The Dodgers are 61-34, second in our Elo ratings, and they just lost at home. Arizona took Friday’s series opener at Dodger Stadium — the D-backs lead the set 1-0 — and now rides a two-game winning streak into Saturday against the best team in the National League West.
LA’s answer: hand the ball to Yoshinobu Yamamoto and stop the bleeding before the break.
What The Call sees
The Call has the Dodgers at 65.1% — an edge-rated pick, the most lopsided number on our card for this series. Start with the ratings: LA sits at 1565 Elo (No. 2 in baseball) against Arizona’s 1494 (No. 18). That 71-point gap plus home field already does most of the work.
Then the pitching card lands on top of it. Our model lists Yamamoto (2.49 ERA, 3.26 FIP over 104.2 innings) against Brandon Pfaadt (4.84 ERA, 4.96 FIP over just 48.1 innings), and that mismatch swings a 13.6-point adjustment toward Los Angeles. Form is a near-wash — the Dodgers are 6-4 over their last ten, Arizona 5-5 — so this pick is ratings plus the arm. Weather won’t interfere: mid-70s, light wind, essentially zero rain chance.
What could break the pick
The team in the other dugout just proved it can win in this building. Arizona is 47-47 but has won two straight, and per Yahoo’s series preview, Pfaadt comes in 2-1 with a 1.34 WHIP in his limited run of starts — the surface ERA is uglier than the recent results.
The counter: Yamamoto is on a genuine heater. He’s 9-5, went double-digit strikeouts his last time out, and has logged six-plus innings in each of his last five starts, three of them seven-plus, going 4-1 in that stretch. This is also a divisional game — Arizona sees Yamamoto more than almost anyone, and familiarity is historically how good pitchers get got. But a 65.1% number means the model thinks the heater version shows up, and we’re not arguing.
If you’re making the trip
Dodger Stadium is a fortress on a hill with no hotel district attached — where you sleep determines your whole game-day logistics chain, from the Union Station shuttle to the post-game rideshare scrum. Our Dodger Stadium guide makes the neighborhood call so you don’t learn it the hard way.
