Dodgers: How Did We Get Here?

If you’ve been around Dodgers’ Twitter the last two weeks, you will have seen it devolve into essential one giant copy of the meme where the dog is sitting in the fire.

“This is fine,” the dog says sarcastically as the room burns around him, a personal favorite of mine, but it seems to have become a reality for many Dodgers fans at this point.

I’ll preface this by saying that things maybe aren’t okay right now, but they will be. The Dodgers are going through one of the worst slumps in recent team history. But they are in first place, they’ve already eclipsed their win total from last year, things could surely get worse.

Just look at last year’s Giants team, best record in baseball in the first half followed by the worst second half in baseball history by win percentage differential. 

The 1964 Phillies led by six and a half games with 12 to go and blew that lead, losing their final ten games in a row.

The 1995 California Angels team was up by 11.5 games with a month, and a half to go, gave it up, and lost in a play-in game where they were dominated by Randy Johnson.

And in more recent history, in 2011, both the Red Sox and Braves had historical chokes. The Braves lost an eight and a half game wild card lead and missed the playoffs. The Red Sox were the BEST TEAM IN BASEBALL ALL YEAR, LOST 20 GAMES IN SEPTEMBER, and finally missed the playoffs after getting skipped in the standings by both the Rays and Yankees.

I capitalized a few important things in that last paragraph in case you missed it. The Dodgers are not the first team to have a historic bad stretch after being out of this world for most of the year. The difference has been that the Dodgers were playing at such high rate that this slide hasn’t put any playoff chances in doubt at this time.

Still, many fans are looking for why this has happened, and there are many ways to answer, especially depending on who you ask (DONT ASK TWITTER, TRUST ME).

Here are a few of the most common things people seem to be pointing blame to and if they have any validity or not.