The Athletic hints Dodgers’ late-season hitting problems could become a feature, not a bug

The Los Angeles Dodgers winning back-to-back World Series titles in 2024 and 2025 should have been the ultimate validation of Andrew Friedman’s galaxy-brain roster building. Two different paths, same champagne.

But buried inside a recent piece from Katie Woo and Fabian Ardaya in The Athletic (subscription required) is a quiet suggestion that should make Dodger fans squirm: that second title? It didn't come from overwhelming teams. It came while the offense was running out of gas –– and maybe running out of time.

Woo and Ardaya laid it out in plain numbers. The 2024 Dodgers bludgeoned teams with 95 postseason runs, one of the highest totals in MLB history. But in 2025, they needed only 72 — one of the lowest totals we’ve seen during the Wild Card era. And that wasn’t simply October randomness. It was the culmination of something we watched happen in slow motion.

Through June 2025, the Dodgers were baseball’s best offense with a 121 wRC+. By July, they had fallen to 26th. Down the stretch, they had fits and starts at best. And in October, they literally could not score more than four runs in a nine-inning game after the Wild Card round.

This wasn’t just slumping. This was erosion. The margin for error evaporated. You could once show up as the Dodgers and assume five runs were coming. Now, you need to grind. You need to force hits. You need to rely on “fighting” instead of talent bailing you out.

This brings us to the inconvenient truth that many fans have been afraid to acknowledge –– that the Dodgers had the oldest position player group in MLB last year. Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernández — two cornerstone bats — had the worst offensive seasons of their careers. Both are entering their age-33 seasons.

So we’ve reached the big question: was the Dodgers' 2025 offensive downturn a slump, or was it the first sign that their core is finally aging out of its superteam era?

Dodgers' late-season slump in 2025 may be symptomatic of an aging roster

It’s uncomfortable because “old” and “declining” are not concepts Los Angeles has needed to acknowledge in a decade. The machine always regenerated. Prospects turned into All-Stars. Stars stayed stars. Regression was something that happened in other zip codes.

But aging curves do not care about market size. And when you zoom out, the warnings multiply. Older players don't just slump more –– they slump longer. Recovery time widens. Bat speed reduction is gradual (until the day that it isn't). And the first thing to go? Damage on velocity.

Which looks a whole lot like… the inability to string together big innings. Sound familiar, Dodgers fans?

The Dodgers didn’t fall apart in 2025. They tightened. The offense shrank. The fireworks became smoke bursts. They still won because their margin for error remains enormous, but the model is shifting.

Los Angeles once built lineups around players approaching or at peak age. Now the roster feels heavy. Locked-in contracts. Aging timelines. Long-term bets on yesterday’s certainty.

This doesn’t mean the doom is here. It means the handwriting is on the wall — faint, but legible. The Dodgers aren't collapsing. They're calcifying.

And the danger isn’t that the offense becomes bad, but rather that it becomes average until October –– when the lights are brightest and the arms are nastiest –– and suddenly, that lineup built on superstar pedigree looks… mortal.

What if the slump isn’t a glitch in the system anymore? What if it’s the new operating software? That's the unsettling thought that Dodgers fans will have to live with going forward because once decline settles in, even they can’t out-spend gravity forever.