RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Before the Los Angeles Dodgers can ruin baseball once and for all, they need to figure out how to win a game again.
The defending champions posted their sixth straight loss on Wednesday , falling 7-6 to the Chicago Cubs. They have now been swept in back-to-back series at the hands of the Cubs and Boston Red Sox, going from the best record in MLB to the third-best win percentage in the NL.
A division lead that was once 14 games could be down to eight depending on how the Arizona Diamondbacks do later Wednesday. Which is still the largest division lead in baseball but… crazier things have happened.
It’s a run that runs counter to the broader narrative around the team over the past week, specifically when they called in a trade to put two-time defending American League Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal in Dodger blue . Reading the headlines and social media commentary, this team was supposed to be inevitable, to the point of sapping joy out of the national pastime and making a salary cap the only way forward for MLB.
Instead, the Dodgers are 10-15 since the Fourth of July. Let’s ponder what’s happening.
The Dodgers have always been a vulnerable juggernaut
Perspective might be the way to start here. For all that’s been made about the Dodgers’ success over the past decade or so, they have never been immune to a bad month every season, because they play baseball.
Take, for example, every Dodgers team that has made a World Series in a full season. The 2017 Dodgers went 12-17 in the month of September. The 2018 Dodgers had a losing record as late as June 6. The 2024 Dodgers lost five straight in May and had a losing record in July. Last year’s Dodgers lost seven straight in July, and that wasn’t even when their bullpen was in free fall.
That’s what happens in a sport where the best regular-season win percentage since the dead-ball era is 72.1% (the 1954 Cleveland Indians). Losses happen, and they can come in bunches. The Dodgers have some issues. They have not been Space Jam’d.
The Dodgers have been here before. Michael Reaves via Getty Images
It might also be worth thinking about what a super-team is in baseball. The Dodgers going back-to-back in 2024 and 2025 is frequently treated as proof positive that a salary cap is needed to save a sport where the richest team can dominate, and even those title-winning teams had such glaring issues (rotation depth in 2024, bullpen in 2025) that they both needed to win back-to-back elimination games at some point.
Los Angeles losing six straight games is a bad development for Los Angeles. It is nothing that team hasn’t experienced before. They just happen to be losing at a time when schadenfreude is going to be at an all-time high after the Skubal trade .
The Dodgers’ winning pace was unsustainable with the talent they have on the field
The Dodgers losing every leg of what is essentially a full turn through a six-man rotation doesn’t sound right. It makes a little more sense when you consider the starting pitchers on the mound. Here’s the group:
Edgardo Henriquez
Yoshinobu Yamamoto
Emmet Sheehan
Justin Wrobleski
Tarik Skubal
Eric Lauer
Now, obviously, the Dodgers should have won the Yamamoto and Skubal starts. They didn’t because they scored three runs total in those two games. They probably should have scored more but, again, baseball. You could say they’re pressing amid the heat over Skubal, but this is a core that has navigated a far brighter spotlight and come out just fine.
The Red Sox and Cubs pitching staffs simply did a very good job of limiting what has been the fourth highest-scoring offense in MLB this season.
As for the other games, the first loss to the Red Sox was a bullpen game in which recent call-up Cole Irvin surrendered the go-ahead run in the seventh inning, and then five more in a lengthy appearance meant to cover for a gassed bullpen. He was designated for assignment the next day .
The Sheehan start saw the pitcher everyone expected to lose his rotation spot to Skubal allow five runs in 2 2/3 innings. He was optioned to Triple-A Oklahoma City the next day .
Wrobleski has been the Dodgers’ most pleasant surprise this season, but the bill came due both regression-wise and maybe fatigue-wise when he allowed seven earned runs in the series-opener against the Cubs. He has never thrown more than 118 1/3 innings in a single season as a professional, and just hit 117 innings in 2026.
Wednesday saw Lauer, acquired basically for free after he was designated for assignment by the Toronto Blue Jays in May, appear in his first Dodgers loss in his 10th game with the team. The Cubs pounced on him for 11 hits and six runs in four innings .
Shohei Ohtani didn’t start any of those games. Nor did Blake Snell or Tyler Glasnow. After Yamamoto and Skubal, those are the Dodgers’ next three choices to start games that matter. All three pitchers are expected to return the mound at some point this season, with Snell and Glasnow currently on rehab assignments and Ohtani basically waiting until his knee stops bothering him.
The Dodgers are also currently without their top two catchers in Will Smith and Dalton Rushing, not to mention their usual list of relievers on the injured list. Obviously, every team deals with injuries, but it stands to reason that the Dodgers we’re seeing now won’t be the same team in October.
The revelation here isn’t that the Dodgers are suddenly bad. It’s probably that they were playing like the best team in baseball despite missing a half-dozen major contributors at times between May and June, and now some of the guys who excelled in that stretch are coming back to earth.
Could Wednesday’s ending be a sign of changes to come?
The first two losses of the Cubs series were one-sided and Wednesday was shaping up to be the most joyless of them all, but then the Dodgers found a gear they’ve been seemingly missing since last week.
Down 7-1 going into the eighth inning, Max Muncy and Ohtani hit five runs’ wort...
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