Dodgers Keep Waiting for the Offense to Wake Up. The Giants Aren’t Waiting for Anything.

The reminders have officially started.

Whenever the Dodgers drift into one of these ugly stretches, somebody inevitably reaches for last season’s script. You know the one: the 2025 Dodgers stumbled into the All-Star break after dropping seven of nine games, looked disjointed for weeks, and still wound up celebrating a second straight World Series title by October.

That is usually the baseball equivalent of someone calmly telling you turbulence is perfectly normal while the cabin lights flicker.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe this is simply another rough patch a talented team eventually shrugs off. But in the “what have you done lately for me?” department, the Dodgers currently look less like defending champions and more like a team trying to solve a puzzle with several missing pieces.

Tuesday night’s 6-2 loss to the Giants only deepened the concern.

The Dodgers have now lost four straight games and nine of their last 13, all while repeatedly wasting scoring opportunities and searching for consistency that never quite arrives. They’ve scored three runs or fewer in 10 of those 13 games, which is not exactly the kind of offensive profile usually associated with a roster containing Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman.

Ohtani at least looked a little more like himself Tuesday night.

After spending the better part of two weeks trying to launch baseballs directly into orbit with every swing, Ohtani finished 2-for-4 with a home run, an RBI and a run scored. The problem for the Dodgers was that Ohtani essentially accounted for the entire offense by himself. The rest of the lineup combined for just two hits and failed to drive in a single run.

That is not so much an offensive attack as it is a group assignment where one guy did all the work while everyone else stared at the PowerPoint.

The Dodgers had opportunities to change the game. Twice they loaded the bases with only one out. Twice they came away nearly empty. Not one run each time. One run total.

That inability to deliver a damaging inning continues to define this stretch.

“I just felt like we ran a little bit out of gas right there,” manager Dave Roberts said afterward. “Unfortunately, when you’re not putting up crooked numbers it’s just hard, and right now it’s just been thin.”

Thin is probably the cleanest possible description.

The Dodgers are getting traffic on the bases without ever sustaining pressure. The line stops moving. The next hit never arrives. Big innings feel like distant memories rather than inevitable moments.

Roberts pointed to the first inning as an early turning point. Will Smith crushed a deep drive to center field that looked destined to spark a breakout inning before Giants outfielder Jung Hoo Lee made a running over-the-shoulder catch near the wall.

“I thought Will had a great at-bat,” Roberts said. “Lee makes a great play over his shoulder, which really could have been the difference in the game.”

Instead, the Dodgers stranded runners again, and the game slowly tilted toward San Francisco from there.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto, meanwhile, endured the roughest power outage of his major league career. The right-hander allowed three home runs in a game for the first time, including back-to-back fifth inning shots by Harrison Bader and Eric Haase that permanently shifted momentum toward the Giants.

Oddly enough, all three home runs came from the eighth and ninth spots in San Francisco’s lineup. Because of course they did.

Yamamoto still struck out eight hitters and at times looked sharp, but this version of the Dodgers currently leaves very little margin for imperfection. A couple mistakes now feel fatal because the offense rarely supplies enough support to absorb them.

“It’s hard for the bullpen to be perfect every night,” Roberts said. “It just really is.”

Fair point. But right now nearly every part of the Dodgers machine feels slightly disconnected from the others.

The rotation flashes brilliance before unraveling for an inning. The bullpen bends at the wrong moments. The offense strands runners by the handful. Even when something positive happens — like Ohtani finally breaking through with a homer or Betts returning to the lineup after more than a month away — it somehow gets swallowed by the larger frustration surrounding the club.

And perhaps that is the strangest part of all this.

Nobody inside the Dodgers clubhouse sounds panicked. Roberts remains openly confident the team will eventually hit its stride again. History says he’s probably right. Teams with this much talent usually do not stay stuck forever.

But history also does not make Tuesday night’s scoreboard disappear.

Right now, the Dodgers do not look like a team chasing another championship. They look like a team trying to remember what clean baseball feels like again.