The Dodgers Fall Behind

The Dodgers are not the best team in baseball right now.

It’s been a tough go of late for the team supposedly breaking the sport. The Dodgers began August with a seven-game losing streak, and they’ve played two games below .500 since the All-Star break. They just dropped three of four to the Brewers over the weekend, ceding their standing as the top team in the majors.

Most slumping teams are slumping at the plate, and that’s certainly the case for the Dodgers. Their 93 wRC+ in the second half ranks 18th in the majors, after reaching the All-Star break with a best-in-show 115 wRC+. Their walk rate has dropped about three points, and their slugging percentage has dropped about 30 points. They’ve really struggled to get runners on, and when they do, the threat often ends in a popup or double play — sometimes even both.

It’s the same lineup as before, with the same group of stars that most fans are familiar with. This isn’t a case where their name recognition outstrips their quality, either. FanGraphs Depth Charts still projects Dodgers batters for the second-most WAR the rest of the way. The Mariners are the team ahead of them, so take that with a grain of salt, but again, we’ve actually seen this Dodgers team hit very well for months at a time.

This just kind of strikes me as a cluster of poorly timed slumps. Kyle Tucker’s frustrating “will he or won’t he” season is back on the down slope, and his 97 wRC+ would be a career worst. Mookie Betts’ is also on track for his worst-ever wRC+, sunk by a .231 BABIP despite decent peripherals. Teoscar Hernández has provided massive surges and slumps, though he is currently stuck in the latter. Even those having great seasons overall, like Shohei Ohtani and Max Muncy, have been lesser versions of themselves the last few weeks. For instance, Freddie Freeman is hitting well over .300 in the second half, but he doesn’t have an extra base hit in August and hasn’t homered since July 4. So many innings end with him standing at first base, waiting for someone to bring him his glove.

The pitching has been notably worse, too. The Dodgers ranked third by WAR in the first half, and they’ve ranked 21st in the second half. Justin Wrobleski’s surprising effectiveness as a contact manager seems to have faded all at once, as he’s given up 11 home runs in his last four starts, including two that were the difference in the 4-1 loss to the Brewers on Saturday. The next day, he was placed on the injured list with left forearm inflammation. Ohtani hasn’t pitched since July 3 while dealing with left knee inflammation and right biceps soreness. He threw a bullpen session last week and should make it back to the mound at some point this year, but his absence has created an ace-sized hole at the top of the rotation. That’s especially true with Blake Snell just recently returning from the IL (a strong six innings of one-run ball with three hits, one walk, and 10 strikeouts against the Royals last Tuesday) and Tyler Glasnow still on the shelf. Of course, the Dodgers recently traded for Tarik Skubal to fill that hole, though his performance in three starts with the new club has been closer to “solid” than “game breaking.” He gave up just two runs across six innings in his outing on Sunday, allowing two walks and seven hits. On most occasions, that would’ve been enough to pitch the Dodgers to victory. But the offense scored just two runs, and the bullpen allowed four runs in the three innings after Skubal’s departure. All things considered, the rotation is the least of my concerns going forward, even if it has been just OK of late.

And the Dodgers really need the rotation to perform at a high level because the bullpen certainly hasn’t picked up the slack. There’s all sorts of small sample numbers to point to, but the one that feels most prescient is 21 meltdowns in the second half, which is second most in the majors. It took Edwin Díaz and Alex Vesia nine batters to get three outs on Thursday while turning a 4-2 win into a 5-4 loss. Both pitchers have struggled with walks, but Díaz has compounded those issues by also being extremely hittable since his return from the injured list in late July. I’d say I can’t see him getting much more leash in high-leverage spots, but there simply aren’t many better options around. The only real consistency the Dodgers have found in the back of the bullpen has come from Tanner Scott, which is a bit of irony given he was often the scapegoat for their modest record in 2025.

To recap: The Dodgers at the moment have a middling lineup, an underperforming rotation with tenuous health, and a shallow, unreliable bullpen. That sounds like a lot of teams across the majors right now. The difference is the Dodgers spent the first several months of the year exhibiting their greatness and building a massive lead in the division. This is still the team with the most WAR and best run differential in the majors. This is still the Dodgers. Things maybe feel bad at the moment, but given we’ve seen this exact group win tons of games already, I won’t be concerned unless this continues into late September.

It’s interesting to think that a team as good as the Dodgers might ever slump. I wanted to see how rare it is for a truly great team to go on a legitimate losing streak and play below .500 for a substantial amount of time. I found every team that finished in the top three by either win rate, run differential, or WAR in a season dating back to 2016 (excluding 2020). I’m not totally happy with these parameters, but I think this offers a nice illustration. I found each team’s longest losing streak, as well as its worst 25-game stretch in that season. Here’s a big ol’ (sortable) list:

The 2026 Dodgers’ seven-game skid is tied with eight other teams for the second-longest streak among these great teams. In other words, it’s a notable slide, but certainly not an outlier.

The true outlier on the list actually belongs to the 2017 Dodgers, who lost 11 straight games (and 16 of 17) in the final quarter of the season. That team somehow still won 104 games. I’d actually forgotten how many wild swings that season contained. The 2017 Dodgers were 91-36 through August 25 and on pace to set the single-season win record, before that three-week collapse limited them to mere greatness. It’s interesting to compare their season to those of the 2017 Astros and Guardians, who won 101 and 102 games, respectively.

About the same time the Dodgers began their collapse, the Guardians embarked upon a record-setting 22-game winning streak and ended the season going 33-4. They’d been a step above mediocre for nearly five months of the year and still wound up winning 102 games. The Astros, by comparison, look kind of boring, running away with the division early, slumping a bit after the All-Star break, and finishing strong — a pretty standard approach to a remarkable win total.

What does this mean for the 2026 Dodgers? Well, nothing. I just like these plots. If there’s a takeaway, though, it’s just to say it’s not weird for this group to suddenly struggle. Most teams slump at some point in the season, even great teams – even the greatest teams. In fact, the Dodgers this year are still pacing a game better than they were in 2024 and three games better than they were in 2025, and those seasons turned out pretty well.

However, if the measure of success is winning baseball’s equivalent of the President’s Trophy, or at the very least the one seed in the NL, the Dodgers are in a tough spot. They’re three games back of Milwaukee, who’ve maintained a 100-win pace since the earliest days of the season. The Brewers have had some issues at the plate in the second half (though they made light work of the Dodgers this weekend), but their rotation is healthy again and their bullpen has been airtight. I keep waiting for them to stumble, and they simply haven’t. It’s possible we’ll finally see them crack in the final month of the season, but it’s just as likely they’ll get hot again and eclipse 100 wins for the first time in franchise history by quite a bit. My gut tells me this is now the Brewers’ race to lose. But as we saw in 2017, seasons can take bizarre and unpredictable shapes. This should be fun.