Gavin Lux Pinpoints a Problematic Pitch For the Dodgers' Struggling Offense

Reducing the solution to a baseball team's struggles to one quick fix is almost always an oversimplification. There is no silver bullet. The team doesn't need to bunt more.

Still, a struggling squad has to start somewhere. For the Los Angeles Dodgers, losers of five in a row, that somewhere might just be one specific pitch they can't seem to handle — at least, not as well as they would like.

Gavin Lux: "As a team, I don't think we're hitting the fastball really well right now... It's just a part of baseball. It's still a really good group, a really good lineup. It's just one of those runs where we're not really clicking." pic.twitter.com/nZfA0sMIfg
— SportsNet LA (@SportsNetLA) May 26, 2024

Second baseman Gavin Lux pointed to the Dodgers' inability to square up fastballs on Sunday after they were limited to five hits and one run by the Cincinnati Reds. A deeper dive into the numbers shows exactly what he's talking about.

The Dodgers are slugging .410 on fastballs this season, 14th in MLB. On all other pitches, the Dodgers are slugging .434 — second in MLB, per Statcast.

Slugging percentage is a good measure of what a batter is supposed to do with a fastball (slug it!) but also can vary based on the ballpark, the quality of the opposing defense, and other factors out of a team's control. Hard-hit percentage cancels out some of that noise, but here too the Dodgers are lagging behind their peers.

According to Statcast, the Dodgers' 46.6 percent hard-hit percentage against fastballs ranks ninth in MLB — better, if not impressive — while their hard-hit percentage of 41.8 on all other pitches ranks first.

The phenomenon Lux is pointing to is very real. It's not that the Dodgers can't hit fastballs; rather, they're hitting everything but the four-seamer harder than every other team. So what happens when they see the heater?

Notably, the Dodgers are seeing hotter heaters than nearly every team. Their average opponent's fastball speed of 94.5 mph ranks third in MLB, per Statcast, which might have something to do with the Dodgers' inability to square up the pitch. Is that a bit of small-sample-size misfortune, or are opponents rearing back and firing when they face the Dodgers?

The answer might not matter. The Dodgers seem to have identified a tangible problem worth drilling down on. Until they solve it, teams will continue to exploit this weakness of the Dodgers' lineup — once few saw coming when the season began.