The Los Angeles Dodgers lineup was one of the best in baseball through much of the first half of the season, then they went and added another MVP caliber player in Trea Turner.
After adding Turner, the Dodgers expected to have a lineup that would be nearly impossible to stop. However, once October rolled around and the postseason started, they consistently struggled to score runs.
The offense had a few outbursts, but more often than not, scoring just three runs felt like a task that would be too difficult to overcome.
“We needed someone to step up and pull an Eddie Rosario. I don’t know the answer,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said about the team’s postseason struggles. “After we made the Trea Turner deal, in my opinion, one through eight, it was the deepest and best lineup I’ve been around.
“But it didn’t quite play like that over those two months. It was just a little bumpier than I would’ve expected. I thought by having that lineup depth, it could withstand some guys who — it’s inevitable — a couple week stretch where guys are out of rhythm, other guys are hot, other guys are kind of in the middle.
“But we hit some real stretches where five, six guys in the lineup were kind of struggling at the same time.”
An injury to Max Muncy before the playoffs started likely had a big effect on the offense, but the lineup still had more talent than most teams can even dream of collecting.
So what caused the struggles? Friedman isn’t sure, but the Dodgers intend to explore the matter during the winter.
“How much of that is baseball? How much of it is stuff that we can do differently?” he asked. “I don’t know the answer to it. There’s been a lot of talk in years past about our reliance on slug. This year was the perfect combination of more team speed up and down our lineup, where we stole a lot of bases, which was great in that it increases the chances to score runs.
“We just had a hard time converting it. To me, that’s a big part of this postseason, was our struggle to consistently score runs. Feeling like we had the lineup depth to do that, it just didn’t play out that way.
“Figuring out the why is important. As we all know, a lot of things in baseball are hard to tease out and get to the why, but we’ll at least spend time trying.”
Friedman: Dodgers will dive into struggles
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said approach and discipline at the plate was lacking during various points of the playoffs, but Friedman believes there was more.
“It’s hard to tease out, I think. A lot of times when a team is struggling to score runs, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, they’re not playing with energy,’ Friedman said. “Well, of course we’re not. We don’t have guys on base. It’s impossible to play with energy when you don’t have action.
“Everything is so interconnected, that it’s hard. I think it’s going through each individual player and what kind of physical ailments that were going on at the time, bad habits that were potentially caused from it, and there were a few instances we put our finger on it with a couple guys.
“Some of it is just sequencing of hits and how things came together. There’s so many different factors. We’re going to try to roll up our sleeves and get at things that at this point, all that matters is they will help us next year as we are encountering similar things and ways we can kind of expedite getting from being in a rut to being an explosive offense at times. We’ve got some time to get through that.”
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