The difference, folks, between crumbling under an injury-laden rotation and rising above it is having your biggest stars all hitting .300.
Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith and Andy Pages are all hitting over .300 right now. Ohtani and Betts have OPSs over 1. Smith, Ohtani and Betts are all hitting over .330. Betts and Smith have 20 strikeouts or less. This...tends to help.
I think Will Smith being a .335 hitter right now is the best development of all of this. Y'know, Betts, Freeman and Ohtani hitting .300, people could have called that. And Smith has had some great seasons as of late, some fine stuff, but...this is the first time he's really been giving OMG numbers. So far he's got 26 RBIs, as many as Max Muncy has. Right now no catcher's hitting as well as he is, and...can I just pitch maybe giving him the starting catching job on the NL All-Star team? Sean Murphy's hurt, JT and William Contreras can be backups. Smith deserves it, just with the way he's played so far. I mean, Realmuto's great and all but he's not hitting .300 right now.
The Dodgers are just outhitting the competition, and that is closing the gap. Getting Teoscar Hernandez was a very good move, as he's been an effective power bat for them, with 10 homers and 29 RBIs already. Muncy's having another excellent season, he's got 9 homers and 26 RBIs. Pages has been incredible so far, with 4 homers and 13 RBIs in 20 games. And of course Ohtani and Betts are having incredible seasons at the plate so far, with both contact and power moments to tide fans over with. There's a few people who aren't hitting, but the ones who are hitting are so good that it's not much of an issue.
Plus, and crucially, the pitching staff has actually held together pretty nicely, even without key guys like Kershaw, May, Gonsolin and Miller. The foursome of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, James Paxton and Gavin Stone has kept a pretty tight ship. Yamamoto and Glasnow are the standouts, but Paxton's 4-0 with a 3.06 ERA. He's not the strikeout artist he once was, perhaps by doctor's orders, but he's still dominant and can keep teams down. And now Walker Buehler's back, and while the first start could have gone better, he's going to get there eventually at this rate. If the Dodgers can keep this unit strong until people start getting activated, they'll be alright.
Look, this team, that's had some unlucky things happen, has got to be lucky that they're the Dodgers. They have the depth, the development, the strength, the consistency. Even a more scattered Dodgers team can still beat the crap out of you. And that's what they intend to keep doing.
Coming Tonight: A Red Sox homegrown guy who took forever to take to the majors, and now might be one of their most crucial pieces.
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