The Los Angeles Dodgers are feeling something that has felt uncommon over the past several years: Vulnerability. Despite winning back-to-back World Series, it seems as if nothing is breaking right for the reigning champs right now. That was furthered on Thursday night as the Atlanta Braves completed a three-game sweep of the Dodgers behind a Chris Sale complete-game shutout. And now, LA has lost the postseason tiebreaker to both the Braves and the Milwaukee Brewers.
Specifically with the Braves series, one in which the Dodgers were swept while losing all three games by exactly one run, it feels like time to point fingers and assess some blame. There are always culprits at various moments, but when you’re talking about pinpointing people who could’ve swung the series and momentum in a different direction, these three in LA feel like they deserve the bulk of the blame.
DH Shohei Ohtani
This is by no means an attempt to discredit who Shohei Ohtani is. But if we’re looking at the series against the Braves in a vacuum, you do have to wonder if the superstar and perennial MVP candidate could’ve simply done more.
On the whole, Ohtani ended up going 3-for-14 in the series with four strikeouts, no RBI and only one run scored in the three-game set. Yes, he did try to get a rally started in the ninth inning on Tuesday with a triple, but the rest of the Dodgers wasted even that. And beyond that, he simply wasn’t in enough opportunities in the leadoff spot to keep creating.
No question, this isn’t something I would expect to be the norm for Ohtani and Los Angeles. He’s the best baseball player on the planet, even if he doesn’t win NL MVP this season. He can singlehandedly take over any baseball game he’s on the field for. At the same, this was a crucial series in terms of both mental edges and pushes for playoff seeding. Ohtani simply didn’t come through to the level that you would’ve expected him to, including going 0-for-4 in the finale when the Dodgers were begging for an offensive spark.
OF Kyle Tucker
You’d be hard-pressed to find two more opposite ends of the spectrum than our first candidate to blame, Ohtani, and Kyle Tucker when you look at the season as a whole. Tucker has been truly abysmal for the Dodgers since he joined them, and that ultimately just felt magnified in a series that held the importance of this one against the Braves.
Not to beat a dead horse as we’ve discussed Tucker’s struggles ad nauseam, but he was a net negative for LA in this series. He started the first two games, going 1-for-9 with a run scored, but then was essentially platooned with Alex Call for the finale against Sale. He did get in late as a pinch runner (and by late, we mean that the Dodgers were down to their last out), but his impact was next to nothing.
Beyond just the poor numbers from this series, though, you have to look at Tucker as a candidate to blame on a macro scale. While he was never joining the Dodgers to be the face of the franchise, he was supposed to be the latest Infinity Stone that this organization was connecting. Instead, the club can’t even rely on him to start all three games when healthy against a massive NL opponent. That speaks volumes about the negative effect he’s having on this team.
Manager Dave Roberts
I’m not going to be one of those people sitting at home and telling you that managing an MLB team is easy. No one should ever make that mistake. At the same time, when the margins of all three games against the Braves were so paper-thin for the Dodgers, you have to look at manager Dave Roberts and wonder why he wasn’t more willing or aggressive in pulling more levels.
The finale was a great example on Thursday night. Sale was dealing, obviously. At the same time, though, Roberts did nothing to try and deliver a spark outside of pinch-running Alek Thomas for Freddie Freeman and Tucker for Miguel Rojas. He then let Alex Call come up with the Dodgers down to their last strike while Max Muncy was still on the bench. Sure, the matchup would be left-on-left, but there’s not a fan in LA alive who would rather have Call at the plate in that spot than Muncy.
Roberts didn’t have an easy task in this series, especially with having to work the bullpen so heavily in the second game of the series once Roki Sasaki left with an injury. However, you could still argue that he’s far too content to not try and pull strings. In a game like baseball, even when you have a team that’s as loaded with talent as the Dodgers, the manager has to make the adjustments to help his team. It quite blatantly felt like Roberts didn’t even attempt to do that enough in this series.
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