The Los Angeles Dodgers had 44 at-bats against the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday night in an 8-4 win. For the first time, the entire lineup was on the same page.
Over the last couple of weeks, Dodgers Nation has hammered the lower third of the lineup for not taking good at-bats, striking out too much, and being rally killers. However, all nine batters flexed their muscle on Monday and ravaged a worn-down D-backs pitching staff.
They didn’t strike out.
“I was like, ‘What the f—? No Ks?’” Kiké Hernández said in the clubhouse while talking about the strikeout meter never changing. He brought up the oddity in the outfield after the Dodgers recorded the final out of the night. Then he found hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc to confirm it was true. Indeed, they’d made it out, punchout-free.
“That’s pretty f—ing cool,” he said.
The Dodgers hadn’t accomplished this feat since a 6-5 win over the Cincinnati Reds in 2006. The 44 batters the Dodgers sent to the plate without striking out marked the most batters to come to the plate in a game where a team didn’t strike out since July 28, 2017, when Cleveland beat the Chicago White Sox 9-3.
In just a few weeks, the Dodgers have gone from leading Major League Baseball in strikeouts to being its toughest team to strike out. On April 20, they had 221 strikeouts. Mathematically, one out of every four batters was going down on strikes.
Entering Monday, the Dodgers’ 13.8 percent strikeout rate over the last week was the lowest of any MLB team. In their last three games, the Dodgers’ rate is even lower (9.2 percent).
According to Freddie Freeman, the team “didn’t have any emphasis on cutting down strikeouts.”
It was just to be more on time to heaters because, that’s when we’re at our best, is when we’re hitting fastballs,” Freeman said, via the Los Angeles Times’ Jack Harris. “We weren’t doing that when we were going through that tough stretch.”
The Dodgers executed their approach flawlessly which is something to be extremely proud of.
