The Dodgers have been the best team money can buy for years now, and lately that money isn't buying home runs. LA's offense has gone cold over the last month, the slugging has disappeared, and the walks that usually come with a patient, powerful lineup have dried up right alongside it. It's the kind of slump that shows up in the standings, not just the box score.
Rosenthal and Alanna Rizzo broke down the Dodgers' slide alongside the Ohtani-PCA MVP race and the Red Sox's surge on the latest Fair Territory pod.
On his Fair Territory podcast with Alanna Rizzo, Rosenthal put the Dodgers' fade in the same conversation as some of the sport's biggest current storylines — the MVP race, Boston's hot streak, Atlanta's reversal. That's the company LA's slump is keeping now: it's not a footnote, it's one of the defining threads of the stretch run.
Sarris went deeper on the numbers and landed on something specific: the Dodgers are seeing more fastballs than any other team in baseball right now, and that spike lines up almost exactly with when the power and the patience both vanished.
That's the chicken-or-egg problem Sarris raised outright — are pitchers attacking the Dodgers with more heat because the results say it's working, or did LA's approach change first and the fastballs followed? Either way, a lineup built to punish mistakes is suddenly seeing fewer of them and chasing more, and the numbers back it up.
Sarris tied it to a bigger league-wide idea: since 2021, on-base percentage has actually correlated with team success slightly more than slugging, but the two stats move together because power draws walks. Pitchers who fear the barrel end up nibbling, and hitters who see fewer good pitches to drive end up chasing. For the Dodgers, that loop has flipped against them — less power is producing less patience, and less patience is producing less power.
None of this tanks LA's season on its own — a team built the way the Dodgers are built doesn't fall out of the playoff picture over one bad month. But in a National League where Milwaukee and Atlanta are both bunched up near the top, a prolonged cold spell at the plate is exactly the kind of thing that turns a comfortable seed into a dogfight. Sarris and Rosenthal are both pointing at the same root issue; the Dodgers just have to figure out how to fix it before October makes them pay for it.