Old school baseball has broken out in the National League Championship Series.

Out of eighteen possible innings, Dodgers starters have thrown seventeen. If they keep this up, Los Angeles just might turn back the clock on a decade of overthinking and overmanaging.

The one thing baseball does is copy winning. The moment a team does something different or unique, and wins doing it, every other team tries it. 

The one-inning closer. The lefty specialist. The endless matchups. The opener. The bulk guy. Every single change in baseball has made the starting pitcher less and less important and, in doing so, has eroded one of the fundamental beauties of the game: the starting pitching matchup. There really is no matchup to speak of when both starters are allowed to go only four innings. Baseball has lost a good deal of its personality.

The Dodgers are doing this, of course, because they have a dreadful bullpen. The more innings they can get from their starters, the fewer innings they have to rely on their pen. It’s the steady parade of bullpen arms that gets teams in trouble. Each arm a manager brings, he runs the risk of running into a reliever who isn’t as sharp as usual.  

But Blake Snell in Game 1 and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Game 2 defied all the analytics that say you must remove your starter after two times through the order. It’s refreshing to see a manager manage the game on the field rather than the spreadsheet on a laptop.  

Milwaukee got just two hits in Game 1, three in Game 2. This is the team with the best offense in the National League, getting dominated by pitching. Dominated old school.

Next thing you know there will be bunting.

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