Dave Roberts lit a fire under Dodgers before Tarik Skubal's first home start and it worked

After the Los Angeles Dodgers' 4-2 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Sunday, Freddie Freeman was adamant. "There's no concern in here," he said. "We're a good team."

It wasn't what Dodgers fans wanted to hear. That loss was the eighth in their last nine games. The offense looked anemic, the backend of the bullpen was falling apart, and even the ever-heralded rotation was losing its rhythm.

On Monday, Dave Roberts bit back. "We're a wild-card team right now," he said, in what's hard to be read as anything but a direct response to Freeman. "We've gotta get going and play with urgency. ... The 'We’re gonna be okay and we're good,' — that's not good enough. Clearly it's not, given how we've played over the last month."

With Tarik Skubal on the mound for his first home start in Dodger blue, LA's offense finally answered. Skubal put them in a hole early, giving up three runs in his first three innings before being yanked after five, but the offense picked him up with a Shohei Ohtani RBI double, Freddie Freeman RBI single, and a Max Muncy two-run double to put the Dodgers on top by the end of the sixth.

Although the score ping-ponged a bit through the next few innings for a narrow 6-5 victory, the Dodgers finally did what they haven't been doing over the last few weeks: they showed signs of life.

Dave Roberts putting his foot down on Dodgers' losing skid finally woke the offense up

This is becoming a recurring theme for the Dodgers. Last July, the last time they lost seven in a row, Roberts said something to the same effect. "I just feel that with the guys we have, we just have to play better. We've got to pitch better, We've got to defend better, we've got to take more competitive at-bats. And we're just not doing any of those things right now."

Even baseball's most dominant team on paper has found themselves in these dark forests ever so often. After that losing streak in 2025, they won two before dropping three straight again. It was a dismal .417 July, but they regrouped to go .566 in August and September.

The sentiment behind Freeman's statement is true. The Dodgers are a good team. But every so often, they need a reminder that they can't rest on their laurels. Their .597 record on the season is still tied for the third-best in baseball, but if the postseason started tomorrow, they wouldn't get a bye. A wakeup call from Roberts, typically a more optimistic guy, was overdue.

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