Dodgers News: LA Stays Atop Latest MLB Power Rankings
Every week, the entire team of baseball writers at The Athletic rank all 30 teams from best to worst, and those votes are tallied into the TA30 Power Rankings.
You’re not going to believe this, but the Dodgers — who are a full eight games better than the team with the second-best record in baseball — are at the top of the rankings again this week.
Last week the Dodgers finished a 5-1 homestand then skipped across the continent for a wraparound series in Miami. The Marlins’ park is among the most suppressive in the majors for offense, and yet L.A. scored 10 runs on Friday and eight more on Sunday. The Dodgers are the current kings of clout, an overwhelming offensive superpower. Pick a stat and they own it. AVG, SLG, OBP, xwOBA, wRC+, WAR, SLAM, JAM, BAM, BIP, POW. They lead the made-up categories, too.
“It’s a mindset,” Trea Turner said. “A mentality.”
Maybe that’s part of it. But you don’t just think your way into being an offensive superpower. Turner and Freddie Freeman rank 1-2 in the majors for hits. If they hold on — and they’ve held those spots since July 26 — they’d be the first teammates to finish atop the hits list together since Ichiro Suzuki and Bret Boone did it in 2001, and just the sixth pair since Ty Cobb and Bobby Veach first did it for the Tigers in 1919.
Meanwhile, Dave Roberts down-shifted his pitching staff into a six-man rotation to save them for the postseason. While the rest of the majors are looking for a second wind, the Dodgers haven’t even hit stride yet.
The 2022 Dodgers really are a combination of pretty much everything that can make a team great. The pitching has allowed the fewest runs in baseball, and the offense has scored the most. And, as Trea Turner said, they do have that “mentality.” Plenty of teams have put together talented rosters, but it takes more than that to be as successful as the Dodgers have so far this season.
In the middle of a frustrating three-game sweep in San Francisco that saw the Dodgers put up just four runs in mid-June, manager Dave Roberts publicly called out his team, saying, “People get caught up in their own individual paths, but the whole focusing on just winning a game and doing whatever it takes to win that day, we have to get back to that mindset.”
Since that series, the Dodgers are 52-15 and have extended their division lead from 0.5 games to 19.5 games. We’d say the Dodgers “got back to that mindset.”
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