Amid the Dodgers’ recent tailspin, and with a pivotal seven-game homestand on the horizon, manager Dave Roberts did not mince words before first pitch on Monday afternoon.
After losses in eight of the club’s last nine games, Roberts decried what he described as a lack of “urgency” and “focus.”
With his team now facing a deficit for a top-two National League playoff seed, and in danger of potentially missing out on a first-round bye in the postseason, he called out the reality of their predicament frankly: “Kind of thinking about it on the plane yesterday,” he said, “we’re a wild-card team right now. We gotta get going.”
Most of all, Roberts expressed frustration with an offense that has ranked among the league’s worst in overall production the last two months, and has been particularly impotent against increased fastball usage from opposing pitching staffs.
“It never feels good to be bullied,” he said. “And to know that teams go after us with the fastball more than any team in baseball, that’s bothersome. That would bother me.”
Roberts did take personal accountability for the team’s recent slump, which includes a 9-15 record over the last 24 games. He said it was on him to raise the roster’s intensity level, and signaled a willingness to begin “managing more urgently” with his team suddenly in a dogfight in the standings.
“Everyone’s trying,” he acknowledged. “But I think the effort could still be enhanced and improved and more focused. So yeah, I think it’s just a reminder. A good reminder. There’s plenty of time. We’re still plenty good. But we gotta play like it.”
A good place to start would be the offense. While the unit ranks fourth in scoring and second in OPS among MLB teams on the season, they are 24th and 21st in those categories since the start of July.
“We’ve scored runs, a lot of runs — fourth in baseball — but that doesn’t tell the whole story,” Roberts said. “The story is being the best version of ourselves, and that’s hitting the fastball, and making adjustments in at-bats, situationally, all of it.”
The team’s struggles against fastballs have grown increasingly pronounced lately.
No team has been challenged with heaters more than the Dodgers over the last several months, and yet no club has a worse weighted on-base average (an all-encompassing stat to measure overall productivity) than their $400-plus million roster.
“You’ve got to look into your zone and get the bat head to it,” Roberts said of how the team can address such a glaring weakness. “It’s something that, I hope our guys take that personally. We shouldn’t get bullied [with fastballs by opposing pitchers].”
The club’s pitching staff, meanwhile, offers a more promising pathway to an immediate turnaround.
Tarik Skubal is set to make his Dodger Stadium debut on Monday night. Blake Snell is scheduled to return from the injured list to start Tuesday’s game. Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani are both progressing in their injury recoveries (Glasnow made his second minor-league rehab start on Sunday, while Ohtani played catch for the second time in recent days on Monday). Yoshinobu Yamamoto continues to be the rotation’s one steady metronome, as well.
With that group rounding into form, the Dodgers should only need so much improvement from the offense to snap out of their funk.
They navigated similar challenges last year, and still found a way to defend their World Series title.
That’s why, for now, Roberts isn’t panicking.
It was time, though, for him to turn up the dial.
“[Saying], ‘We’re gonna be OK and we’re good,’ that’s not good enough,” Roberts said. “Clearly it’s not, given how we’ve played over the last month. So we put ourselves in this position. [We have] a lot of talent. But I think across the board, we need to play with more urgency. And our guys know that.”
