What a difference one week makes.
The Dodgers' road to the 2024 championship will be fondly remembered by fans, many of whom spent all or part of the season wondering if or when the front office planned to cut ties with Austin Barnes and Chris Taylor, two veterans who struggled to hold their own at the plate in recent years.
Barnes and Taylor were cut four days apart last week. Each was the longest-tenured position player in the organization at the time. When Barnes was designated for assignment Wednesday, even future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw said "everybody was surprised" that it happened.
Although their time in Los Angeles was inevitably going to end, their resilience in spite of their batting lines — a 29 OPS+ in the case of Taylor, a 47 OPS+ in the case of Barnes — made the demarcation point between "rosterable" and "unrosterable" less than obvious.
Barnes' surface stats (.214/.233/.286) were not substantively worse than they were in 2023 (.180/.256/.242), when he played 59 games as the backup to Will Smith and accrued -0.7 WAR according to FanGraphs — which takes into account catcher framing, Barnes' strongsuit.
Taylor's .200/.200/.257 batting line was pacing for new lows in every category since he joined the Dodgers in a 2016 trade. But his bat speed was effectively unchanged (70.5 mph via Statcast, up from 70.0 mph in 2024) and the Dodgers would be paying him $13.3 million to not play by virtue of cutting him now.
So, what changed?
“We didn’t feel like coming into the season this was something that we would necessarily be doing in May,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman told reporters Sunday. “But you learn things and things change and things evolve and play out. We just have a lot more information at this point in May than we do before the season. I wouldn’t say it was something that we thought was fait accompli, and was necessarily going to happen. But with where we were, all things factored in, while not easy we felt like it was the right thing to do.”
Looking at Barnes' and Taylor's hitting performance in a vacuum ignores a critical factor: Each was being pushed for playing time in a way they previously were not.
Rookie infielder Hyeseong Kim has a .452/.485/.581 slash line in 14 games. No one expects Kim to sustain that performance, but neither did the Dodgers guarantee him $12.5 million to play for Oklahoma City — where he was arguably the best defensive and offensive player on the Triple-A Comets' roster.
Dalton Rushing, the top prospect in the organization, was also becoming increasingly difficult to stash in the minor leagues. He had a .938 OPS in Oklahoma City while seeing time at catcher, first base and left field. He's 4 for 10 with a walk and a double in his first three games.
Much of the information the Dodgers did not have in March revolved around Kim and Rushing. Now that the two rookies (Kim is 26, Rushing 24) have shown they can hit major league pitching and adapt to a variety of positions, keeping them buried in the Pacific Coast League was a tougher decision to defend.
More must-reads: