Max Muncy didn’t dress it up. He didn’t soften it, either.
With the Los Angeles Dodgers staring at a 3-0 hole against the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series, the veteran third baseman was asked what has gone wrong with the offense. His answer landed with no wiggle room.
“It’s a pretty simple answer. We’re playing like s-. They’re playing great,” he said, as reported by the California Post’s Jack Harris and other reporters.
That blunt assessment came after a Wednesday night loss that followed a familiar pattern for Los Angeles: the bats finally looked a little more alive, then Blake Snell unraveled in the seventh inning with back-to-back home runs.
The numbers behind the Dodgers’ slide are ugly. As detailed by Newsweek baseball writer J.P.
Hoornstra, the Dodgers are one of 274 teams too play at least seven postseason games in a season since 1903. Their team OPS of .572 doesn’t just sit near the bottom of that list - it is almost dead last.
The 2026 Dodgers are 268th, with only six teams posting a worse OPS in more than a century.
That is a stunning fall for a lineup built around big names and big swings. Los Angeles has gone without a home run in this series against Milwaukee, despite featuring power bats like Muncy, Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and others.
Now the Dodgers have no margin left. They’ll try to avoid “playing like s-” for a fourth straight game on Thursday, because another loss ends their season.
Tyler Glasnow will start for the Boys in Blue as they try to stave off the sweep. First pitch is set for 5 p.m.
PT, moved up an hour from the previously announced 6 p.m. PT start.
Snell, who took the mound in Game 3 and gave up those two crushing homers in the seventh, said the focus has to stay on Thursday.
“Yeah, it sucks, but it’s part of it,” he said. “How do we bounce back, how do we fight? I think that’s the most important thing, us coming together and finding a way to win.”
In Other News...
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The commercials at the center of the debate feature actress Sydney Sweeney in a campaign for the sports prediction platform Novig, and the pushback has already reached other athletes as well. Sweeney, an equity partner in Novig, has defended the spot as a playful campaign built around sports, but the criticism leaves MLB facing a familiar problem in October: how to balance postseason exposure, sponsor pressure and the expectations of the audience watching at home. [Read more 🡒]
Dodgers Suddenly Face A Brutal Question With Season On The Brink
Blake Snell was on the mound for the Dodgers in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series, and the outing quickly became part of a familiar October script: one or two mistakes, then a long night of chasing the game against the Brewers. Milwaukee kept landing the big blows, Jackson Chourio added to a postseason surge that has now carried him into the Brewers record book, and Los Angeles never found enough offense to dig out of the hole. Shohei Ohtani, dropped to sixth in the batting order, did reach base twice and picked up a single, but the lineup as a whole still came up short.
Now the Dodgers have been pushed to the edge in Game 4, with their season suddenly hanging over a start time that was moved up because of weather concerns tied to the American League Championship Series. For a club built to expect October pressure, the question is no longer about staying comfortable or tweaking around the margins. It is whether there is enough left on the mound, in the lineup, and in the dugout to extend the series long enough to make any of the rest matter. [Read more 🡒]
Teoscar Hernandez Sends A Clear Message As Dodgers Face NLCS Trouble
The Dodgers head into the rest of the NLCS in an uncomfortable spot after dropping the first two games to the Brewers, but Teoscar Hernandez is not sounding like a player ready to concede anything. Hernandez acknowledged Milwaukee has played well, yet he also pointed to the simple reality that the series is still alive and the Dodgers still have a path back into it. For a club that has leaned on him as a steady offensive presence over the past two years, his tone matters.
Hernandez has been one of the lineups more reliable bats, and that kind of stability is what the Dodgers need now more than ever. Down two games, every at-bat starts to carry extra weight, and the margin for error has already narrowed sharply. The Brewers have set the tone so far, but Hernandez is making it clear the Dodgers are not treating this like a finished story. [Read more 🡒]
