It’s a well established fact that in professional baseball a team’s Opening Day roster never resembles its end-of-the-season roster. In fact, in many cases it is not uncommon for more than half of their Opening Day roster to have changed. This is even more prevalent for an organization’s minor league teams where injuries, promotions, demotions, trades and even the annual First-Year Player Draft affects roster moves system wide.

Obviously, the ultimate goal and the very reason for the minor leagues is to find, develop and promote potential future major leaguers, not necessarily to win championships in the six domestic and one Dominican MiLB levels – although you would be hard pressed to convince the players on any level of this. Baseball is, after all, a game of competition. But with so much movement – usually through promotions – a minor league team that wins a first-half championship berth (for those levels that have a split season), the team that they field in the opening round of the playoffs more often than not has very few of the players left that got them there; and there is no greater example of this than the 2015 Rancho Cucamonga Quakes.

The Advanced Single-A Quakes, under manager Bill Haselman and coaches Mike Eylward, Bill Simas and Rafael Ozuna, won the California League South’s first-half title by an impressive 4.0 games over the defending Cal League Champion Lancaster JetHawks (Astros) and High Desert Mavericks (Rangers), and but for the first week of the season led the division wire-to-wire. It’s certainly no secret that one of the main reasons for this was Dodgers top pitching prospect Jose De Leon who posted a 4-1 record and 1.67 ERA with a Cal League-leading 58 strikeouts. But on May 17, De Leon was (you guessed it) promoted to the Double-A Tulsa Drillers where he continues to flourish.

As happens almost every year, Quakes manager Bill Haselman lost half of his Opening Day roster to promotions and trades – including top catching prospect Kyle Farmer. (Photo credit – Ron Cervenka)

But De Leon wasn’t the only Quakes pitcher to help the team to their first playoff berth since 2013, he had help from right-handers Scott Barlow, Randy Fontanez and Jordan Hershiser, and left-handers Ramon Benjamin, Luis De Paula and Michael Johnson. However, with 21 games remaining in the regular season, only Barlow and Johnson are still with the team. Benjamin has since been promoted to Double-A Tulsa and Fontanez to Triple-A Oklahoma City, with De Paula being sent down to the Low Single-A Great Lakes Loons. Hershiser elected to leave the Dodgers organization and was picked up by the Padres, but has struggled ever since.

The Quakes also received some outstanding pitching help from Zach Bird and Jharel Cotton who were promoted to the Quakes after the season started. Cotton was subsequently promoted to Double-A Tulsa and Bird was a key piece in the trade that brought Alex Wood, Jim Johnson, Luis Avilan and Jose Peraza to the Dodgers from the Atlanta Braves at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline.

But without question, Dodgers top first base prospect Cody Bellinger has been instrumental for the Quakes success all season long. The 20-year-old Chandler, AZ native and son of former major leaguer Clay Bellinger leads the Cal League in home runs (26), is second in RBIs (87), fifth in doubles (30), 10th in slugging percentage (.526) and 13th in OPS (.853). He has also been outstanding defensively at first base and in the 27 games he has played in the outfield.

So how, then, do the Quakes stand a chance in the playoffs with half of their Opening Day roster now gone? As Sir Isaac Newton would say: “For every action there is an equal opposite reaction,” and on August 14, that reaction occurred with the promotions of outfielders Alex Verdugo and Kyle Garlick, and right-handed pitchers Trevor Oaks and Josh Sborz to the Quakes from the Great Lakes Loons.

Alex Verdugo

Verdugo (19), who was selected by the Dodgers in the second round of the 2014 First-Year Player Draft out of Sahuaro High School in Tucson, AZ, was tearing it up at Great Lakes where he was hitting .295 with five home runs and 42 RBIs.

Kyle Garlick

Garlick (23), who was selected in the 28th round of this year’s draft out of Cal Poly Pomona, had a phenomenal slash-line of .327 / .385 / .517 for a .902 OPS that included four home runs and 24 RBIs in only 38 games with the Loons.

Trevor Oaks

Oaks (22), a seventh-round draft pick by the Dodgers in 2014 out of California Baptist University Riverside, was 5-5 with an excellent 2.56 ERA in his 16 starts with the Loons.

Joshua Sborz

Sborz (21), the Dodgers second-round draft pick this past June out of the University of Virginia, was 0-1 with a 2.84 ERA in his two starts with the Loons following his 0-1 and 4.50 ERA in his three games (two starts) with the Pioneer Rookie League Ogden Raptors.

In their three games since joining the Quakes, Garlick is 6 for 11 (.545) with a home run, a double and five RBIs and Verdugo 7 for 14 (.500) with two doubles and one RBI. Needless to say, opponents are now going to have a very difficult time pitching around Cody Bellinger.

In his one start with the Quakes, Oaks is 0-0 with a 2.08 ERA, having allowed only one earned run in his 4.1 innings of work, and Sborz is 0-0 with a 4.50 ERA, having allowed only one earned run in his two innings pitched thus far.

Pablo Fernandez

Another addition to the Quakes rotation occurred two weeks earlier when Cuban defector Pablo Millan Fernandez was promoted to the Quakes from the Loons. If the name Pablo Fernandez sounds vaguely familiar to you, it well should – he was signed the same day that fellow Cuban defector Hector Olivera was signed by the Dodgers. And while Olivera received nearly all of the ink, hype and hoopla, Fernandez is a potential superstar in his own right and could prove to be the better signing of the two. Unlike Olivera, who was also sent to Atlanta in the aforementioned trade, Fernandez was signed to a minor league contract – although for a rather hefty $8 million signing bonus. By doing so, the Dodgers avoided having to use any of their international bonus pool monies towards the signing. They also will not have to pay a 40 percent tax on his contract towards their $189 million luxury tax because his contract is a minor league deal.

In his three starts with the Quakes, Fernandez is 2-0 with a 3.31 ERA. He has struck out 16 and walked only three in his 16.1 innings of work. The 26-year-old Holguin, Cuba native figures to be in big league spring training camp next February and will be vying for a spot in the Dodgers 2016 rotation.

Even though the ultimate goal for the Quakes and the rest of the Dodgers minor league teams is to prepare their young players for advancement through the Dodgers minor league system and hopefully one day making it to The Show and not necessarily to win championships, you’ve got to like the recently reinforced Quakes chances of doing exactly that.