Insane stat proves Dodgers' offense needs a major change to start 2025 season

The Dodgers led the National League in home runs in 2024 and trailed the first-place Yankees by just four and the second-place Orioles by two. Of course, Shohei Ohtani was singlehandedly responsible for almost 25% of their total 233 homers, but Teoscar Hernández hit over 30 and Freddie Freeman and Will Smith hit 20 or more. Even Mookie Betts and Max Muncy, with abridged seasons, hit 19 and 15 respectively.

Everyone knows that the Dodgers can mash; that's never been in doubt. This year, Tommy Edman has unleashed something that the Cardinals were never able to extract from him, and he currently leads the Dodgers in home runs with six. Ohtani, Freeman, and Smith all have OPS marks around or over .900 (Smith led the pack with a 1.026 OPS after the Dodgers' Tuesday game against the Rockies).

However, ahead of their first game against Colorado on Monday, Dodgers writer Blake Harris pulled out a truly confounding stat: since April 3, the Dodgers were 29th in runs scored in front of only the White Sox, but were also tied for third in home runs. Harris said it best, "If they're not hitting homers, they're not scoring runs."

Dodgers' power has been on full display, but everything else about the offense has been lacking

The Dodgers have made this point even clearer over their first two games of the Colorado series. On Monday, three of their five runs were scored on homers; on Tuesday, three of their six. It's great that we can regularly expect the Dodgers to mash the ball if they make contact, but if that's all the offense has going for it, it's going to be something that opposing teams will be able to exploit.

Hitting bombs is basically the main thing that the front office assembled this offense to do. That's what made it so surprising when they traded for Edman, who had no history of being able to crank the ball before he proved that he can get in on that action too this year, and signed the light-hitting Hyeseong Kim in the offseason (though Kim is also showing flashes of power in Triple-A).

It's probably easy for a team like that to underestimate small ball, but the Dodgers need to find a balance between keeping things simple and swinging for homers. Not every win has to be a slugfest.