Ten reasons why the Dodgers are probably toast

Phil Gurnee ♦ July 1, 2016 ♦ 2 Comments

I can go positive and I can go negative. Jon Weisman already made the case for staying positive, so I thought to myself, can I find nine reasons not to be optimistic? Heck,  I could probably find 20 but I’ll limit myself to ten.

1. The best hitter on the team is a rookie who has yet to have a slump. Even though Corey Seager is the greatest thing since Mike Piazza,  can he follow Mike Piazza and continue carrying the offense on his back until the end of the year?
2. Adrian Gonzalez not only looks lost but sounds lost. Just the other day he lamented the defensive shifts he is seeing and bemoaned they are making him a .250 hitter. Heck Adrian, Dodger fans will take .250, just hit a home run once in a while instead of ground balls to second. You can’t really blame the shift on your lack of power. Call up Big Papi and ask him how he’s doing it. You can’t complain about how baseball is making slow 1st baseman obsolete when Big Papi is rewriting record books while being the slowest player in baseball.
3. Ryu could barely get through his rehabs without having to stop multiple times. What do you think is going to happen when he has to pitch every fifth day for a month?
4. Julio Urias has two more starts and then is gone from the rotation. For how long we don’t know. All year? Until Sept? Can he be effective out of the bullpen?
5. Bud Norris could be good, average, below average, or horrible, and for his career,  he’s been the latter two much more than the former two. Notice that none of those options are above average.
6. Dave Roberts thinks that Howie Kendrick is a starting left fielder. A left fielder who is about to garner his 100th plate appearance as a left fielder without driving in one single player that wasn’t named Howie Kendrick.
7. Puig looks good again, but for how long? Will it be the hamstring that takes him down, or will it simply be that he’s not very good?
8. Injury-plagued seasons don’t simply stop being injury plagued. If this season can take down Clayton Kershaw it can take down anyone.
9. The phrase – “the soft underbelly of the bullpen” might get used three out of five games for a while.
10. If everything goes right the Dodgers could win exactly as many games in the second half without Kershaw, and still not make the postseason because they are battling multiple teams for the wild card, not just chasing the Giants. Two of probably four teams are going to make the wild card from among the Marlins/Mets/Cardinals/Dodgers.

That wasn’t much fun. Well, to be honest, writing the Adrian part was fun, but for the most part,  this column doesn’t have much of a payback to the writer.

Also by the time I got to the end of number ten and re-read what I wrote. I don’t see any reason why the Dodgers can’t be the play-in game. Normally a writer would cancel this column and try another angle, but I’m committed, and since no one will read it anyway, I’ll post it as it is.