The Los Angeles Dodgers are supposed to be a powerhouse team, the one club that no one can even take down. Constantly splurging in free agency, organizing blockbuster trades, and morphing prospects into impact players would boost any team. They’ve been doing it for years, from the Mookie Betts trade to this season’s signing of Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki.
In 2025, their season has been marked with more injuries and inconsistent play. The Dodgers posted a rare losing month in July, their second in two years, going 10-14. That’s their worst record in a single month since 2018, when they went 12-16 in April.
It just seems the team isn’t firing on all cylinders like they were expected to this year. There have been some ugly stretches of baseball and even worse stats put up by what are supposed to be some of their best players. By no means are they out of the playoffs, but their reign on the National League West is in jeopardy thanks to a surging San Diego Padres team. What happened this year?
The elephant in the room isn’t necessarily the team’s fragile pitching staff, but rather the sudden disappearance of star player Mookie Betts. He is putting up not just the worst stats in his tenure with the Dodgers, but the worst stats of his entire career. In fact, Betts is on track to finish under 100 OPS+ for the first time in his 11-year career.
There might be a good explanation for this outside of metrics: He took a serious beating during the offseason due to illness. Betts contracted a mysterious and very concerning stomach virus in March of this year, which caused him to lose over 20 pounds and completely wrecked his strength. He was limited to smoothies and liquids only for most of the month, when his body felt like it was “kind of eating itself,” he told Reuters at the time. The 32-year-old dropped to 157 pounds and couldn’t keep any solid food down.
It could explain his lack of hard-hit contact and barrelling on the ball. Betts registered a decline in his hard-hit percentage across all pitches this year and saw continued weak bat speed (swings above 75 mph) that barely reached 8% after hitting 21% in 2023. The metrics of when he hits the ball show that there are lingering effects of the illness that will take a long time to recover from. Losing 10% of your body weight will do damage.
The good news is that his plate discipline remains unaffected, nearing a 1:1 walk-to-strikeout ratio at the plate. His whiff and strikeout rates continue to hover around the 90th percentile, while his squared-up percentage is 41%, one of the best in the league. He posted a decent July, slugging a .288/.358/.762 line with three home runs and 12 walks. He’s fine, but strength will be a priority during the offseason if the Dodgers want to bring him back to life.
Sasaki wowed the entire baseball world in 2023 with his display during the World Baseball Classic and his unbelievable stat lines in the Japanese leagues. Every MLB that could afford him wanted the ace to come to their rotations, but he ultimately chose to pair up with Yoshinobu Yamamoto with the Dodgers. The payoff for the team has been nothing since his arrival.
Calling Sasaki’s Dodgers debut rocky might be a small understatement; it’s underwhelming. On the surface level, the 21-year-old got rocked in his eight starts for the team, posting a 4.72 ERA and 1.49 WHIP. His six home runs in 34 innings didn’t help, and the 22 walks also highlight a major control problem. Sasaki seemed to be overwhelmed with his adjustment to the MLB, even to the point where it brought him to tears.
As if his season couldn’t have started any worse, Sasaki suffered a shoulder impingement that shut him down for most of the 2025 season after May. His four rehab starts went poorly, going 14 innings with a 7.07 ERA and a 1.79 WHIP. Again, command seemed to be an issue, walking eight and hitting one batter while only striking out eight. He’s not adjusting to the MLB well.
Sasaki has lost edge on the four-seamer, the pitch he’s well known for and the one he can pump at 100 miles per hour. He’s struggling to hit 96, and it’s getting crushed by hitters, going for a .253 average and nearly a .500 slugging percentage. All six of his home runs came off the fastball, which doesn’t bode well for his 62% air rate. A whiff rate of 10% on a fastball will get any pitcher killed on the mound.
His split finger is effective, striking out 14 with a .158 OBA. That might be the pitch he has to lean on going forward. He’s young and has time to adjust his grip and delivery. He needs a tail on the fastball to really hammer it as an effective pitch.
Yamamoto is the clear ace of the Dodgers, maintaining the best ERA, WHIP, and third-lowest walk ratio on the team through all starters with five games started. The rest of the rotation is either injured or very modest at best, presenting a huge challenge to the team’s continued success.
During the 2025 season, the Dodgers had as many as 14 pitchers on the injured list. 2025 offseason signee Blake Snell dealt with a shoulder injury that wiped out a chunk of the season. Shohei Ohtani recovered from a second UCL tear to start pitching in the second half of the year. Tyler Glasnow suffered another injury to his repertoire.
The team’s rotation holds great potential and is the key to a World Series run. The problem is that they cannot stay healthy long enough to put together a run. It also doesn’t help that Clayton Kershaw is entering the twilight of his career and that other starters are struggling as well. Who is going to take his spot?
As for the bullpen, their late-season performance can be summed up with the recent Orioles game. Tanner Scott hasn’t been lights out at all, and that might be the signal to either move on from him or demote him from the closer spot.
This season will mark the first time the Dodgers finish back-to-back seasons under 100 wins since the 2015 and 2016 seasons. They are far from a .500 team, but there is reason to be concerned about the above, plus their biggest stars aging. Thankfully, they have solid foundations in Will Smith in batting and Emmet Sheehan in pitching.
If there’s one thing we know the Dodgers to be, it’s that they don’t tolerate slumps and they don’t like seeing red flags. They are the West Coast juggernaut of the league, and they have to protect it. Expect them to make moves in 2026, just like usual.
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