The Los Angeles Dodgers lost to the Philadelphia Phillies again on Thursday night. The sweep at the hands of a National League powerhouse resulted in the team's fourth consecutive loss. While the NL West is still well in-hand given the inconsistency of the teams behind them, there's another issue starting to manifest for this squad that we hadn't seen in several weeks.
Back at the end of May, the Dodgers had lost five games in a row. In three of those games they scored either one or zero runs. They appeared to shake off those woes by the end of the month and spun it into a very strong showing in June. But as we close in on two weeks worth of July games, those issues are beginning to manifest once again.
Even prior to Thursday's 5-1 loss, the Dodgers had ranked 23rd in the league in runs scored in July, with 32 across eight games. Despite maintaining top 10 walk rates and isolated slugging figures, they're running into a great deal of misfortune in batted balls. A .283 BABIP ranks only 19th this month.
Part of that is due to a lack of quality contact combined with heavy groundball rates. Their 36.8 HardHit% sits 20th this month, while they're putting the ball on the ground 47 percent of the time over that stretch.
There are a couple of realities here. The first is that any team in baseball is going to be prone to stretches of offensive ineptitude. Directly linked to that is that those types of stretches for the Dodgers are going to be more glaring due to the lack of length in their lineup. It was already an issue, but with the continued absences of Mookie Betts & Max Muncy, the team is struggling to compensate over the longer term.
Many of the culprits of questionable contact against high groundball rates are those who are being pressed into increased duty as a result. Chris Taylor. Miguel Vargas. Enrique Hernández. Gavin Lux, as well, with a groundball rate approaching 69 percent.
There are, at least, a couple of spots of good news for the Dodgers. The first is that they'll get a crack at a much more average pitching staff in Detroit to close out the first half. The second is that as we hit the All-Star break, the MLB Draft will transpire. The team can then turn its immediate attention to available bats ahead of this month's trade deadline.
But yet another stretch like this for the Dodgers is certainly communicating the imperative nature of acquiring at least one additional bat before month's end.