Los Angeles Dodgers: Why the starting rotation will be just fine

3. The Los Angeles Dodgers are the deepest team in the league in starting pitching

Starting pitching is a huge luxury in the Major Leagues. That is why teams are willing to pay an old and injury-prone Hyun Jin Ryu $80 million and why Dallas Keuchel is making just shy of $20 million per year despite not being that great last season.

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Dodger fans have been spoiled with such great starting pitching that they can oftentimes forget what they have in front of them, expecting more than the team reasonably should have. What the Dodgers do have is a lot of options to start games in 2019, which is built to last the test of time.

Kershaw, Buehler, Urias, May, Gonsolin, Kenta Maeda and Ross Stripling. Right there you have seven very solid starting pitching options and only five of them can make the cut. All seven would undoubtedly make the starting rotation on any other team and on the Dodgers they are going to be battling for positioning.

Let’s put it this way. There is a good chance that Stripling and Maeda are the sixth and seventh-bets starting pitchers on the Dodgers in 2019. If both Maeda and Stripling would have thrown 175 innings last season, which is a normal workload for a starting pitcher, then they would have ranked 46th and 34th in FanGraphs WAR last season.

That means that the Dodgers’ sixth and seventh best starters, two guys that might not even make the rotation, are both top-50 pitchers. You are lucky if you have three pitchers in the top 50, if everything goes absolutely right (which it won’t), the Dodgers could have seven.

As we mentioned, it does not always go right and the Dodgers are built for those seemingly emergency situations that would derail almost any other team. What other teams could lose 40% of its rotation and still be in an excellent situation?

Not a single team in the league. So while the Los Angeles Dodgers would have been better if Gerrit Cole decided to come to Los Angeles, they are still just fine without him.