Sequels are never as good as the original unless one is talking about The Godfather, Part Two, or The Empire Strikes Back.
For instance, the road trip that effectively started my baseball writing career was eight straight losses over ten days in four cities. Initially, my plans for visiting Pittsburgh and Baltimore involved going to five games: three in Pittsburgh and two in Baltimore. As fate would have it, my flight got moved, and I had the silly idea to go to the finale and then race like a madman
to the airport.
This plan actually worked, unlike the Dodgers over Labor Day week.
If the Dodgers played badly enough that I made literal memes, then I feel obligated to revive an old meme to prove a point. Enough happened to break the reports of my shenanigans over two essays, with this essay focusing on the baseball rather than the vibes.
Aren’t you missing a field report from your visit to Los Angeles?
I used some of the material from that field report in the article “Dodgers have just won the season series against the Cincinnati Reds,” with the rest to be shared on Dodger Stadium-related issues when the Dodgers return for their final homestand of the regular season.
Called shot
Let us revisit what I previously wrote before my ill-fated outing to Pittsburgh and Baltimore.
“The Dodgers should go at least 7-2 against these three disappointing teams to build any sort of momentum towards the showdown with the Philadelphia Phillies to likely determine the second seed in the National League. Anything less for the talent that is supposedly on the roster is an underachievement.
The Dodgers are 7-1 when I am around in 2025, but something tells me that this record will likely balance itself out over the next week.
Unfortunately with this year’s team, in one of the more perplexing disappointments of the 2025 season, one could easily imagine the Dodgers going 4-5 or 5-4, merely treading water and wasting a golden opportunity to improve playoff seeding while barreling towards a humiliating and seemingly inevitable first round playoff exit.“
[emphasis added.]
There are times I truly hate being right. From 7-1 to 8-6. Woof.
It should be a crime to watch such bad baseball in such beautiful parks. I generally don’t complain while I am on the road, but when the play is bad, I am inspired to create mockery-based montages to my favorite music, while I am still at the ballpark, I realize something has gone horribly wrong.
Take Game 2 of the Pittsburgh series, for instance. The Dodgers loaded the bases early with nobody out, then bupkis in almost comedic fashion.
Based solely on math, their inept play last week likely cost the Dodgers any reasonable chance of securing a postseason bye, further widening the gap with the Philadelphia Phillies. Accordingly, it seems neither the Dodgers nor the San Diego Padres is covering itself in glory in the division race based on their inept play as of late.
Yes, the Dodgers swept the worst team in baseball, the Colorado Rockies, at home. Yes, the Padres inexplicably lost a series to still-technically-alive Cincinnati Reds. Technically, the Dodgers gained ground and finally looked as good as advertised against a bad team.
Considering that I watched them look even worse than the Rockies against slightly better teams, I will hold my breath and applause until the team shows more of a consistent pulse.
One fact that seems fairly inevitable with sixteen games to go in the regular season: the Dodgers seemed to be destined for the Wild Card Round, which is a massive disappointment considering the expenditure and the relatively poor play since July.
After all, a slump that persists long enough is the new normal. Yet, it might not be all bad for the Dodgers. Last week, Craig Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus wrote an interesting paywalled essay that argued that the Dodgers were, in fact, ruining baseball even if just a little:
The difference between [now and previous seasons] is that the Dodgers had enough cushion within the division that whatever in-season experiments they wanted to run were basically irrelevant. That’s the kind of thing you can do without causing agita when you win 111 games and finish the season 22 up on your next closest competitor. …
But it’s the similarities that create the bigger problem. In both situations, Roberts and the Dodgers seem to just…not care all that much. Obviously, their preference is to win, you don’t spend what they’ve spent just to win in the playoffs, but to be good enough to sell lots of tickets and ads throughout the season, too. …
There’s nothing strictly wrong with prioritizing a World Series; it’s where the league and its culture have arrived, hand in hand. But the impact of taking the longest view available at every possible turn undeniably results in a diluted on-field product—again, much as we’ve seen with the league as a whole. …
And that kind of thinking can make a certain kind of sense. The league has devalued winning the division, especially if you’re not a top-two seed. The Dodgers likely look at the benefits of being the third-seed division winner compared to the fourth-seed top Wild Card and…shrug. It’s home-field advantage in the Wild Card round either way, so why press things?
I edited the excerpt lightly because there was significant, deserved shade cast at Tanner Scott for his lack of performance in Baltimore. Frankly, pick a day: he was terrible. I have been to my share of games where history was either made or nearly made (twice by the same guy). And seeing a no-hitter bid turn into a debacle that will be remembered in Baltimore for the next thirty years in almost-record time was almost ironically impressive.
Yes, I felt my blood start to boil as Yoshinobu Yamamoto came as close as one can to immortality before it slipped out of his grasp, and then Blake Treinen and Tanner Scott held a clinic of ineptitude that was shared in real time amongst the writers of this site.
I found the entire situation darkly funny, which was aided by my company for the game, which you can hear when the chain of disaster was complete. If the following were a script, it would be dismissed as cliché, as trite. And yet, we all saw it happen.
It was rough, but the Dodgers rebounded against the Rockies to go 4-5. To be fair, the team is still 10-15 against below .500 teams over the last six weeks. With respect to Mr. Goldstein, while the Dodgers are a virtual lock to play October baseball, a speed bump has potentially arisen in San Francisco.
Taking care of business?
If the last few weeks have taught me anything, it’s that the Dodgers are clearly not fans of the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, as they have not been taking care of business, even the working overtime part. The San Francisco Giants had primarily been left for dead, and justifiably so. The team could not score, and fans were split, wondering whether Gerald Posey III had bitten off more than he could chew or whether Bob Melvin would be fired today or tomorrow.
Then the weirdest thing happened: the Giants got an actual voodoo doll and started winning when the Dodgers and Padres decided to go limp. As my companion Adric has actually been accused of being a voodoo doll at Oracle Park, this development is galling, honestly.
I was worried that the Dodgers might stumble against their northern cousins until I realized that the Giants had finally dragged their season record to just above .500. If the Dodgers want to maintain any diminishing hope of a bye and/or stick a dagger in the Giants’ season, they will have seven opportunities to do so over the next ten days.
If the Dodgers lay yet another egg against the Giants, then the final road trip to Phoenix and Seattle may actually get interesting — in a bad way. Regardless, there are just over two weeks of regular-season baseball left in the title defense. It is up to the Dodgers to show that we “ain’t seen nothing yet.”
