For all the hemming and hawing over the Dodgers ruining baseball by accumulating many of the best players in the sport, they sure aren’t playing like it right now. They’ve gotten swept for two series in a row, looking more like a team who will have to play a wild card series rather than have a cakewalk to a third straight World Series.
The good news is the Dodgers will not lose on Thursday, but only because they don’t play.
Every team, no matter how good or bad, will have a stretch of the season in
which they seemingly can’t get out of their own way, and look inept to the point of frustration over a reasonably long stretch of time. The Dodgers are in the throes of such a malaise right now, having lost six straight games.
Before getting drubbed by the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs, the Dodgers had not lost more than four games in a row this season. In this decade-long stretch during which the Dodgers have won five pennants, beginning in 2017, they’ve only lost six games in row five times:
Dodgers longest losing streaks, 2017-26
- 2017: 11 straight losses (Sept. 2-11)
- 2025: 7 straight losses (July 4-11)
- 2018: 6 straight losses (May 10-16)
- 2019: 6 straight losses (April 8-13)
- 2026: 6 straight losses (July 31-Aug. 5)*
*currently active streak
The Dodgers offense hasn’t exactly been humming during the losing streak, and has been rather ordinary even since the start of July. They scored more than one run five times in 54 innings over the last six games. The first four of those crooked-number frames gave the Dodgers the lead. Five runs in the eighth inning on Wednesday at Wrigley Field only served to give hope in a game that was already seemingly decided. Instead, the Dodgers lost by one run instead of a lot.
Yosshinobu Yamamoto and Tarik Skubal — the two pitchers on the active roster expected to be in the Dodgers’ ideal postseason rotation — each had productive, quality starts, combining to allow five runs in 14 innings. But they lost both starts, just like all six starters (or bulk pitcher, in the case of fill-in Cole Irvin on Friday) have during this woeful stretch.
Even with the good starts by Yamamoto and Skubal, Dodgers “starters” during the last six games have an 8.42 ERA, allowing 29 runs in 31 innings, including 13 home runs. That’s no way to live, with the team averaging seven runs allowed during the losing streak, giving up five or more runs five times in the last six games.
When the Dodgers allow five or more runs this season, they are 11-28 (.282). When they give up four or fewer runs, they are 58-18 (.763). They should look into doing more of the latter.
Over the last six games, the Dodgers played 105 half-innings. They led after 12 of them. Up next are the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field, who swept the Dodgers a month ago in Los Angeles. Not playing from behind most of the time would go a long way toward ending a losing streak.
