The Cincinnati Reds pitching against the Los Angeles Dodgers in their two games during the playoffs didn’t exactly perform well. They gave up 18 runs in two games. The Dodgers are one of the best hitting teams in baseball. And Dodger Stadium boosts home runs more than any ballpark in the league over the last three years. Perhaps it was just a combination of bad days and an elite offense. But maybe the Dodgers simply knew what was coming.
Buster Olney talked about this on his podcast yesterday. He said that Eduardo Perez was able to tell what Hunter Greene was going to throw simply by watching the video and seeing what he was doing with his glove. That sounds similar to what was going on with Chase Burns in Boston when he was tipping his pitches and got lit up by the Red Sox. According to Olney, Perez was certain that the Los Angeles hitters knew every time that Greene was going to throw a breaking ball to them. That implies, too, that they knew when a fastball was coming.
Jesse Rogers, who was with Olney during that segment of the podcast, then interjected that he thought the Dodgers knew what was coming to and that it wasn’t just against Greene because they “were incredible at the plate and it wasn’t just hitting fastballs. It felt like they knew when the offspeed was coming and they took advantage of it. And yes it started with Hunter Greene. I’ve never seen him be hit that hard. And Dodger hitters were so on time and it felt like they knew what was coming and it happened even after Greene left the game.” He would later add “I think the Reds need to look at things moving forward because when Hunter Greene gets hit that much, there’s a reason behind it.”
Caleb Noe of WCPO in Cincinnati saw the clip from Olney and Rogers and noted that in Game One when the Reds brought in Connor Phillips that the Dodgers hitting coach was in the on-deck circle with Teoscar Hernandez showing him video on an iPad and the two chuckled as he walked away. Hernandez then hit a home run on a 99 MPH fastball on the outside corner three pitches later.
We don’t know for sure if that’s what was going on. Maybe someone on the Dodgers will talk about it in the future. Maybe they won’t. But it’s not a good look that Perez felt very confident based on what he could see that he knew exactly what was going to be thrown in the game by Greene.
This is just one more “what if” to add to the list of things that could have possible been different in the series against the Dodgers.
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