Dodgers’ Series In Denver Highlights Deficiencies
- Updated: June 5, 2015
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BREAKING NEWS: The Colorado Rockies are not great at baseball. Lord knows I watch more Rockies baseball than most people since I cover them for money, but let’s all face facts: even at Coors Field, where the Rockies have historically done pretty well, that team’s not scaring very many people.
Which makes it even more disheartening for Dodgers fans to watch the boys in blue to take just two of the four games in Denver against the NL West’s doormat. Plus, acknowledge the fact that the Rockies really should’ve won a third game, considering they were one strike away from a Tuesday night victory.
The Alex Guerrero go-ahead two-strike two-out grand slam was fun as hell, but sustainable? Probably not. (I know, watch him hit another one next week just because I said that.)
Look, playing on the road is hard for pretty much everybody, but the Dodgers are fading a bit lately. After starting 22-10, they are 9-12 in their last three-plus weeks of baseball, and at times, the bats and bullpen have both looked suspect for a club that needs to add some pieces – and get some pieces back healthy – if they want to run through the NL West to the playoffs all year.
Obviously, Yasiel Puig returning soon will (should?) help. Hector Olivera and/or Carl Crawford could help a lot, too, if either one can provide anything this year (one from development as he acclimates to the Dodgers’ system, the other if he can ever get off the disabled list, a pessimistic proposition considering he was just transferred to the 60-day).
But the bullpen, which collapsed again Wednesday night, doesn’t have any more significant returning pieces like the outfield does — and one coming piece in Chris Withrow has now departed — and it’d behoove the front office to go make a move to get a pitcher for the pen. (And, let’s be honest about guys like Mike Bolsinger regressing to the mean; they probably ought to bolster the rotation, too.)
As the Dodgers prepare to host the Cardinals on Thursday night, two things will happen: (1) the Thursday game is the club’s 54th, which is exactly one-third of the way through the season, and (2) hosting one of the NL’s best after just seeing them on the road and only taking one of three games will tell the Dodgers a lot about how they stack up against the good clubs in the National League.
As for (1), early season hand-wringing is pretty worthless, but once you’re one-third of the way through and already in June, um, it’s time. Not to shut it down or cry wolf, but to take an honest evaluation of the club and go get pieces that are missing.
Does that mean picking up Jonathan Papelbon in the bullpen or Cole Hamels in the rotation? Maybe. Maybe not! It certainly means that the front office needs to address some deficiencies if it hopes to make it deeper in the playoffs this year than in recent memory…
…Which brings us to (2), a great barometer for the Dodgers against another of the National League’s good teams. Want to get to the World Series in 2015? Something tells me that one way or another, you’re going to see the Cardinals. Obviously, the late-May-early-June Dodgers and Cardinals are going to be very different from October’s versions, but you’re lying to yourself if you think the series this weekend (and the one last weekend in St. Louis) wasn’t important.
This series against the Cardinals won’t be the Dodgers’ biggest series of the season, but it is the biggest series thus far this season. Games are slowly starting to matter – June will blend to July, to August, to, holy-crap-it’s-pennant-winning-time. And what clubs do now starts to matter more and more.
That’s not to say the Dodgers losing two, or three, or four this weekend will end their season. It obviously won’t. But it is to say that, at 54-ish games, the front office now knows what they have on the roster this year, and what they need to do to bolster it for the stretch run.
PS – I was right about this, let me gloat a bit, plz. (Ok, back to your unmitigated hate of me.)
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