LOS ANGELES — The sum of the parts has been very good. Even though some of the parts have not.
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Blake Snell has made one start this season. Tyler Glasnow hasn’t pitched since the first week of May.
The Dodgers made Edwin Diaz the highest-paid closer in baseball history when they signed him last winter. He hasn’t closed out a game since April.
They signed right fielder Kyle Tucker to the second-highest AAV (average annual value) deal in baseball history. He has had an OPS since the start of April more than 130 points lower than his career average.
Shortstop Mookie Betts hit under .200 until mid-June. Catcher Will Smith hasn’t played since waking up with a stiff neck in early June. Left fielder Teoscar Hernandez missed a month with a hamstring injury. Utility man Tommy Edman didn’t debut until mid-June after ankle surgery last fall.
And … they reached the All-Star break with the best record in baseball. How does that add up?
“After hearing you say all that – I actually don’t know,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said with a laugh.
The Dodgers have dealt with a long list of injuries each of the past two years as well. They absorbed them well enough to reach the break in first place in the National League West. But to absorb all of that and post the best record in baseball?
“That’s a great point,” Freeman said. “When you’re in it, you’re just going about it. … But when you break it down like that, you’re like, ‘Whoa.’ I didn’t really realize.”
Freeman credits the emergence of young pitchers like Justin Wrobleski and relievers Edgardo Henriquez and Will Klein for the Dodgers’ ability to compensate for the negatives. Defense has been “a huge factor” (a shaky final week before the All-Star break being an anomaly), Freeman said.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts agrees to all of that. But it’s more than that, he said.
“It’s certainly a lot harder than it looks,” he said. “Certainly you have to have talent. You have to have depth. I also think it’s a certain standard that we’ve established – that regardless of who the cast of characters that is upright, we’re going to find a way to win. I think that’s a culture, that’s a mindset. I think that’s kind of the formula.
“I will say this – it’s actually the biggest compliment that I don’t have to field questions about a (post-World Series) letdown. That speaks to the culture. Every champion has to deal with questions about, ‘Is there a letdown?’ and I think we’ve proven to the world that we don’t succumb to that. That’s probably the biggest compliment we can get.”
Not so fast.
The Dodgers clearly had a letdown in the final week before the All-Star break, committing nine errors in five games and getting swept by the Arizona Diamondbacks over the final weekend.
The temptation to cruise through the second half will only get stronger. They lead their division at the break for the 10th time in the past 12 full seasons, by seven games or more for the fourth time in the past six, with the best record in the NL for the fifth time in the past nine.
“I think we just do such a good job of not worrying about that in this clubhouse,” third baseman Max Muncy said of the Dodgers’ 11½-game lead in the NL West this year. “Obviously we know it. But you still have to go out there and win.
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“We have to take the guys that we have and go out there every night and find a way to win that game. … You worry about what you need to do today and you don’t worry about ‘You’re one game up. You’re 15 games up. You’re 100 games up.’ It doesn’t matter. What matters is you’re trying to play that game tonight and win that game.”
That might be the ideal mindset, but the reality in the second half will be that the Dodgers will be playing for October every night.
The idea that they won’t take a truly meaningful at-bat again until the postseason is rejected in the same fashion by Muncy and Freeman.
“Every at-bat is meaningful for some reason,” Muncy said.
“They’re all meaningful. Every at-bat is meaningful,” Freeman echoed. “You’re still going for the No. 1 seed. You have the (Milwaukee) Brewers who are playing well. You just don’t know. I don’t want to be on the road for every series in the playoffs. So you’re fighting for everything.
“Everything is meaningful because this is how you build towards October. If you put on this uniform and you step in that box and you don’t think that at-bat is meaningful – wrong team then. Every at-bat, every play on defense, every pitch that you’re throwing is meaningful. … There’s so many little things inside the game. If you think something is not meaningful, then you’ve got the wrong mindset.
“If you have to play it for yourself, then you play it for yourself. There’s ways to make every at-bat meaningful. If you’re a competitor, every at-bat is meaningful. I want a hit every at-bat.”
The last time the Dodgers had a division lead as big as this year’s was 2019, when they led by 13½ games at the All-Star break. They didn’t take their foot off the gas, going 46-24 after the break – but they lost to the Washington Nationals in the first round of the playoffs.
They led by 9½ games at the break in 2022 and won the division going away by 22 games, winning a franchise-record 111 games – and lost to the San Diego Padres in another NL Division Series. They won the division by 16 games in 2023 – and again lost in the first round of the playoffs, this time to the Diamondbacks.
There is not necessarily a correlation between those second halves spent without any urgency in the standings and the postseason failures that followed, Freeman said.
“I think people are going to think that’s the issue when you get bounced in the first round,” he said. “The last two years, we’ve had the first-round bye (in 2024) and then we did the wild card (in 2025) and we won both ways.
“I think we know how to do it and get through it.”
The 2026 Dodgers are indeed wiser, Muncy said.
“Just having the experience that a lot of the guys in this room have, I think we have learned,” he said. “You have to worry about today. In those years, it was kind of, ‘Well, if we win these next two games we can kind of chill for a little bit.’ We don’t need to worry about that as players. As players we have to go out there and win every single game. We let Doc and the front office – we let them worry about those decisions (when to rest players). I think that’s why it’s worked so well.”
If reaching the break with the best record in baseball despite their challenges was “a lot harder than it looks,” keeping a sense of urgency intact while running away with a division that has just one other team with a winning record (the 49-47 Diamondbacks) won’t be easy either.
“I will say this, though – maybe not for the division but when you’re talking about having the best record and home-field (advantage) throughout, we’re still playing for that,” Roberts said.
“I do think the teams and players that say, ‘This doesn’t matter’ that’s just a loser’s mentality and quite frankly we don’t have those type of guys.”
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