WASHINGTON — It’s been a rarity this year for Andy Pages to not be right by Teoscar Hernández’s side. The young Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder has sought guidance from Hernández as he looked to solidify a spot he wasn’t promised in center field. For hours after the long spring days at Camelback Ranch, Hernández and Pages bunkered inside the organization’s sparking new hitting lab, hoping to find something.
“Anytime he wants to talk, I’m going to be there,” Hernández said. “I’m going to keep talking to him and make everything easy for him.”
Pages did not have a dominant spring. He opened the season in Tokyo as the Dodgers’ center fielder anyway. His slow start to the season began to have a compounding effect. His warts in reading balls in center field got exposed, prompting postgame meetings at his locker with Hernández and Mookie Betts to go through proper technique. His gaffes on the bases proved costly. More than anything, he wasn’t hitting. After 11 games, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts gave Pages a respite.
He responded Tuesday with a home run, looking to the sky when he returned to the dugout. In Wednesday’s 6-5 win over Washington, he hit another, tying the game for the Dodgers in the seventh inning. He made a nice, running catch in center field. Another good day for the 24-year-old, who needed the boost.
“Since spring training, the team told me my spot wasn’t secure,” Pages said this week in Spanish. “I had to go win a job. So the stress accumulated, and I think that these games, not getting the results, it accumulated even more. Thankfully … I was able to get that weight off of me.”
The Dodgers needed it, too. Hernández’s go-ahead, two-out single in the seventh inning capped another Dodgers comeback. The win over the Nationals helped avoid the ignominy of getting swept against the inexperienced, if talented, club. A positive note to cap an underwhelming road trip.
Andy ties it up! pic.twitter.com/hEqya45BSW
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) April 9, 2025
Pages’ swing has been in a good place since those late nights with Hernández in spring. But fighting for a spot had sapped him of some of the aggression that made him a feared power hitter in the minor leagues. He’s sought to see plenty of pitches, adjusting to a spot he’s never hit in: at the bottom of a talented Dodgers order. That remains a process.
“Sometimes I get too passive for that reason, which isn’t good for me,” Pages said.
In the fourth inning, Pages stared at three consecutive sinkers from Nationals starter Jake Irvin. All were over the plate right at the knees. Pages shook his head in disgust as he walked back to the dugout.
“I think he’s calibrating,” Roberts said. In the dugout, Hernández urged Pages to swing.
The aggression returned in the seventh. He waved through two sliders from Eduardo Salazar. When the third broke over the heart of the plate, Pages lurched for it. He lofted a fly ball that just keep carrying in left, all the way over the fence. Tie score. Hernández gave the Dodgers the lead four batters later.
Pages had just one extra-base hit through his first 41 plate appearances this year; now he has two in as many games.
Center field still remains an area of focus. The Dodgers would have liked to start Tommy Edman there most days, but that was before second baseman Hyeseong Kim struggled mightily in spring. Kiké Hernández could be an option, but he’s had to mostly play first base as Freddie Freeman has appeared in three of the Dodgers’ first 14 games. James Outman is off to a slow start in the minors. The club acquired Esteury Ruiz last week to reinforce the outfield depth.
For now, at least, Pages can breathe.
“He’s gonna hit,” Hernández said. “He’s a good hitter. He’s gonna be fine. And he’s gonna help us a lot this year, too.”
The first test for the Dodgers’ pitching depth arrived this week. The results weren’t pretty. The organization for months had touted the quantity of quality arms it had in reserve. Losing Blake Snell to the injured list just two starts into a nine-figure contract would be a blow but one this team is supposedly built to protect against.
The first dip into that depth hasn’t been encouraging. Call-ups Justin Wrobleski and Landon Knack got bombed out of consecutive starts, showing the downside of the volatility that comes with digging deeper into this group.
Wrobleski had a strong spring and an even better first start of the year in Triple-A with Oklahoma City. Then he got torched for eight runs in five innings, including a pair of home runs to Nationals phenom James Wood.
“When you’re a competitor, you don’t want this to happen,” Wrobleski said after his start. “But at the end of the day, it’s just about doing your job when you’re called upon, and today I didn’t do a good job of that. It’s just about continuing to make the most of whatever opportunities I’m given the rest of the year.”
Knack garnered respect a year ago as the Dodgers’ most consistent spot starting option, logging World Series innings as part of a formative rookie campaign. Spotted a four-run lead Wednesday — just the fifth time in 14 games the Dodgers have scored first — it took Knack 31 pitches to record an out. It took 41 for him to get out of a three-run first and 69 for his day to be over in the third inning.
“Just completely out of sync with stuff,” Knack said. “Release point just not there. Really didn’t have changeup command today, and so just kept falling behind, just not able to execute like we usually would.”
Combined, the two managed to record just 22 outs, allowing 13 runs.
A starting rotation that led the majors in ERA during the 8-0 start now has real question marks.
First, with Snell. The two-time Cy Young winner’s meeting with Dr. Neal ElAttrache this week yielded what Roberts called a “best-case scenario.” He’ll be down from throwing until Monday and won’t need any medical intervention for now as he deals with left shoulder inflammation.
Next question is about who is coming to help backfill until Snell gets back as the Dodgers will continue to need to pop in extra starters while keeping Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki on a once-a-week pitching schedule. Wrobleski and Knack will remain in the mix, as will Bobby Miller — who has struggled with his control and has walked eight batters in 9 2/3 innings in the minors. Tony Gonsolin is still weeks away from a return as he continues his rehab assignment with Oklahoma City. Clayton Kershaw is facing hitters but still doesn’t feel 100 percent with his surgically repaired left big toe; the soonest he’d be eligible to return is late May, anyways.
Eventually, Emmet Sheehan and Shohei Ohtani will enter the mix. Ohtani threw another light bullpen session Wednesday afternoon as the Dodgers continue to take his recovery slowly coming off a second major elbow ligament reconstruction.
The bullpen, which has logged a major league-leading 64 innings this season, has done its part. It ranks fourth in baseball with a 2.25 ERA, logging 6 2/3 scoreless innings after Knack departed Wednesday.
“I think it’s kind of expected,” Kirby Yates said. “I think with the way everybody has pitched in the past and (is capable of doing), everybody’s just going out there doing their job.”
Roberts spent much of Wednesday afternoon still stewing on what he saw Tuesday, when the Dodgers whiffed 15 times against a collection of Nationals arms that paled in comparison to some of the high-powered talents they’d seen in the season’s first few weeks.
“I just don’t think 15 strikeouts with our ballclub should happen,” Roberts said, lamenting the poor quality of at-bats. “We faced (Tarik) Skubal and we faced (Chris) Sale and we didn’t punch 15 times. For me, that’s just — I don’t think we’ll see that again this year.”
The Dodgers struck out a combined seven times against the two reigning Cy Young winners — and 15 times against Brad Lord (who spent the offseason working at a Home Depot), Colin Poche, Orlando Ribalta and Jackson Rutledge.
This vaunted offense has struck out 10 or more times in five of the last six games.
“It’s pretty stark, pretty clear that the team at-bats just haven’t been that consistent,” Roberts said.
Wednesday had an encouraging start, at least. The first four batters reached safely and scored against Irvin, with the Dodgers forcing the right-hander to throw 37 pitches. He’d need just 66 to get through the next five innings. It took until the seventh for the Dodgers to find daylight again, with Pages’ homer, Ohtani beating out an infield single, stealing second and scoring when Teoscar Hernández lofted a single into the outfield.
“We’ve been having a lot of quick innings,” Kiké Hernández said. “I don’t think we’ve really ran a starting pitcher out of there early in the game, which is something we pride ourselves on as an offensive unit. We’ve been letting the starting pitcher settle down. We’ve gotten a couple of them early, but then we’ve just let him settle down and cruise through the rest of the game. There’s been a lot of six-inning outings against us, which is for us — that needs to change.”
Getting Freeman back will help. The former MVP is expected to return to the lineup Friday night when the Dodgers return home against the Chicago Cubs. They can move past a cold, miserable 2-4 road trip.
“At some point, we were going to play sh–ty baseball,” Hernández said, “and it just seemed like this was the week to do that.”
(Photo of Andy Pages: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)