The Dodgers Are Genuinely Vulnerable, And Vegas Doesn’t Care 

On Thursday night, Edwin Diaz walked out to protect a 4-2 lead in the ninth inning against the team with the best record in baseball. He walked back off the mound having blown it, and the Los Angeles Dodgers dropped the series opener to Milwaukee 5-4. 

On Friday night, with a 3-1 lead, the Dodgers went back to Diaz in the ninth. This time, he got the job done, but not before hitting a batter and walking two more to load the bases. It took him 26 pitches, 11 of which were strikes, and a web-gem snag by Tommy Edman at second base for the Dodgers to narrowly escape the clutches of yet another late-breaking defeat.

If you’ve watched or kept up with the Dodgers even semi-regularly over the last 15 days, these last two nights have exemplified a new and rather unwelcome normal.

And yet, as of Saturday, August 15, BetMGM still prices the Dodgers at +160 to win the World Series, miles ahead of the Yankees at +750. That confidence is increasingly difficult to reconcile with what’s happening on the field.

The back-to-back defending champions have won just five of their last 14, getting swept by Boston and Chicago, dropping two of three to Arizona and needing a sweep of the last-place Royals just to stop the bleeding. Even that came with only a +4 run differential. Not exactly a statement or return to form.

So the Dodgers’ recent performance begs a more uncomfortable question: is this merely a rough patch, or is the rest of the league beginning to write the book on them?

Stats updated prior to games on Saturday, August 15

The Shutdown Inning Problem

If you want to understand what’s actually broken here, forget the box scores and look at the moments right after the Dodgers do something good.

Going back to July 31, when LA sat at a comfortable 69-40, the Dodgers have been almost incapable of following a score with a shutdown inning:

• The seven-game losing streak opened at home against Boston, where the Dodgers were up 4-3 in the fifth and were down 8-4 by the seventh.
• The next day, LA took a 2-1 lead early, only to watch Boston tie it right back up and then take the lead in the eighth.
• In the series finale, a three-run second inning gave way to a three-run third against them, and a 3-2 lead evaporated into a 5-3 deficit.
• Against the Cubs, the Dodgers scored three in the top of the first and immediately surrendered two in the bottom half. They cut a deficit to 7-5 with a sixth-inning homer, then gave up three more the very next half-inning.
• Even in the Royals sweep, supposedly the good part of this stretch, LA blew a 5-3 sixth-inning lead in game one and coughed up a 3-1 seventh-inning lead in game two before escaping with a late comeback.

Right now, this is a team that cannot protect the moments it creates for itself. 

Since July 31, the Dodgers rank 19th in the majors with a 4.52 staff ERA and have surrendered the third-most home runs in baseball (20).

Their bullpen ERA of 4.00 ranks 15th, which is better than only the Rays, Diamondbacks and Phillies among current playoff teams, two of the clubs fighting for wild-card spots.

The Culprits, By Name

Edwin Diaz was a signing I was skeptical of from the jump, and the results have been worse than the skepticism warranted. He missed most of the year hurt, and in the 15 games he’s pitched, he’s posted a 10.66 ERA and a 2.45 WHIP to go with four blown saves against seven converted, good for a -1.1 bWAR.

Justin Wrobleski’s All-Star-break breakout has completely reversed. He allowed seven home runs across his first 17 starts of the season; he’s allowed nine in his last three alone, and he’s sitting on an 11.74 ERA in August. Regression was expected, but this is a cliff.

Even Tarik Skubal, the big trade-deadline addition, has looked human in Dodger blue: a 4.09 ERA through two starts and 11 innings, with four walks and multiple home runs allowed. The bright spots have been Roki Sasaki and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, both sitting at a 2.10 ERA or lower since the break, and Tanner Scott, the only reliever with a sub-3.00 mark out of the pen in that stretch.

Offensively, the story is just as uneven. The Dodgers rank 13th in OPS over the last 15 days at .724, and 24th in “late and close” OPS on the season at .683. Kyle Tucker, another offseason addition I didn’t love at the time, has been a genuine disappointment: a .234 average, 11 home runs, a .705 OPS, and a -4 Fielding Run Value in right field that’s dragging a Dodgers defense ranked fourth in baseball in team FRV. 

Mookie Betts has been excellent defensively at shortstop (+6 FRV) in his age-33 season, but he’s hitting just .239 with a .709 OPS, and a brutal .206/.608 line against left-handed pitching. Betts’ struggles are part of a larger problem. The Dodgers are 3-7 against left-handed starters since July 31.

Is that becoming part of the blueprint? Put a left-hander on the mound and force this lineup to find a way?

Teoscar Hernandez has also been shaky in left (-2 FRV) and is hitting .249 with a .714 OPS. Since the break, Shohei Ohtani is the only regular Dodger with an OPS north of .800 (.875).

Dalton Rushing, who was hot before suffering a potentially season-ending elbow injury on August 1, is gone. Will Smith has played just 52 games since a neck injury sidelined him June 5, though he’s reportedly close to taking batting practice again. In the meantime, LA is piecing together catcher duties between Ben Rortvedt and Hunter Feduccia.

Bought, Not Built

The Dodgers are the second-oldest team in baseball by average age (30.3). Lately, it shows, and there isn’t an obvious cavalry coming. The farm system is loaded, headlined by Josue De Paula and Mike Sirota producing big numbers in Double-A, but a jump to the majors during a stretch run quest for a three-peat is a lot of pressure and could stunt their development.

James Tibbs III has mashed in Triple-A, but he doesn’t project as an immediate defensive upgrade over Tucker or Hernandez in the corner outfield.

Here’s my real frustration with this team: they’ve drifted from what made them who they are. This is an organization that built a dynasty on analytically sound, disciplined spending. Instead, over the last two offseasons, it feels like they’ve started buying premium free agents just to keep them off the market, and not necessarily because they were the best roster fit. 

I wasn’t sold on Tucker or Diaz before the season, and both are now costing the Dodgers real money and real outs on the field.

Maybe this is what happens when an eight-game division lead allows a great team to drift onto autopilot. But coast for long enough and little lapses become habits, and habits aren’t always easy to shed when October suddenly demands precision. The erosion in their day-to-day execution is becoming difficult to ignore.

The team-wide numbers can obscure some of that erosion. The Dodgers rank fourth in baseball in walks this season after finishing second from 2021-25, which is not exactly a collapse. But several of the hitters who define this lineup have become less selective.

Ohtani’s walk rate is down from 15% to 13.5%, Betts’ is down from 9.2% to 7.2%, Tucker’s is down from 14.6% to 12.4% and Max Muncy’s is down from 16.5% to 11.3%.

And there’s more to Ohtani’s walk rate. In 112 plate appearances leading off games, Ohtani has walked just 11 times (9.8%). His aggression can produce instant offense, but it can also produce a quick first out—an especially noticeable dynamic for a lineup that has struggled to manufacture momentum when the early damage doesn’t come.

The Cubs exposed the Dodgers with record-setting run prevention and a deep, resilient lineup that fouls off pitches and draws more walks than any team in baseball. The Red Sox exposed them with timely hitting and the best bullpen in baseball. The Diamondbacks exposed them with elite baserunning, small ball, and clutch situational hitting. 

Now Milwaukee’s pitching depth and relentless style are testing them in yet another way. Four different playoff-caliber teams have found four different ways to beat the Dodgers. That’s what makes this stretch harder to dismiss as a slump.

LA is still eighth in zone swing rate (48.1%), fifth in lowest chase rate (27.8%), and sixth-lowest in whiff rate (23.9%). They own the fourth-lowest ground-ball rate and the fifth-best barrel rate in baseball. The talent, individually, is still there.

But the Dodgers also lead all of baseball in GIDP (103), which is a small, ugly detail that sums up the season so far: a team capable of doing almost everything right, and still finding a way to strand the moment.

Talent can cover for a lot of sins. It helped the Dodgers to two straight titles. But it can’t buy a third straight championship on reputation alone, certainly not with this level of competition circling, and not with a roster that keeps handing games back as fast as it wins them.