The shine of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ start to the season has worn off a bit the last couple days as they dropped two straight games to the St. Louis Cardinals to fall to 8-4 on the year.
Tuesday night’s loss was particularly disappointing considering the Dodgers looked a lot like their 2018 selves. They did not have trouble getting runners on base, notching seven hits and walking eight times, but they did have trouble getting runners in.
Los Angeles was shut out on the night, leaving 13 runners on base and going 2-for-11 overall with runners in scoring position. Heading into the Cardinals’ series, the Dodgers were the best team in the league with runners in scoring position, batting .333.
Despite getting shut out, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was still pleased with the at-bat quality he saw from his team and is not yet ready to worry about the offense, as seen on SportsNet LA:
“I think if you’re looking at run production, yeah, you’re not going to run out eight every single night. But I do think the at-bat quality — Cody, I thought Max took a lot of good at-bats, I thought J.T. took good at-bats, Austin — up and down the lineup, we’re still doing some really good things. I think that ultimately, you look out, we’re going to continue to put pressure on guys and score runs.”
As Roberts alluded to, the Dodgers were obviously not going to keep up their eight runs per game pace that they got off to in winning eight of their first 10 games.
The Dodgers have an extremely tough part of their schedule coming up though, so the hope is that they can continue to keep up their high at-bat quality day-in and day-out, which wasn’t always the case a year ago.
