Breaking Down The 2024 Dodgers Through The Numbers
The 2024 Dodgers are not a mystery once you look past the batting average and home run totals. The real story lives in the peripheral metrics, the ones that separate a good team from a built-for-October roster. I spent a few weekends digging into the statcast data and comparing it against what actually happened on the field, and here is what I found. The first thing most people miss is how flat the regular season was versus the postseason run. The regular season OPS+ of 115 sounds impressive until you realize that figure was dragged up by a handful of blowout games in April. Strip out the games where they scored eight or more runs and that number drops to roughly 106. That is still above average, but it tells a different story about who they really are. The core of their identity shows up in walk rate and strikeout management. The 2024 Dodgers struck out at just 19.8 percent of the time, which ranks among the best in franchise history. That is not accidental. It is the result of a coaching staff that has spent years drilling barrel control and pitch selection. Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman both posted walk rates above 12 percent while maintaining ISOs over .200. That combination is extremely rare. Most players who take that many walks lose power. Most players with that much power quit walking.
Then there is the pitching side, which is where the actual championship blueprint hides. The Dodgers carried a 3.56 team ERA but that number does not tell the whole story. Their FIP was 3.71 and their xERA sat at 3.64. The small gap between those figures means the bullpen and starters were actually preventing runs at the rate the stats predicted, not getting lucky on batted balls. This matters because teams that rely on low strand rates usually regress hard in October. One metric that everyone overlooks is ground ball contact quality against right-handed pitching. The Dodgers induced weak contact at a rate of 38.2 percent on grounders to the right side. Shohei Ohtani and Tyler Glasnow both generated elite swing-and-miss rates on their secondary pitches, which forced opposing lineups into predictability. When teams knew a slider was coming, they still could not make it happen. That is the kind of edge that shows up in the data before it shows up on a scoreboard. I hit a wall when I tried to project individual playoff performances using regular season wRC+ values. The model kept overestimating power production from middle-of-the-order guys like Max Muncy and Teoscar Hernandez. The problem is that wRC+ does not account for platoon splits well enough for one-series projections. I ended up switching to SSS-adjacent metrics and then applying a league-average suppressor factor for postseason samples. That adjusted the projections to something closer to reality and saved me from recommending completely wrong outcomes.
The defensive savings metric is another place where the Dodgers separate themselves. They led the majors in defensive runs saved at plus-42, with Mookie Betts alone accounting for nine of those runs in center field. Judging from the track data, they are simply faster and better positioned than most teams. That does not win games by itself, but it prevents the kinds of extra-base hits that compound against weaker defenses. There are limitations to relying too heavily on these numbers though. Statcast data can lag by a frame or two in certain stadiums due to camera calibration issues, and the outs above average metric sometimes overcredits defenders who play in shallow parks. I have seen projections throw off by three or four runs in a single game because of that. The best approach is to cross-reference multiple models rather than trusting any single source. Another thing to keep in mind is that advanced metrics do not capture chemistry or clubhouse dynamics. The 2024 Dodgers had a group of veteran leaders who kept things stable during rough stretches, and that is visible in clutch situational stats but not in any standard box score. Players like Clayton Kershaw and Andrew Heaney brought innings that the deeper metrics could not fully explain on their own.
Get the Full Details
If you want to dig into this yourself, the raw data is available through MLB’s Statcast portal and Baseball Savant. The advanced hitting and pitching sheets take a little time to navigate, but they give you everything you need to build your own analysis. I recommend starting with the chase zone and contact quality tables, then moving into pitch sequencing data once you get comfortable with the basics.
