Dodgers notes: Jake Reed, MLB arbitration results, pitch timer

Speaking of the optimism of spring training, Dodgers reliever Jake Reed worked with Driveline Baseball this offseason to develop a new pitch.

Alex Fast on Saturday shared video of the right-hander’s sinker and split-fingered fastball.

Per Baseball Savant, Reed has not yet thrown a splitter in his two major league seasons. Against left-handers, he threw his sinker 40 percent of the time (though we’re talking about only 106 total pitches thrown to lefties in 2021-22). Reed threw his slider 32 percent of the time against lefties the last two years.

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Jorge Castillo at the Los Angeles Times dug deep into the practice of procuring insurance to cover MLB players in the World Baseball Classic, after Clayton Kershaw dropped out of the tournament on Friday. Included in Castillo’s reporting: “Dodgers reliever Brusdar Graterol wanted to pitch in the tournament for Venezuela, but he wasn’t offered insurance coverage because of previous injuries.”

Salary arbitration season is now officially over. Among the 33 players to exchange figures with their teams on January 13, fourteen reached agreement on a contract, including Tony Gonsolin’s two-year, $6.65-million deal with the Dodgers. That left 19 arbitration hearings, of which the owners prevailed in 13. The final decisions came Saturday, and Associated Press has more.

Juan Castro, who started and finished his 17-year major league career with the Dodgers, announced Saturday that he’ll be inducted into the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.

Emma Baccelieri at Sports Illustrated asked an important question about an overlooked aspect of the new rules, and found out what signal umpires will use to denote a pitch-timer violation. “We want them to be very demonstrative,” says Joe Martinez, MLB vice president of on-field strategy.

Tim McCarver died Thursday at age 81. He shares the record with 24 World Series called on television along with Joe Buck, though it’s not solely because of that duo’s long run together on Fox. McCarver’s analysis before the final pitch of Game 7 in 2001 was especially prescient.

McCarver was in the No. 1 national TV booth for three decades, and also called four World Series each for ABC and CBS as well. I enjoyed this tribute to McCarver by Joe Posnanski:

He deeply wanted to share that love of baseball with us. He wanted to unwrap the game for us, explain to us the relationship between the pitcher and catcher, describe to us the back-and-forth mind games and reveal to us the complexities that we were not seeing. He didn’t want there to be any secrets. He wanted everyone to be able to see the full-color beauty of baseball.