Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
This one’s going to be a little bit of a mashup. Last weekend, I was watching a Dodgers game when Max Muncy made a slick play over at third base. Then he mashed a two-run home run to put the Dodgers on the scoreboard. That got me to thinking about how impressive Muncy’s career has been – never the prime attraction on a Los Angeles team that has employed many of baseball’s best during its reign atop the league, but always a key cog.
But a Muncy article wasn’t the only idea I left that game with. His two-run homer? It only served to narrow the Dodgers’ deficit from five to three. The Braves tacked on more runs late and won 7-2 for a second straight day, taking two out of three from the two-time defending champs. Then the lowly Giants came to town and split a four-game set. The Los Angeles offense, in particular, has been moribund of late. That sounded like an article topic all on its own. But if two articles are good, one article slamming together points from both is better (he said hopefully).
I don’t think there’s anything sneaky or overlooked about Muncy’s excellent start to the 2026 season. When he comes to the plate, he does the same thing every night: He tries to leave the park. That means he’s looking for pitches to clobber, and also trying to clobber those pitches. The looking part, combined with his great batting eye, means plenty of walks and plenty of deep counts. The “trying to clobber” part means plenty of whiffs and plenty of scorched baseballs. It’s an approach that’s easy to describe, but it’s devilishly difficult in practice to strike the right balance between selection and aggression.
Muncy is now in his ninth season of finding that balance. His consistency is remarkable – year in and year out he’s posted a double-digit walk rate, a strikeout rate between 20-27%, and a batting line in the neighborhood of a 130 wRC+. His wRC+ is 21st among qualified hitters over that span, wedged between Hall of Fame hopefuls Jose Altuve and Paul Goldschmidt. His batting line is a dead ringer for Kyle Schwarber’s. This year, Muncy is off to an excellent start, on pace for his best year since 2018. It’s not so much that he’s found a new gear; you’d have a hard time differentiating between his 2025 and 2026 component statistics. That’s basically my point, though. What he’s doing isn’t surprising, because he’s made it commonplace. He’s hit more or less like this for a decade.
That’s impressive enough on its own, but it’s not the most impressive feat Muncy has pulled off in his tenure on the Dodgers. When he joined the team, he was defensively limited. He played his natural position, first base, the majority of the time. He also played second base when the Dodgers were trying to get more offense on the field, but it was the shift-enabled second base role that doesn’t really exist anymore. It involved plenty of standing in shallow right field with a rangy shortstop and a slid-over third baseman to cover the dirt.
When the Dodgers signed Freddie Freeman, though, Muncy couldn’t play first anymore. But instead of shifting him to DH (it was the first year of the universal DH) or back to second, where the overshift was only a year away from being banned, he moved to third base. That was partially out of necessity – an aging and injured Justin Turner played only 66 games at the hot corner, his lowest total since 2014 (excluding 2020, for the pedants out there). But the change was a revelation. Somehow Muncy, who had looked like a position-less slugger for most of his professional tenure, was up to the task.
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If you’re a DRS aficionado, Muncy is 20 runs above average since he moved over to third, the fifth-best defensive third baseman in that span. Statcast’s FRV is far more measured; it has Muncy as a -5 defender in that span, though a scratch defender from 2024 onwards. I’ve previously found that FRV works a little better in the infield, but both metrics have predictive value; in other words, you won’t go too wrong thinking Muncy is average or a bit above.
That would be a remarkable feat in and of itself. From age 24, his big league debut, through age 30, Muncy played only about 700 innings at third, and was indifferent at it. Then at age 31, when most players move down the defensive spectrum, he shifted to a tougher position and held his own. He’s 35 now, the oldest primary third baseman in the league. The other guys above 30 are mostly defensive wizards: Nolan Arenado, Manny Machado, José Ramírez, Matt Chapman, and Alex Bregman are the next five oldest. This is not normal.
If the Dodgers listed their players like a movie poster, I’m not even sure Muncy would be famous enough to make the cut. They boast three MVPs, a two-time Cy Young winner, the highest-paid pitcher in baseball history, and the player with the highest ever annual (non-deferred) salary. Muncy would be on the “also featuring” line at best, and even that might be a stretch considering how decorated his compatriots are. But his contributions to their success are massive. The Dodgers are old, and their roster isn’t particularly flexible. But if your 35-year-old slugger can handle third base, both of those limitations ease significantly. How do they keep squeezing more juice into their lineup? It’s at least partially because Muncy lets them.
That brings us back to that lineup and its aforementioned run of poor form. The Dodgers surged out of the gates, scoring six runs per game en route to the best record in baseball on April 20. That day featured a 12-3 victory over the Rockies in Denver – the best offense in the best place for offense. But since then, the Dodgers have been moribund. They’re scoring only 3.8 runs per game, the sixth-worst mark in the majors. While their run prevention has still been superb (3.5 runs allowed per game, fifth best), they’ve scuffled to a 10-12 record. Forget the best record in baseball; they’re locked in a tight race with the Padres for the NL West lead.
I’ll start my evaluation of their slump by telling you one person not to blame: Max Muncy. You know how he’s produced a metronomic 130 wRC+ in his long Dodgers career? His wRC+ over this stretch has been 123. He and Kyle Tucker (122 wRC+) have kept the bases juiced. Andy Pages (108 wRC+, four homers) has helped clear those bases. The rest of the squad, however, has hit one massive slump all at once.
Those three MVPs who form the backbone of the offense? Shohei Ohtani is hitting .203/.329/.333 in this downswing, for a 92 wRC+. It’s one of the worst 20-game hitting stretches of his Dodgers career – he had two similar spans in 2024. Whether it’s a coincidence or not, Ohtani has been dominant on the mound over that stretch, and the Dodgers have started to give him more days off around his starts as a result. He didn’t hit either of the last two days – he pitched on Wednesday and struck out 10 over seven shutout innings, then got a full rest day.
It’s not so much that Ohtani has never slumped like this before – as I mentioned, he had some lulls in 2024. But he wasn’t pitching in 2024, and it wouldn’t exactly be unfathomable if the workload associated with being one of the best starters in baseball acts as a drag on his offensive numbers. Whether that’s true or not is going to be incredibly difficult to untangle mathematically, even when viewed from a 40,000-foot, career-long level. As Ohtani himself put it, “Both my hot streaks and slumps are part of who I am as a player. What’s important is being able to maintain good form for a long period of time.”
That’s a very self-aware statement, not always a given in professional sports, where success generally goes hand in hand with an irrational belief in yourself. But it’s just true! Ohtani has had skids like this before, and he surely will again. Great players aren’t immune from bad stretches – they just have them less frequently, and even their lows aren’t quite so low as your average hitter. That’s why they’re great.
The Dodgers are built to withstand a cold stretch from Ohtani, but Freeman has been just as cold. He’s posted an 88 wRC+ over the same stretch, batting .244/.326/.329, with only one home run and four doubles in 92 plate appearances. Meanwhile, Mookie Betts basically hasn’t even been on the field – he missed almost all of this span recovering from an oblique strain before returning Monday.
The good news is Freeman’s rough patch is already over. He’s been hot since the start of May, in fact, with a 137 wRC+. Those five extra-base hits I mentioned? They’ve all come in that span. Trying to slice hitter performance into arbitrary windows will lead to funny results like that. But in the aggregate, Freeman has been roughly neutral for the Dodgers in their recent malaise – one very cold stretch and one hot one. That’s a big change from his usual form. Last year, those three were a collective 96 runs above average offensively (mostly Ohtani and Freeman, to be fair). During this downstretch, they’ve been two runs below average. That’s a lot of runs to make up!
It’s not all of the runs, though. Those offensive contributions were worth about 0.6 runs per game. The Dodgers are slumping meaningfully harder than that. Will Smith and Teoscar Hernández, All-Star batters both, are off to poor starts to the season, and both have been below average during this downturn. Smith appears to have angered the batted ball luck gods. He’s in the 80th percentile for barrel rate and xwOBA and the 77th for strikeout rate; he’s also walking more than average, albeit less than he did in his superlative 2025 season. His timing looks slightly off, but that’s just my making general statements. If you made me describe exactly what is wrong, I don’t think I could. These are just the normal fluctuations for him; he had a slump this bad last year en route to a 153 wRC+, and a far deeper one in 2024. Catching is hard! Sometimes the guys who do it don’t hit for a few weeks. It happens.
Hernández’s cold stretch is slightly scarier. You might not have noticed it as the Dodgers romped their way to a second straight World Series last year, but he declined significantly from his first season in Dodger blue. He was basically average offensively, and played his usual blah outfield defense en route to a 0.6-WAR season. He’s changed his approach significantly – fewer swings, slower swings, better contact rate, worse power output – but the change hasn’t been great for his overall numbers. He’s never hit for less extra-base power, barreled the ball up less frequently, or made so little hard contact. He’s also still striking out 28% of the time. The adjustments he’s made might work if he slashed his strikeout rate by a ton, but this version of Hernández looks more like a fourth outfielder than a Home Run Derby champion. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a sign that nothing is wrong, how about this? Between the time I started and finished this article, the Dodgers played one game. Smith and Hernández combined for three extra-base hits in a 5-2 victory.
Even the supporting players for the Dodgers have struggled. Dalton Rushing burst onto the scene this year and still sports a jaw-dropping 189 wRC+. But that’s because he posted a 388 wRC+ (!!!) in his first 28 plate appearances. Since April 20, he’s hitting .179/.304/.179 in 46 times up. Hyeseong Kim, who played nearly every day in Betts’ absence, has followed a similar path: 155 wRC+ in his first 10 games, 72 wRC+ since. If you’re wondering how the Dodgers were scoring six runs per game in the early going, it surely helped that these two guys were playing out of their minds, but reality has reasserted itself. Stupid regression toward the mean. I’m sure both have better days ahead – Ohtani’s wise words about hot streaks and slumps apply to everyone – but the timing of their ups and downs has exacerbated the run-scoring whiplash.
A tiny bit of this downswing can be attributed to their opponents. This lineup has faced pitchers with an aggregate 2026 ERA of 3.90 over this stretch – 3.95 if you exclude their games against the Dodgers. That’s a hair better than league average, but hardly an insurmountable obstacle. It’s been more about Los Angeles’ lack of production than any elite opposition.
So am I here to bury the Dodgers? Not even a little bit. If you go looking for disaster in every slump, you’re going to be disappointed. The Dodgers had two non-overlapping 20-game stretches of scoring four or fewer runs per game last year – and finished second in baseball in runs scored. They had a lengthy stretch below four runs a game in 2024 en route to another second-place finish in scoring. They’re still sixth in runs scored this year! Meanwhile, their pitching staff has allowed the third-fewest runs. I’m fairly certain that the Dodgers are going to be OK.
Baseball is just weird this way. Sometimes what happens today is a great predictor of what will happen tomorrow. Sometimes it’s not even close. But nothing currently afflicting the Dodgers feels structural. While many of their best hitters are struggling at the moment, they’re not doing so in the same way, or for the same reasons. And what could be more Dodgers than Max Muncy walking and slugging his way through it all at the same clip as always? Finding a way to keep Ohtani fresh seems like a very difficult problem. The rest of this will come out in the wash.
