Did Dodgers wait too long to remove Craig Kimbrel from closer role?

So the Los Angeles Dodgers have 110 wins and their ninth division title in the past 10 years. Even allowing for their more or less unlimited payroll budget, this is an achievement worthy of praise. After all, there are plenty of teams with huge payrolls every year that sit at home in October (one of them just 30 miles up the road in Anaheim).

But how much praise? For all of their success, the Los Angeles Dodgers have won one World Series (in the pandemic-shortened season of 2020). A case could be made, in fact, that their dominance has hurt them this season.

The Los Angeles Dodgers waited until two weeks before the end of the season to decide that Craig Kimbrel wasn’t cutting it as closer.

This is despite the fact that September was the third consecutive month Kimbrel had posted an ERA above 3.00. For the season, Kimbrel has walked 28 men in 58 innings and has posted a WHIP of 1.36. Most ominously, he is tied for the team lead in losses, which is not something you see from a closer every day.

At the beginning of August, the Dodgers had a 12-game lead over the San Diego Padres. In other words, they were in cruise control. Looking back, one has to wonder how patient they would have been with Kimbrel if their lead was, say, three games at that point. There was almost never a time this season when watching Kimbrel pitch was a soothing experience, but the angst involved with a shaky closer is a lot easier to cope with when your season isn’t riding on every inning … just ask the Milwaukee Brewers.

As it stands, the Dodgers have had seven total saves in the month of September by six different pitchers. Closers are kind of like quarterbacks and significant others — if you think you have several, you probably don’t have any. Meanwhile, at some point in the postseason, the Dodgers are likely to face their old pal Kenley Jansen, who has been solid for the Atlanta Braves, and Edwin Diaz, who has been dominant for the New York Mets. They will do so with a rotation that has been decimated by injuries and a bullpen anchored by … well, we still don’t know.

It’s entirely possible that none of this matters, that the Dodgers have so much talent that most of their postseason games will be over before the closer, whoever he is, even starts warming up. And the reality is that their bullpen is full of the type of arms that most other teams would be thrilled to insert in the closer role.

But the Dodgers never did that. They spent five months and three weeks figuring Craig Kimbrel would snap out of it, in part because they haven’t really faced a tense moment since early July … and even that level of tension was whether they would win the division settle for a Wild Card berth.

Kimbrel never did snap out of it and, because of that, the Dodgers are much more vulnerable heading into the postseason than a 110-win team ought to be.