Dodgers have overcome rash of injuries

In the end, all baseball regular seasons can feel like a six-month long version of “Survivor.” This one is no different, with so many contending teams having been affected by injuries to key players that should have buried them, but they haven’t. The Yankees didn’t have Gerrit Cole early; the Braves lost Ronald Acuña Jr. early and Austin Riley late; the Mets have only had Kodai Senga for 5 1/3 innings and, well, the list is a lot longer than that.

It’s a list, of course, that has also includes the Dodgers. They lost Mookie Betts for two months to a broken left hand, didn’t have Clayton Kershaw and Walker Buehler at the start of the season, don’t have Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow now and never had Tony Gonsolin (16-1 just two years ago), who is recovering from Tommy John surgery and still holding out hope that he might pitch this season. And as Dodgers fans know, that’s just their own short, and painful, list that doesn’t include Brusdar Graterol, who got injured eight pitches into his 2024 debut, and River Ryan, who is out for the season after having Tommy John surgery.

With it all, and with all the mix-and-match lineups that manager Dave Roberts has used and the way the D-backs and Padres are coming up hard and fast in the rearview mirror, Roberts’ team woke up on Tuesday morning with the best record in baseball.

When the Dodgers signed Shohei Ohtani and Yamamoto last offseason, that’s exactly where we all thought they would be as the season moved up on Sept. 1. Nobody knew the trip would be quite this interesting or — even with an offensive built around the remarkable Ohtani — as bumpy as it has sometimes been.

On Monday, I asked Roberts, who has done some of his best work across the first five months of the regular season, how in the world his team did manage to come out of last weekend with the best record in the sport.

Here was his first answer:

“Ha! It’s still a bit of a wonder to me as well. And we still have our No. 1 and No. 2 starters [Yamamoto, Glasnow] on the IL.”

The Dodgers are hopeful of getting whole in September. After all the injury issues they’ve had with their starters, and even though Buehler is a long way from his pre-Tommy John surgery form (1-4, 6.09 ERA), Gavin Stone has stepped up lately and Jack Flaherty is 3-0 since the Dodgers acquired him at the Trade Deadline from the Tigers. In addition, Michael Kopech, another Deadline acquisition from the White Sox, has looked like a total late-inning star since putting on Dodger Blue.

And now that Betts is back — and back in right field — Roberts is once again writing in the names of three MVPs at the top of his batting order:

So the Dodgers are wounded, but still loaded, totally. Ohtani has already hit and run his way into the 40-40 club, and he still has a shot of being the first player in history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season. Freeman is still Freeman. Mookie? He remains one of the most versatile players the sport has known, able to move as effortlessly as he has from the outfield to playing both middle-infield positions. It wasn’t just the Dodgers who got better when he came back. Baseball got better.

Everybody absolutely knows how much talent the Dodgers have, how they don’t just have three former MVPs in their regular lineup, they also have another former MVP in Kershaw (2-2 with a 3.72 ERA in six starts). Now they try to hold their place at the top of the NL West and set themselves up to make October something other than a heartbreak month for them this time.

So many top teams have been hit — and hit hard — and have kept coming. Some are still leading divisions, some would be Wild Cards if the season ended now — some like the Mets and Red Sox are on the outside looking in, with Boston fading fast.

But the Dodgers have had a season as informed by the IL as any of the other top teams. Here they are, anyway, about to open a series with the Orioles, three games ahead of the D-backs and four ahead of the Padres.

Said Roberts: “We frankly ran some crazy lineups out there before we got healthy. But we just do a remarkable job of being laser focused on that day’s ballgame. Pick up the pieces and do it again the next day.”

It is a tribute to him and his players. Ohtani came up the freeway from Anaheim, because he wanted to win and he has done everything possible to carry Roberts’ offense — even when Betts was hurt — and been as valuable to the Dodgers as Aaron Judge and Juan Soto have been for the Yankees and Bobby Witt Jr. continues to be for the Royals. Every time the Dodgers’ season looked as if it could go sideways, it did not.

There is no guarantee that they’re going to win their division, there is way too much ball to be played between now and October. There’s no way of knowing what their rotation is going to look like in September, much less October. But the L.A. Survivors are still here.