On the first day of spring training, at a Camelback Ranch facility adorned with ever-present reminders of the team’s 2024 World Series title, a Dodgers staff member took in the scene, then chuckled while reflecting on the club’s trek to a championship.
“Last year was not a fun year,” the staff member said. “At least, not until the end.”
Indeed, in the afterglow of the franchise’s first full-season title in more than three decades, the turbulent path getting there became easy to forget.
Last season’s Dodgers dealt with a wave of injuries to the pitching staff, inconsistencies in the lineup, and the club’s lowest full regular-season win total (98) in six years.
Fast-forward six months, and this year’s Dodgers find themselves in a similar place.
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They are again navigating absences on the mound and in the bullpen over the last several weeks. Their offense has gone from leading the majors in scoring over the first half of the season, to suddenly sputtering over the last month and a half.
And after a 7-4 loss to the Angels on Monday, in the opener of a three-game Freeway Series at Angel Stadium, they are on pace for only 92 victories with a 68-51 record, clinging to what has dwindled to just a one-game lead in the National League West over the San Diego Padres.
Little fun. Lots of frustration.
“It’s not going well for us right now,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “We got to find a way to snap out of it. No one’s going to feel sorry for us. So it’s on us to find our way out of it, and we need to do it.”
Monday’s game was a lost cause from the start.
Despite getting an extra day of rest this week, after flipping places in the rotation with Tyler Glasnow for Sunday’s loss against the Toronto Blue Jays, Yoshinobu Yamamoto turned in one of his worst starts in the majors.
He gave up a home run to Zach Neto on his first pitch of the night, and another run later in the first inning after two walks (one of them on a missed third strike call from home plate umpire Dan Iassogna) and a Yoán Moncada single.
Then, in the fifth, his outing completely fell apart. Five of the first seven batters of the inning reached base (four singles and a hit by pitch). Four runs crossed the plate (including two on a Mike Trout single). And after Yamamoto walked his fifth batter with two outs, manager Dave Roberts was forced into an early hook, removing Yamamoto after 4⅔ innings and six runs (the most Yamamoto has yielded in his 41-game MLB career).
“[The early runs] kind of threw me off rhythm,” Yamamoto, whose earned-run average rose to a season-high 2.84, through interpreter Yoshihiro Sonoda. “As the game went on, I was trying to make a few adjustments. But unfortunately, I didn’t make them.”
The Dodgers’ lineup didn’t do much better.
Over the first six innings, they failed to figure out Angels right-hander José Soriano and his upper-90s mph sinker, managing just two hits while striking out six times.
Angels shortstop Zach Neto celebrates with teammates after hitting a home run in the sixth inning Monday against the Dodgers. (Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
By the time they finally put a runner in scoring position in the seventh, the deficit had grown to 7-0 on Neto’s second home run of the night (this time off Alexis Diaz). And even then, they came up empty, with Alex Freeland grounding into an inning-ending double-play against former Dodgers reliever Luis García with the bases loaded.
Eighth-inning home runs from Shohei Ohtani (his 42nd of the season, and the 100th of his career at his old home stadium in Anaheim) and Muncy (a three-run drive inside the right-field foul pole) put the Dodgers on the board at long last.
But it was far too little, much too late — allowing the Angels (57-62) to improve to 4-0 against the Dodgers this season after sweeping a series at Chavez Ravine back in May.
“This was a bad loss for us,” Muncy said. “There’s not really a way of getting around that.”
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts walks off the field after pulling Yoshinobu Yamamoto from the game in the fifth inning Monday. (Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
When coupled with Sunday’s maddening defeat to Toronto (a defeat that left Roberts outwardly perturbed in his postgame news conference), the last 48 hours have represented another backward step in a Dodgers’ campaign that is quickly growing full of them.
It has zapped whatever momentum was building after the team’s two series-opening victories against the AL East-leading Blue Jays last weekend. It has dropped the club to 12-19 since the Fourth of July, the fifth-worst record in the majors over that span. And, most consequentially, it has opened the door for the Padres (who were 8½ games back of the Dodgers as recently as July 2) to inch closer to the division lead ahead of their visit to Dodger Stadium on Friday.
“You hate to say that yesterday’s loss carried over to tonight, and you got to give credit to Soriano and the way he threw the baseball,” Roberts said. “But, yeah, I mean, you win yesterday, and you feel even better about coming into today. But now you’re looking at losing two games in a row.
“There definitely has to be some urgency. I don’t think anyone is blind to the fact that the standings are the standings. It’s gotten a lot more interesting. So we’ve got to go out there and play good baseball. I definitely feel that our guys are starting to feel that urgency. It’s been long enough of middling baseball — as far as overall team wins and losses.”
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The only silver lining: The Dodgers overcame similar struggles last year, doing just enough down the stretch to win the division and march all the way to an unlikely championship.
But they were hoping to avoid such headaches this year, and mount a more enjoyable title defense.
With less than two months remaining in the season, that dream has come and gone.
The Dodgers can still win another World Series. But the road to this point has been anything but a breeze.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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