The Dodgers closed the regular season with a September that looked a lot more like the team they expected to be.
They were missing Shohei Ohtani, Andy Pages and Roki Sasaki for most of the month until the final week, but that didn’t stop them from going 18-7. After a flat July and an underwhelming August, it was a needed push to finish the year.
Mookie Betts was at the center of it. After spending much of the season below his usual standards offensively, he started to turn things around in mid-August and then caught fire in September.
He hit .337/.438/.674 with seven home runs and nine doubles, scored 20 runs and drove in 22. His 16 extra-base hits were his most since August 2023, when he won National League player of the month.
Betts finished the month second in FanGraphs WAR to Reds shortstop Elly De La Cruz, 1.9 to 2.0, and he ranked fourth in the majors in OPS at 1.112 and wRC+ at 202.
The late-season surge wasn’t limited to Betts. Teoscar Hernández and Kyle Tucker gave the Dodgers real production from the corners after nearly five months of close to replacement-level offense there.
Hernández posted a 166 wRC+ with 18 RBI, while Tucker had a 140 wRC+ and six home runs. Tucker’s month came with one caveat: after fouling a ball off his right knee on September 19, he managed only five singles in 21 at-bats.
Will Smith also returned after nearly three months on the injured list and looked like himself again, hitting .290/.400/.548 with a 160 wRC+. Alex Freeland contributed in limited action as well, putting up a 133 wRC+ while batting .250/.413/.389.
The offense also started doing damage in bunches again. During the July and August slump, the Dodgers had only four wins by at least five runs over a 51-game stretch.
In September, they had five blowout wins, which was one shy of the most in the majors. That brought them back in line with the way they opened the season, when they piled up 25 blowout wins through the end of June, the best mark in baseball.
For the year, their 34 blowout wins were tied with the New York Yankees for second most and trailed only the Chicago Cubs.
Freddie Freeman’s month went in the opposite direction. He opened September with a three-run homer on September 2 and reached base five times in that game, but he didn’t have another extra-base hit over his final 18 games and 77 plate appearances. Over that stretch, he hit .167/.208/.167.
That September homer ended the longest power drought of Freeman’s career: 47 full games and 196 plate appearances without a home run. Even during that stretch, he had still been useful, hitting .318/.362/.374 with 10 doubles.
But the power vanished in the final month, and Freeman was also dealing with a knee injury that cost him four games and sent him to designated hitter for another. Afterward, he made it clear why the upcoming five-day break before Game 1 of the NLDS mattered.
“I think we all know why it’s important,” Freeman last week said of the bye. “There’s a lot of guys limping toward the end, a lot of aches and pains this year.”
September also brought an encouraging debut from Josue De Paula, who got a chance to play with Ohtani on the injured list. The top prospect made the most of it, showing a sharp eye at the plate with 11 walks against five strikeouts in 11 games. He hit .323/.500/.581 with three doubles, a home run and a triple.
De Paula became the first Dodgers player to reach base at least half the time in a month with at least 40 plate appearances since Betts in August 2023. He and Betts are the only Dodgers to do it in the 2020s.
“Josue has been awesome. Injected some life and energy into our team as we got into September,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said Wednesday. “He handled himself and did as well as he could possibly do.”
Pitching was another major reason the month went the way it did. The Dodgers’ starting rotation remained their biggest weapon heading into October, and the group of Tarik Skubal, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell and Glasnow combined for a 2.76 ERA, 117 strikeouts and a 30.3-percent strikeout rate over 98 innings in 17 starts. Snell briefly raised concern when he left his September 16 start after one inning as a precaution because of left groin discomfort.
Emmet Sheehan also made a strong impression after being called back up from Triple-A, allowing one run in 17 innings across three appearances while striking out 24 and walking three.
In the bullpen, Alex Vesia gave the Dodgers another strong September. He allowed one run in 10 1/3 innings over 11 games and struck out 15. Even with the highest walk rate of his season since 2021 at 13.5 percent, he issued only one walk among the 35 batters he faced in September.
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