LOS ANGELES — For the first time in three years, it’s been hard for the Los Angeles Dodgers to find separation. For the better part of a decade, the Dodgers have allowed themselves the luxury of treating the stretch run as a trial period, with only a Game 163 in 2018 and an NL West race with the Giants that went down to the wire in 2021 representing anything like true stakes in September.
Cruise control has its benefits, though it is hard not to wonder how a month of relatively meaningless baseball undid the last two Dodgers clubs that combined to win 211 games in the regular season and just one in the postseason.
“(Last) September felt like you didn’t have anything to play for,” Miguel Rojas said over the weekend of the Dodgers club that reached a double-digit division lead on August 16 of last year and spent its September trying to line up their patchwork pitching. Then they got swept in the NLDS.
They won’t have the luxury of waiting around for this year’s group to figure it out. The Dodgers entered Tuesday with the most wins in the major leagues (74). They also happened to have two of the hottest clubs in the sport, the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks, in the same division and hot on their tails.
The Dodgers have chosen to spin this as a positive. It’ll be good, they’ve said, to have stakes to keep themselves going rather than trying to force it themselves before the postseason.
Jason Heyward hits a three-run home run in the eighth inning against the Mariners. (Kirby Lee / USA Today)
Those stakes came into play Tuesday night. The Dodgers hung around after an early deficit. Jason Heyward, clinging to a roster spot for another looming crunch this week, came off the bench and turned around a 99-mph Andres Muñoz fastball for a go-ahead three-run homer in the eighth inning.
“Shoot, that was probably the highlight for me of the season thus far,” manager Dave Roberts said.
A 6-3 victory over the Seattle Mariners kept the Dodgers’ lead to three games, maintaining their margin for another day while also giving them the best record in baseball.
But their margin is slim, and it will grow slimmer with their rotation still largely looking to sort itself out.
Gavin stays hot! pic.twitter.com/5sIUy6CjM6
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) August 21, 2024
Max absolutely crushed this. 😳 pic.twitter.com/wYtltI55zg
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) August 21, 2024
Walker Buehler made his 10th start for the Dodgers this season on Tuesday night, and it went much like the ones preceding it. The right-hander’s return from a second Tommy John surgery continues to take on water. It took Buehler three pitches to record his first two outs but 25 more before he could emerge from the first inning. By then, two runs had been scored. Another run scored before his night ended after just four ineffective innings, with as many arguments with home-plate umpire CB Bucknor (one) as he had strikeouts.
It didn’t matter in the end on Tuesday. That, Buehler can take as a positive. His command remains erratic, even if he did a better job of throwing first-pitch strikes. Rather, he couldn’t put anyone away: against a Mariners team that strikes out more than any team in baseball, Buehler reached 10 two-strike counts yet got only one strikeout. The Mariners have the lowest team batting average in baseball (.215), yet recorded seven hits against Buehler.
It was another frustrating outing, yet one that was foreseeable. The Dodgers had originally anticipated activating Blake Treinen from the injured list on Tuesday, yet pushed it back because they needed to keep rookie Ben Casparius around for potential coverage in case Buehler’s outing was a brief one. Those concerns would be founded, though the deficit was held close enough that Casparius was never actually deployed.
Still, Buehler insisted, there was progress made.
“I’m so tired of saying that I feel closer, but … that’s as close as I’ve felt to the me of old as I’ve felt this year,” Buehler said. “I’ve been saying this, but I gotta perform and gotta perform, but I feel like I can actually perform now.”
The differences are imperceptible to the untrained eye, he said, and didn’t necessarily translate to results on Tuesday night. He felt like he was driving down the mound, moving his body forward and generating force off of it properly. He likened his outing to the poor version of what he last was when healthy in 2021, which was something after feeling “hopeless” at points during his return to the injured list in June. There is less of a disconnect between what his body is doing and what it’s capable of doing, even if the results remain poor nonetheless.
“If I missed by two feet to the left, my hand told me that I had missed by two feet to the left,” Buehler said. “It wasn’t kind of this weird mystery that I’ve been dealing with for a long time.”
Those are conversations and ideas that are easier to swallow with a nine-game lead, or in the middle of the season, rather than amid a tight race.
The Dodgers have found themselves in a confounding place. Buehler hasn’t pitched well. Nor has Bobby Miller, forced back from the minors after Tyler Glasnow landed on the injured list Friday. But both remain in their rotation for now, even with the Dodgers’ margin as slim as ever.
“I don’t think we’ve put our minds there,” Roberts said Tuesday afternoon when asked directly how long Buehler would last in the rotation if things don’t improve. They didn’t on Tuesday night.
The organization has been reluctant to extend much leash to rookie Landon Knack, who has a 3.00 ERA through 10 big league appearances but has been largely kept to two times through the opposing order. Fellow rookie Justin Wrobleski has shown flashes, yet has been susceptible to the long ball (seven home runs and a 4.68 ERA in 25 innings).
“So you also have to try to appreciate the alternatives. I don’t think there’s a set number of starts that you can look at (for Buehler) and honestly, we don’t have another alternative right now.”
The Dodgers’ choice, however, is allowing two struggling starters to try to figure things out with the division still very much in the balance.
“It’s not ideal,” Roberts said.
“I need to go do it,” Buehler said. “That’s all there is to it.”
Even if it means the Dodgers possibly pushing him to the bullpen or moving on if it doesn’t get better.
“It’s not gonna be easy for me and I’m not going to go down lightly,” Buehler said. “I feel like I can compete in the major leagues and compete in big games the way I felt today. Now, it’s kind of honing that in.”
(Top photo of Walker Buehler pitching in the first inning against the Mariners: Kirby Lee / USA Today)
