Dodgers’ latest slump hasn’t eroded their confidence, with good reason

LOS ANGELES -- It is Sept. 6, and the Los Angeles Dodgers have lost 9½ games off their division lead over the Arizona Diamondbacks in just 11 days. Under normal circumstances, this would likely qualify as an epic collapse. But this has been no ordinary season for the Dodgers.

The Dodgers have dropped 10 of their last 11 games, while the Diamondbacks have won 12 straight, the perfect storm for a late-season comeback. But the Dodgers still own a 12½-game advantage in the National League West, and, at 92-46, still own the best record in baseball, seven games clear of the next-closest team (Houston Astros).

Helping that comeback for Arizona is that five of their 12 wins have been against the Dodgers, all in the last eight days, including the last two nights at Dodger Stadium. The Diamondbacks are one of two teams with the winning record (10-8) against the Dodgers in 2017 — the Washington Nationals have won two of three against Los Angeles, with three more games remaining in two weekends — yet understandably, the Dodgers’ confidence is still high.

Before their recent losing skid, the Dodgers were on pace for 116 wins, which would have tied the MLB record. Now, they would need to finish 24-0 to reach that mark. Their current pace is only 108 victories.

To put things into perspective, the Dodgers have 24 games remaining in the regular season, while the Diamondbacks have 23. Of those 47 outcomes, Arizona needs 36 to fall their way to win the National League West, or 35 to tie and force a one-game playoff for the division. Two of those outcomes can be struck at once with Wednesday’s series and regular season finale between these two teams, at Dodger Stadium. But even with Arizona’s great run over the last week and a half, their chances for the division remain quite slim.

FanGraphs still projects the Dodgers with a 100-percent chance to win the division, as does Baseball Prospectus.

Those odds haven’t done much to soothe a segment of Dodgers fans, who aren’t handling the losses well. But its hard to blame them. After all before the Dodgers lost 10 of their last 11 games, the club had 10 losses in their previous 60 games. They didn’t even have a losing streak of longer than three games before their dueling five-game skids in the last week and a half.

”I don’t think there’s anything I can say to soothe fans and their passion,” manager Dave Roberts told reporters on Wednesday. “We’re going to win a game again, I know that.”

The Dodgers will need to play a lot better to turn things around. They have been outscored 62-26 in their last 11 games, hitting .200/.263/.317 as a team while the pitching staff posted a 5.72 ERA.

Part of the issue has been resting players, with the Dodgers taking their foot off the gas pedal with a large division lead — it got has high as 21 games before the recent slide — and the club did win 92 games before September even started, surpassing their season total from 2016, when their won their fourth straight division.

The Dodgers are making sure people are healthy and ready in October, taking every precaution necessary and not forcing things for games in September.

But this is nothing new. The team has been resting players all season, making liberal use of the 10-day disabled list. Nine of their 10 pitchers to start a game in 2017 have spent at least one stint on the DL, some multiple times. On offense, Yasiel Puig, who has played in 131 of the Dodgers’ 138 games, is the only Dodger who can even reach 150 games played this season, with only three more — Corey Seager (123 games), Kiké Hernandez (121) and Chris Taylor (117) — with a chance at 140 games played.

“It’s a luxury we do have, because we have a lot of good players,” Roberts said.

The Dodgers have 18 different players with at least 0.8 Wins Above Replacement this season — a cherry-picked minimum, sure, but the season is roughly 85-percent over so it wasn’t purely selected out of thin air. Only the Cleveland Indians — winners of 13 straight games themselves — have more, with 19 players.

There are reasons to believe the Dodgers will, in fact, play better. One is that five months worth of games tells us more about a team than two weeks, no matter how fresh in our noses the recent stench might be.

The Dodgers pitching staff as a whole has been arguably the best in baseball all season. They allow 3.49 runs per game on average this season, a half-run better than Arizona, the next-best team in the NL. The Indians, at 3.68 runs per game, are the only other major league team to allow fewer than four runs per contest.

But that Dodgers staff got smoked last week, especially the starters. In eight games last week, the starters posted an 8.80 ERA, and that included six shutout innings from Clayton Kershaw in his first start after missing over five weeks on the disabled list with back tightness. His return is another beacon of hope for the team.

In three games in Arizona, the Diamondbacks jumped on Rich Hill, Hyun-jin Ryu and Kenta Maeda for 10 first-inning runs in a three-game sweep, and that trio combined to allow 19 runs on 24 hits in 10⅔ innings, including six home runs. Only Hill among this group is likely to get playoff starts for the Dodgers, though Ryu and/or Maeda could potentially be a part of a postseason bullpen.

“It doesn’t matter. They just didn’t pitch well. We’re gonna be at home, and they will pitch better,” Roberts said. “We’re not concerned about the matchup [with Arizona].”

That trio got a second chance at Arizona this week at Dodger Stadium, and in the first two games at least have done well, despite the losses. Hill and Ryu combined to allow just three runs in 12 innings on Monday and Tuesday, with 17 strikeouts.

It might have helped had the Dodgers scored more than one run in the first two games of this series.

Seager is dealing with elbow inflammation and hasn’t started the last nine games, though is expected to return at some point during the upcoming weekend series against the Colorado Rockies.

Cody Bellinger, whose 36 home runs established a Dodgers franchise record for rookie home runs, missed nine games with an ankle sprain, and is 6-for-28 (.214/.241/.500) since his return from the disabled list.

Seager and Bellinger haven’t been in the same starting lineup since Aug. 19 in Detroit. In 17 games since, the Dodgers are averaging just 2.88 runs per game.

“You look at what Corey brings to our lineup, he’s arguably our best offensive player who’s not in there. Cody’s just getting his feet wet, still trying to get on track,” said Roberts. “Right now we’re not firing.”

On the season, the Dodgers average 4.85 runs per game, fifth in the NL, and they rank first in the league in both OPS+ (103) and wRC+ (106).

The Dodgers’ insane run of winning -- they went 52-9 in one stretch, and went nearly three months without losing a series, going 19-0-3 — was fueled in large part by the offensive quartet of Chris Taylor, Seager, Justin Turner, and Bellinger, who usually occupy the first four spots in the batting order.

In the 53 games those four have been in the starting lineup together this season, the Dodgers have averaged 5.68 runs per game, and are 45-8 (.849).

Making sure those four, and the pitching staff, are healthy for the playoffs are of chief concern to the Dodgers at the moment, much more so than September regular season games, no matter how frustrating the short-term cost — losses -- might seem.

But can the Dodgers flip the switch in October?

Back in 2009, when the Dodgers were not faring well down the stretch after building a large division lead, I researched how playoff teams fared under the wild card format, at the time using data from 1995-2008, the first 14 years of the Wild Card era:

Here are the first round playoff results based on these factors:

Teams with home field advantage won 24 of 48 1st round series (50.0%)

Teams with the better regular season record won 26 of 54 1st round series (48.1%)

Teams with the better record in the final 10 games won 21 of 46 1st round series (45.7%)

Teams with the better record in the final 20 games won 22 of 46 1st round series (47.8%)

Teams with the better record in the final 30 games won 27 of 49 1st round series (55.1%)

I don’t see a lot of advantage there in any category. Perhaps in the final 30 games, that may lead to postseason success, but it doesn’t appear to be an overwhelming advantage.

...

Here are the league championship series results based on these factors:

Teams with home field advantage won 15 of 28 league championship series (53.6%)

Teams with the better regular season record won 16 of 27 league championship series (59.3%)

Teams with the better record in the final 10 games won 11 of 20 league championship series (55.0%)

Teams with the better record in the final 20 games won 12 of 25 league championship series (48.0%)

Teams with the better record in the final 30 games won 9 of 24 league championship series (37.5%)

Again, it doesn’t appear that any kind of strong finish yields a significant advantage. Maybe regular season record is important in the league championship series, but last I checked the Dodgers in fact have the best record in the National League.

I haven’t looked at the data from the last eight years, but at the very least there are examples of teams stumbling through September only to find success in October.

The San Francisco Giants were one game back in the National League West, then lost nine of their remaining 15 games in 2014, settling for the second Wild Card spot in the NL. They won the World Series.

In 2015, the Kansas City Royals dropped 18 of 28 games from Aug. 30 to Sept. 29. They also won the World Series.

“It’s easy to say that momentum does matter, and any team if they had their choice would they want that momentum? Absolutely,” Roberts said. “But every team if you see has had momentum how they fared going into the postseason, compared to teams that didn’t have it, the winning kind of balances itself out.”

The bottom line is this. How the Dodgers fare this October will depend on how they play this October. It won’t be because of how they played in late August and early September, just like it won’t be a result of how they played in June, July, or most of August.