New City, Same Story: Dodgers’ Slump Travels to St. Louis

A change of scenery was supposed to help.

After 13 straight games spent grinding through uneven at-bats, shaky defense and an offense that has looked more theoretical than productive, the Dodgers finally got a travel day to reset. New city, fresh start, chance to turn the page.

Instead, they brought the same script with them to St. Louis.

The Dodgers opened a six-game road trip Friday night looking very much like the team that has spent the better part of two weeks searching for itself, falling 7-2 to the St. Louis Cardinals in a game that felt familiar in all the wrong ways.

It started immediately.

Strikeout. Fly out. Strikeout.

Three batters, three outs, and not much to suggest anything had changed.

Then came the bottom of the first, where what could generously be called a sequence of mistakes — and less generously called a mess — put the Dodgers in a hole they never seriously threatened to escape.

Emmet Sheehan showed flashes of the swing-and-miss stuff that has made him somewhat intriguing, striking out eight over 4⅔ innings. But those flashes were buried under a first inning that unraveled quickly. A walk, a single, and then a throwing error from Will Smith moved runners into scoring position.

From there, the inning took a turn from sloppy to strange.

Sheehan was called for a balk after failing to properly declare a switch between windup and stretch, allowing the game’s first run to score. Moments later, Nolan Gorman turned a chest-high fastball into a two-run home run, and just like that, the Dodgers were down 3-0 before they had managed a baserunner of consequence.

Manager Dave Roberts’s reaction from the dugout was immediate and unmistakable, even if not entirely printable. It was the look of a team — and a manager — trying to make sense of a stretch that has offered few easy answers.

The Cardinals added on in the third when Alec Burleson homered off a hanging slider, and while Sheehan continued to pile up strikeouts, his fastball — sitting lower than usual — lacked the margin for error that has bailed him out in better outings.

“I don’t want to make too big a deal of the velo,” Roberts said afterward, though he acknowledged it was down. Sheehan pointed instead to ongoing adjustments in his delivery, describing a process that has shown progress at times but remains inconsistent.

That inconsistency has extended well beyond the mound.

Offensively, the Dodgers again struggled to generate anything resembling sustained pressure. They finished with seven hits but managed just two runs, one on a Max Muncy RBI double in the second and another on a Kyle Tucker sacrifice fly in the sixth. A bases-loaded opportunity in that sixth inning produced little, emblematic of a lineup that has spent this stretch failing to capitalize when it does create chances.

Over their last 10 games, the Dodgers are hitting .211 and averaging just 3.6 runs per game, a stretch that has seen them score two runs or fewer five times — including each of their last three losses.

“I think right now we have a lot more guys not swinging the bats well than guys that are,” Roberts said. “So shuffling the lineup, I just don’t think that’s the solution.”

That may be the most telling part.

There is no obvious fix.

The Dodgers aren’t being undone by one flaw so much as a collection of smaller ones — a missed pitch here, a defensive lapse there, a rally that never quite materializes. Even the power that defined them earlier in the season has gone quiet; after leading the majors in home runs, they have hit just three over the past 10 games.

Teoscar Hernández, tasked with explaining the collective lull, offered the standard perspective.

“It’s part of the game,” he said. “We’re just trying to minimize it and come back.”

That is the long view, and it is not wrong. But in the short term, the Dodgers look like a team stuck between corrections, aware of the issues but still working to solve them in real time.

A travel day didn’t change it, and a new city didn’t fix it.

At some point, the Dodgers have to stop waiting for it to turn and start correcting it themselves.