Mookie Betts seems to have as few answers as Dodgers fans do amid team's struggles

The Dodgers played a hard-fought game against the Pirates on Tuesday night, but they ultimately fell by two runs after Pittsburgh took an immediate four-run lead off of Clayton Kershaw in the first (partially thanks to some more poor defense from Teoscar Hernández), then tacked on five more against LA's bullpen. They fell again in Pittsburgh on Wednesday night. They continue to fall in Pittsburgh.

In the Tuesday contest, Shohei Ohtani hit a home run at 120 MPH, the 100th homer of his Dodgers career and the sixth hardest-hit ball in the Statcast era, almost everyone in the starting lineup got on base at least once — but the Dodgers still left seven stranded.

The Dodgers are 5-6 since Aug. 22 and played .536 ball through the month, the 13th best record in baseball. Their lead over the Padres shrunk down to nothing, and occasionally became a deficit a few times, and recent injury returns haven't seemed to be as much of a balm as the Dodgers were hoping.

After LA's first loss against the Pirates, a subdued Mookie Betts said, "There's no secret formula. It doesn't matter if a team's below .500, above .500...we just have to figure out ways to win games and we're not doing it."

Dodgers' loss to Pirates on Tuesday night, recent underperformance has everyone scratching their heads

The Dodgers' August was nowhere near as bad as their July, when they posted a .417 record, but they haven't been able to bounce back to the .600, or even .550-ish, excellence that they maintained for most of the first half. Even Betts, who has been slowly but surely improving over the last month after posting some of the worst numbers of his career in the first half, hasn't been able to do much for the team's overall success.

Lately, LA's offense hasn't been as much of a problem as their pitching and defense has. After being benched for the Dodgers' finale against the Diamondbacks, Hernández came back to collect two hits and an RBI on Tuesday. But if he had managed to make a play on that fly ball in the first inning on Tuesday, Kershaw might've been able to get out things more unscathed. If Michael Kopech and Kirby Yates weren't continuing to struggle since coming back from their IL stints, the end of the game might've gone differently.

The Dodgers are still leading the NL West thanks to the Padres suffering an even worse recent slump, but they can't only bet on a Padres collapse through the rest of the month if they want to avoid the Wild Card round in October. Whatever the answer is — they need to figure it out, and fast.