Unless you set an alarm, you probably won’t be awake for the first pitch of the MLB regular season. At 7:05 Wednesday evening in Seoul—that’s 6:05 a.m. ET/3:05 a.m. PT in the States—the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres will square off in the first of two games that count toward the standings. It’s the first time regular-season games have been played in South Korea and the first time in five years that the MLB season has started outside the U.S.
The Seoul series is a star-studded matchup between nominal NL West rivals, featuring seven of the sport’s projected top 40 position players and eight of the projected top 50 pitchers. The Dodgers and Padres both played “checkbook baseball” this winter, to borrow a phrase from Cardinals pitcher Miles Mikolas, albeit in different ways. The Dodgers distributed checks—committing more than $1 billion to Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, and other prominent players—while the Padres tore them up, trimming payroll following the spending spree that culminated in them missing the 2023 postseason. Despite the death of owner Peter Seidler, hyperactive Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller was at it again, as the Friars followed last year’s unlucky campaign with a tumultuous offseason that saw them trade away their best hitter (Juan Soto) and trade for their projected best pitcher (Dylan Cease).
To greet these two games between two teams, let’s conduct two investigations. We’ll focus on one potentially historic aspect of each roster: the Dodgers’ ridiculous top of the lineup, and the Padres’ “Oops! All shortstops” defense.
The Dodgers: As Easy as 1, 2, 3
The first batter of the MLB season will be 2023 NL MVP runner-up Mookie Betts. Things won’t get much easier for Padres starting pitcher Yu Darvish after that: Next up will be 2023 AL MVP Shohei Ohtani, followed by 2023 NL MVP bronze medalist Freddie Freeman. That’s three of the top eight projected hitters in MLB, batting back-to-back-to-back (or as John Sterling might say, back-to-back and belly-to-belly). They’ve already combined for 11 Silver Slugger awards, 17 All-Star selections (without double-counting Ohtani’s two-way appearances), and 18 top-10 MVP finishes, and all three players remain at or near the peak of their powers at the plate.
Both Betts and Ohtani have leadoff experience, and all three have hit second and third, so the Dodgers can’t really go wrong with these offensive forces in any order. But Betts has batted best and most often in the top spot, Ohtani has historically excelled as a no. 2 hitter, and Freeman has hit third more often than not, so Betts-Ohtani-Freeman it is. That alignment allows Dodgers manager Dave Roberts to stack speed at the top of his lineup—though the slower Freeman, who somehow keeps improving, has become a great base runner—while ensuring that the free-swinging Ohtani gets plenty of pitches to hit. “As a manager, you start trying to formulate a lineup and see how it looks on paper,” Roberts said last month. “You get a big glow on your face when you look at Ohtani, Freeman, and Betts.” Opponents, presumably, get big frowns on their faces instead.
FanGraphs’ depth chart projections—which blend the outputs of the ZiPS and Steamer systems—peg Betts (142), Ohtani (141), and Freeman (141) for wRC+ marks above 140, or 40 percent above the MLB average. Other high-performing projection systems, such as ATC and THE BAT X, have them higher (146/147 for Betts, 155/161 for Ohtani, and 145/143 for Freeman), though even those more optimistic marks may seem conservative compared to their actual stats last season (167, 180, and 163, respectively). All three will be 30 or older by this year’s All-Star Game, so the algos expect some age-related decline, but these forecasts for modest dips aren’t insults; few hitters of any age have true-talent estimates as high.
This spring, the Dodgers’ dynamic trio has largely lived up to its billing. Ohtani, who’s barred from the mound as he rehabs from September elbow surgery—don’t worry, the Dodgers have the game’s projected top rotation (and a top-five projected bullpen) without him—has slashed .500/.577/.909 (286 wRC+) amid the publicity surrounding his newly public love life. Betts has been nearly as locked in, slashing .441/.513/.618 (207 wRC+). Only Freeman, at a comparatively pedestrian .281/.324/.625, has been below the 140 wRC+ mark, albeit barely (he’s sitting at 135, not counting his single, double, and homer in an exhibition game against the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes on Saturday).
One can imagine many more games like the Dodgers’ March 3 victory against the Rockies, in which Betts, Ohtani, and Freeman kicked off the bottom half of the first with three consecutive singles, and the trio ultimately combined for seven of the team’s 11 hits and five of its seven runs scored. Cleanup hitter Will Smith is going to drive in a ton of runs this season—unless Freeman keeps clearing the bases himself. Plus, L.A.’s lineup (unlike San Diego’s) isn’t just a few stars followed by a bunch of scrubs. Even the worst of the team’s projected regulars against righties project to be average—and that’s assuming that the pitchers who face them aren’t exhausted by running the gauntlet of Betts, Ohtani, and Freeman. That’s a lot of offense for Dodgers lovers to look forward to and Dodgers haters to dread.
Roberts said the Betts-Ohtani-Freeman sequence isn’t “set in stone,” but as long as the three stars are healthy, they’ll likely be batting consecutively in some order. Let’s assume that each of them avoids serious injuries, qualifies for the batting title (by making at least 3.1 plate appearances per team game, or 502 in a 162-game season), and plays up to his projection, producing a wRC+ of 140 or higher. Where would the three of them rank among the most potent trios ever, and among the most intimidating tops of a lineup?
Only 43 teams have ever featured three consecutive hitters in a starting lineup who wound up qualifying for the batting title and finishing the season with at least a 140 wRC+. The table below lists the 10 teams that have ever run out such lineups in more than half of their games:
Teams With Three Qualified 140 wRC+ Hitters Batting Consecutively in More Than Half of Games
The fabled Murderers’ Row Yankees—arguably the best offense ever—never fielded a lineup with a 140 wRC+ trifecta, because Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were that 1927 team’s only 140 wRC+ hitters. But a different edition of the pre-integration Yankees, the 1942 club, leads the list. Joe DiMaggio batted cleanup in all 154 of the ’42 Bombers’ games, and Charlie “King Kong” Keller and Joe Gordon typically came next. The 2015 Blue Jays, who had José Bautista, Edwin Encarnación, and Josh Donaldson batting 1–3, 2–4, or 3–5 in 132 games, were the most recent team to join the group. Two of these teams, the 1953 Dodgers and 1976 Reds, boasted more than three qualifying 140 wRC+ hitters; the ’53 Dodgers sometimes had five such sluggers batting in a row.
Betts, Ohtani, and Freeman could propel the Dodgers to a new record if they started more than 145 games in consecutive spots in the order; 137 is the postwar, post-integration number to beat. If they bat in order enough times to place anywhere on this list, though, that would bode well. Every one of the teams in that table finished first or tied for first in wRC+ among AL/NL offenses (pitcher hitting excluded). Collectively, they averaged 96.4 wins, with the worst of them, the ’96 Mariners, going 85-76.
What makes the Dodgers’ offensive standouts extra-extraordinary is where in the lineup they bat: at the top. Historically, the heart of the order has been the likeliest location for a run of three 140 wRC+ hitters: Consecutive sluggers have been less common from 1–3 than from 3–5, 4–6, or 2–4. Until fairly recently, leadoff batters (and even no. 2 hitters) tended to be lighter-hitting, speed-and-bat-control types. Betts is an anomaly; in fact, mid-career Mookie has the highest career OPS of any leadoff batter—unless we lower the plate-appearance threshold to 2,500, in which case his contemporary Ronald Acuña Jr. edges him out.
Lineups With Three or More Consecutive Qualified, 140 wRC+ Hitters
(In case you’re curious, the three 6–8 examples are Campanella-Hodges-Furillo and Hodges-Campanella-Furillo from those stacked ’53 Dodgers, and Boston’s David Ortiz, Bill Mueller, and Trot Nixon on July 25, 2003.)
Thanks to the scarcity of past top-of-the-lineup mashers, the Dodgers could become only the 10th team ever to bat qualified, 140 wRC+ hitters 1-2-3 in any number of games. Two of those teams, including Freeman’s 2020 Braves, played during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when the 60-game schedule made the feat easier to accomplish. Only one team has ever pulled off this trick with any regularity: the second World Series winner of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine era. The Dodgers could potentially surpass the ’76 Reds’ record with more than two months’ worth of games to spare.
Teams With Qualified 140 wRC+ Hitters Batting 1–3
Some of the 140 wRC+ qualifiers on previous teams weren’t really name-brand batters; they were good-but-not-great players who were having career years (like Nixon and Mueller). If these highly decorated Dodgers climb the lists above, it won’t be a fluke. Injuries, underperformance, and/or lineup reshuffling could derail the Dodgers’ pursuit of an unprecedented trio. On paper, though, the top of this lineup packs as powerful a 1-2-3 punch as any we’ve ever seen. The chance to see Betts, Ohtani, and Freeman make a first impression from afar might be worth waking up for.
The Padres: Why Don’t They Build the Whole Defense Out of Shortstops?
When Mookie leads off for L.A. this week—and for the foreseeable future—he’ll be listed as a shortstop. That wasn’t how the Dodgers drew things up, but for the second straight season, Betts has been pressed into service at a premium position he’s hardly played professionally. Last year, Mookie moonlighted at short in place of an injured Gavin Lux; this year, the natural second baseman swapped positions with Lux when the once-presumptive shortstop threw erratically in spring training. Betts’s attempt to master a demanding position fairly late in his career is a compelling full-season subplot (and a testament to his skill), but it’s not guaranteed to go well. The problem for the Dodgers is that they don’t have enough shortstops. Which is ironic, considering that their adversaries in Seoul have nothing but shortstops.
Preller has hoarded shortstops for years. Perhaps he’s haunted by what might have been: A few months into Preller’s Padres tenure, the GM traded Trea Turner to the Nationals. And as Turner established himself in D.C. as one of baseball’s best shortstops, Padres shortstops struggled, collectively ranking 29th in WAR in 2015 and dead last in 2016 and 2017. Not until 2020 did Padres shortstops get good, as Preller’s “love for up-the-middle talent”—as the San Diego Union-Tribune put it in 2017—paid off in Fernando Tatis Jr.’s first full season. Despite Tatis’s subsequent travails, Preller has since made damn sure that his team will never be short of shortstops again.
When Preller signed Xander Bogaerts in December 2022 (having missed out on bringing back Turner), he told a story about a time in 2009—during Preller’s years with the Rangers—when he’d advised a scout, “You can never have too many shortstops.” In 2024, he’s truly testing that maxim. MLB.com beat writer AJ Cassavell described the Dads as “a team full of shortstops” last year, but Preller’s love for players of the shortstop persuasion has never dictated his team’s defensive alignment to this extreme extent.
This spring, 20-year-old Jackson Merrill—one of four Jacksons among FanGraphs’ leaguewide top 30 prospects—competed for the Padres’ big league gig in center field. Merrill’s upper-level experience is limited to 46 games in Double-A last season, and he’s never played center field professionally. In the minors, he was—yes, you guessed it—a shortstop. So what? As Preller said in December 2022, the Padres’ shortstop surplus “leads to some creative conversations in the room about where guys are going to play.” Merrill’s athleticism led to creative conversations about center. Earlier this month, Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper noted that “the Padres’ reliance on shortstops is extremely unusual. If Merrill makes the team as a regular center fielder, the Padres could regularly field a lineup with a converted shortstop at every position other than catcher.”
Well, Merrill made the team as its starting center fielder, giving the Padres shortstops in center, left (Jurickson Profar), right (Tatis), first (Jake Cronenworth), second (Bogaerts), third (Graham Pauley, for now, and eventually Manny Machado), and, of course, short (South Korea native Ha-Seong Kim, who homered twice on Monday in his homeland return). So just how unusual is the Padres’ shortstop menagerie?
If we went back far enough—college, high school, Little League—we’d probably find that the majority of major leaguers played shortstop at some point. Shortstop is home to the most athletic infielders, and most major leaguers were likely among the most athletic players in their neighborhoods, cities, or schools. In the pro ranks, however, shortstop is a more exclusive assignment (outside of San Diego, at least). The table below shows the all-time percentage of major league non-pitchers who appeared at each position in at least one game, more than one game, or 10 games or more in the majors or affiliated minors.
Percentage of Major League Hitters Who Played Position Professionally
These numbers loosely track the difficulty of playing each position, as indicated by the Bill James concept of the defensive spectrum. The only positions played by a lower percentage of big league non-pitchers than shortstop are catcher and, unsurprisingly, pitcher. Players with shortstop experience are physically capable of shifting to almost any other position, but relatively few players shift to shortstop from anywhere else. (Even Betts was drafted as a shortstop.) By contrast, it’s common to slide down the defensive spectrum to corner positions, which inflates their rates.
That table reinforces that fielding an all-shortstop team is tough—unless, like Preller, you stock up on shortstops on purpose. But the Padres’ seven-shortstop defense won’t be the first of its kind. By coincidence, the number of teams that have started seven defenders with previous pro shortstop experience in a game (44) is almost identical to the number of teams that have batted three qualified, 140 wRC+ hitters consecutively (43). However, while there have been almost 2,300 total team games with 140 wRC+ hitters batting back-to-back-to-back, only 428 games in the Baseball-Reference database satisfy the seven-shortstop condition. And only 15 teams have done it more than five times in a season.
Most Games With Seven Pro Shortstops
Even that somewhat overstates the ease of finding comps for these Padres. The caveat is that the vast majority of those games qualified thanks to one or more players who’d logged the odd game at shortstop—for instance, Kansas City’s Alex Gordon, whose six innings at short in one game in 2007 snuck 11 Royals lineups from 2018 and 2019 into our sample. If we require at least 10 games of shortstop experience for each player, that already small sample dwindles down to 55 games. Only two teams, the 1903 Brooklyn Superbas (23 games) and the 1988 Detroit Tigers (18 games), managed more than four such games apiece.
So no, it’s not that uncommon for a team to play seven shortstops. Last year, the Rockies did it once thanks to first baseman Nolan Jones (five games at shortstop in rookie ball), third baseman Ryan McMahon (two previous MLB games at shortstop), and right fielder Kris Bryant (two previous MLB games), and the Twins did it once courtesy of center fielder Michael A. Taylor (19 games in rookie ball). In 2022, the Red Sox did it once thanks to first baseman Bobby Dalbec (two previous MLB games) and third baseman Rafael Devers (one previous MLB game), and in 2021, the Dodgers did it thanks to first baseman Albert Pujols (two MLB innings at shortstop, way back in 2002). But to do it with what Cooper called “legitimate” shortstops? That’s special.
Pauley has played only one pro inning at shortstop, in A ball in 2022. But if, as expected, Machado replaces Pauley when his surgically repaired right elbow permits him to make the throw from third, then Merrill would be the Padres’ least-experienced shortstop, with 178 pro games to his name. (Unless Profar gets bumped by Tommy Pham, who hasn’t played short since his 37 games there in rookie ball.) That’s a super-high minimum for the weakest shortstop link on a seven-shortstop team. In fact, no other major league game meets that standard. The only one that comes close is the Orioles’ lineup on June 1, 2012, when first baseman Mark Reynolds—who played short 135 times in A-ball or below, and once in the Arizona Fall League—had the lowest total of Baltimore’s past or present shortstops. And for those O’s, that seven-shortstop defense was a one-time thing. The Padres could double that total before they come back to California, and if Merrill makes good, they could become the most shortstop-y team of all time.
Except that Preller’s all-shortstop plan is missing one component: a catcher. Austin Nola, who caught for the Padres from 2020 through 2023, is a former minor league shortstop, but he’s on the Royals now. Neither of the Padres’ current catchers, Luis Campusano and Kyle Higashioka, has played anywhere except backstop or first base. Here, then, the Padres’ shortstop collection can be beaten, because there have been 203 major league games in which all eight non-pitcher defenders had “pro shortstop” on their résumés.
Most Games With Eight Pro Shortstops
Finally, though I hate to break it to Preller, there have been 43 big league games—all for the 1901 or 1903 Superbas, or the 1902 White Sox—where the starting pitcher was a former shortstop, too. Kudos to Bill Donovan, Henry Schmidt, and Clark Griffith, respectively, for making it possible for those teams to start shortstops all the way down. The bad news for Preller: His measly seven shortstops come up, well, short. The good news: He still has something to aim for. It’s good to have goals.
The Padres’ fetish for shortstops probably makes more sense than, say, the Marlins’ quest to corner the market on second basemen. Admittedly, it may not be the most efficient approach to team-building: The Padres signed Bogaerts to an 11-year contract less than a year and a half ago, and they’ve already moved him off the position where his bat provided the greatest value. Still, the nice thing about shortstops is that their gloves are good everywhere. The Padres were one of the majors’ best defensive teams in 2023, thanks in large part to Tatis’s superlative play in right. And though the Dodgers are deeper in most respects, they may end up envying the Padres’ strategic shortstop stockpile.
Thanks to Kenny Jackelen of Baseball Reference and Ryan Nelson for research assistance.
