Dodgers’ sluggish offense dooms them for third straight series: ‘Haven’t been synced up’

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LOS ANGELES — Dave Roberts welcomed the premise with a smile. April is not a sane time for baseball analysis. Small sample theater is ripe for overreaction. Every slow start means a player is cooked, not ready, or some combination of both. Everything appears to be magnified in Los Angeles, so a brutal 10-day stretch for the Dodgers feels like a month.

Is it crazy to panic? — The question went.

“I don’t want to call anyone crazy,” the Dodgers manager said Sunday morning. “You can.”

A night earlier, they’d been booed out of their own ballpark after the reigning World Series champions suffered the worst home shutout loss in franchise history. Roberts understood. “We got our butts kicked,” he said.

Then the Dodgers lost again on Sunday 4-2 to the Chicago Cubs to drop a third consecutive series. They have not played well for large swaths of this short season. Panic? No. Frustration? Apparent, especially with an offense that has largely sputtered out of the gates despite the team’s 11-6 start to the season.

Their margin is slimmer than a $400 million payroll would suggest, or how this team was built. This was a lineup constructed to make the other question marks on the roster irrelevant. Over three nights, the Dodgers avoided the Cubs’ two top starters — Shota Imanaga and Justin Steele — and managed to score a total of five runs. Of the 26 innings they came to bat, they scored in just three of them.

They have been much too reliant on their collection of individual stars to carry them. The bottom of the order simply hasn’t gotten going. A damning statistic: through 17 games, three-time MVP Shohei Ohtani has come up to the plate with a runner in scoring position just seven times. He’s walked four of those times. It’s not a recipe for good offense.

“We just haven’t been synced up,” Roberts said. He lamented the team’s approach during the Dodgers’ losing trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., citing a lack of team at-bats as they piled up an inordinate number of strikeouts. Their lineup has not exhausted opposing pitching staffs for a full series in a manner that has been their trademark for years.

“The last 10 days, there hasn’t been a lot of loud contact,” Roberts said. “Just kind of building innings, creating stress, we just haven’t done that.”

It’s wiped away the good vibes that came with the Dodgers’ 8-0 start fresh off their title. Even that stretch seemed to gloss over some of the team’s slow start offensively. All but two of those games required a comeback from an early deficit, mostly after struggling to get to the opposing starter.

“I mean even when we were winning early we still weren’t really clicking that good,” Mookie Betts said.

It took until the sixth inning on Friday to ding up Matthew Boyd, a rally that included a hit-by-pitch and ended with Tommy Edman continuing his April power surge with a three-run homer that would be the Dodgers’ only runs. Ben Brown, who’d allowed 11 runs in his first 11 2/3 innings this year, bullied the Dodgers with just fastballs and curveballs over six scoreless innings.

Sunday, it was Colin Rea’s turn to bully the Dodgers with an array of fastballs, some coming in even harder than the Dodgers were expecting and from an unusual release point. Rea, filling in for Steele (whose season officially ended on Sunday), did his job for 11 outs. The Dodgers had just one hard-hit ball against him.

A Cubs bullpen that entered the weekend ranked 25th in baseball with a 4.97 ERA only allowed one run the rest of the way.

Even that run left a bitter taste. Michael Conforto singled and Will Smith grounded a double down the third-base line to lead off the sixth inning, generating a chance for the bottom of the order not just to tie the game but jump on the Cubs for several runs. Max Muncy accomplished the former, lunging for a breaking ball from Caleb Thielbar that he drove to the wall to score Conforto on a sacrifice fly. He pumped his fist with satisfaction. He kept the line moving.

Kiké Hernández worked a full count and got his barrel to an inside breaking ball. Cubs third baseman Matt Shaw dove for the sharp liner, snaring the ball that left Hernández’s bat at 105.2 mph. Hernández stood frozen in disbelief in the batter’s box. When Miguel Rojas got a full-count breaking ball of his own over the plate, he lofted a harmless flyout off the end of the bat to center field. Rojas slammed his bat to the dirt.

“I hit the ball hard,” Hernández said, “but I need to find a way to get that runner in.”

The Dodgers’ quiet bats wasted another strong start from their rotation. Their starters allowed just three runs, all on solo homers, over 17 innings this weekend. Tyler Glasnow delivered six of them, allowing just the two blasts to Pete Crow-Armstrong and Michael Busch.

A half inning after their rally to tie the game, Blake Treinen left a cutter over the plate to Crow-Armstrong. The talented young outfielder and local product smoked it into the pavilion. Treinen’s margins were nonexistent. When Conforto misplayed a Kyle Tucker fly ball down the left-field line in the eighth inning, leading to another run, the two-run deficit felt insurmountable.

Pete Crow-Armstrong rounds the bases after hitting a home run in the seventh inning. He had two homers and a triple against the Dodgers on Sunday. (Kiyoshi Mio / Imagn Images)

“Running counts, getting on base, taking walks when given to us, and not chasing, and try to create stress,” Roberts said. “And when we do that, we give ourselves more opportunities. And when we don’t do that, our margin is much smaller. Pitchers have to be more perfect, and that’s a tough way to live.”

The reasons for the Dodgers’ struggles are easy to explain away. Freddie Freeman wasn’t in the lineup on Sunday, with the reigning World Series MVP starting just five of the team’s first 17 games this season due to rib and ankle issues.

Muncy has gotten off to a slow start. Hernández’s second-inning single marked his first hit all season that wasn’t a home run. Miguel Rojas has scuffled. Andy Pages’ struggles were noteworthy enough that the rookie was given a day off this week before slugging two home runs to cap off the recent trip. Those four have combined to hit .150.

Hernández said he found a slight adjustment in his stance in the last few days. He was crouching too low, getting underneath the baseball and sacrificing contact as a result. Sunday, he hit those two baseballs hard. Roberts lauded Muncy’s ability to “show some fight” and get the ball in the air to score the run. That marks progress in April, even in the middle of an ugly stat line. If one or two of those names start trending up, so should the rest of the offense.

“We have more guys scuffling than guys that are feeling really good at the plate,” Hernández said, acknowledging his place as one of those struggling. “So it’s just one of those stretches right now. It’s a matter of time. We’re going to snap out of it and we’re just going to start steamrolling people.”

a Nico knock to bring Tuck home 😊 pic.twitter.com/jBzvJ0c6eq

— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) April 14, 2025

The Dodgers’ offense is more talented than the last 10 days have indicated. Which makes this stretch all the more perplexing.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve sucked for two weeks,” Betts said. “It just happens that it’s right now. If we panic, things get worse. If you don’t panic, it looks like we don’t care. So what are we supposed to do?”

Something to ease the Dodgers’ concerns, at least in the short term: the Colorado Rockies, who come into town next, have a more legitimate gripe with the state of their offense. They just went into Petco Park and got swept by the San Diego Padres without scoring so much as a single run.

(Top photo of Shohei Ohtani: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Getty Images)

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