An awful truth has arisen with the Dodgers since the Fourth of July. This team has gotten into the terrible habit of playing down to its competition. Where prior incarnations of the team would pad their respective win totals in beating the teams that were supposedly inferior on paper, the 2025 Dodgers have made a habit of skipping the low-hanging fruit.
Over their last 31 games, the Dodgers are 11-4 against teams with winning records and 6-10 against teams below .500.
In a word, that record is unacceptable.
Admittedly, in past work, I sensed that something was off about the team. I understand that the season is long and taxing but the runway to secure a playoff bye and to silence naysayers about the disappointing nature of this year’s team is rapidly ending.
Admittedly, when the Dodgers have been frustrating, I have distracted myself with other tasks knowing that this stretch of the calendar was looming and that my attention would soon be locked in, for better or worse.
Losing to and being dominated by 2025-Yu Darvish and Nestor Cortes is one thing; but to be dominated by pitching that the rest of baseball seems to have no issue with is alarming at best.
Whatever accomplishment was to be had after effectively ending the Cincinnati Reds’ season was undone by being stymied by 2025 Zac Gallen and Eduardo Rodriguez who had a combined ERA of 5.36.
Considering that the team has spent all year discounting the notion of a championship hangover and that the team could find that extra edge that it really should not need, it was shocking that Dave Roberts admitted both facts to Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic over the weekend:
“I hate going backward and talking about last year,” Roberts said. “But when you’re playing a long season, you’re defending champions, people are coming after you, which we know and understand, it’s just hard to keep that dialed in focus every single night. That’s just reality. That’s human nature.”
“I do think that a flip can be switched,” Roberts said. “It doesn’t feel good for me saying it. … Whatever it is, we’ve got to do it right now. We’ve got to win today. We’ve got to play better baseball. We’ve got to play more focused baseball and then let the chips fall where they may. There’s just more in there. There just is.”
At some point, which the team has likely reached, responsibility for the apparent mediocrity is shared amongst the players and managerial staff. The Dodgers have publicly talked of accountability but if the end result has not changed, is one truly being accountable?
It has been a frustrating exercise to watch the Dodgers for large portions of the season. At some point, a slump is not just a slump but rather a paradigm shift into a new normal. A deeper examination of what this thought means to the organization at a whole will likely be dissected during the offseason.
Every single writer at True Blue LA had the 2025 Dodgers winning at least 100 games. I was the most conservative thinking that Ohtani, Freeman, Betts, and company were due for some regression, not posting career-low marks. When Michael Conforto and Teoscar Hernandez are putting up similar offense numbers, something has either gone blissfully right or terribly wrong.
Closing Time
As the season calendar now turns to September, the Dodgers are faced with a unique opportunity: they now have a stretch of nine games against literal last place teams.
- The Pittsburgh Pirates – haven’t had anything to play for since April and are likely wasting one of the premier pitching talents in the sport (Paul Skenes) by mimicking the terrible decision making and roster construction of the Shohei Ohtani-Mike Trout-era Anaheim Angels
- The Baltimore Orioles – the biggest disappointment in the sport, felled by regression and failure to bolster a young core that finally sparked some excitement in Baltimore
- The Colorado Rockies – still terrible, just not in any historic way.
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.
In any other year, one would expect the Dodgers to easily dispatch, inferior opponents like the Orioles, the Pirates, and the Rockies, cementing the Dodgers’ hold on the division and coasting into the postseason with one of the two first round byes.
If this untenable status quo continues, the Dodgers’ dalliance with mediocrity will likely resolve itself in short order. For the next six games, I will be on-site in both Pittsburgh and Baltimore providing coverage and insight of the proceedings.
PNC Park and Oriole Park at Camden Yards are two of the most venerable and spectacular venues in MLB. Apart from a potential blip on Thursday, the weather should likely cooperate for the proceedings. Everything that can be lined up in the Dodgers’ favor seems to be doing so.
Yet, I cannot shake this pervasive feeling of dread. I suppose the next six will tell me whether my anxiety was founded on a level I could not adequately describe or whether I am suffering through a unique form of jet lag.
