings? Or have they hit bullpen pitching better than most? Or have they simply been lucky? That’s what I set out to find out.

First, to see how well the team has done in the later innings, chiefly the 7th or later. This wouldn’t show why or how the walk-off magic was created, but it would at least prove that it existed on some level.

As a team, the Dodgers have the third-most home runs in the 7th inning or later in all of major league baseball, which considering their walk-off tally, is not all that surprising. LA also has the 9th-most hits and 4th-best batting average in the later innings. All these show that they are good in the late innings.

But the most telling stat of all? Their league-leading on-base percentage after the 7th inning. No team has gotten on base more often in the late innings than the Dodgers, which certainly helps the offense in more ways than one. Getting on base increases your chances to score plain and simple, and when relievers miss the zone and walk batters, they tend to try to throw more strikes, leaving more pitches over the heart of the plate for the subsequent hitters, and maybe even prompting a pitching change.

That has led to Cody Bellinger’s emergence as a late-inning RBI machine. The MVP-hopeful has driven 14 home runs in the late innings, helping him amass 29 RBI’s, tying him for the team lead with Max Muncy. Belli-Bomb’s triple slash in the late-innings? .338/.437/.712. And he’s got 25 walks to boot. Only two players have more home runs in this frame, Hunter Renfroe and Pete Alonso, both with 16.

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The Dodgers, as evidenced by the above stats, are great at hitting in the late innings, which is to say they are great against tired starters and relievers. But what about when the going really gets tough, when they’re down and out in the ninth or later. How have they responded to that pressure?

Well, in a league-wide context, they have not as well as they have in the late-innings in general, at least in the power department. Only Will Smith and Muncy have 3 home runs in the 9th or later, tying the pair for 26th in baseball. But as a team, they have put up a top-8 mark in AVG, SLG, RBI, and walks, with the second-best OBP in the game today.

So the Dodgers clearly are beyond lucky. Their high volume of walks has driven their already top-8 AVG and elevated their OBP to the second spot in the game in the ninth inning, and their power before the 9th inning, likely off of set up men and the first few relievers entering games, has been phenomenal.

The lightning in the bottle that the Boys in Blue have caught doesn’t look to be a flash in the pan, but rather seems to be well contained within the friendly confines of Dodger Stadium for the foreseeable future.