Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
The Dodgers (4-2) begin their first road trip of the season today as they open up with a three game series against the Washington Nationals (3-3). The team is coming off a disappointing series loss to the Cleveland Guardians (4-3), where they averaged just over two runs per game. You’d expect better than that from the best lineup in baseball, but it happens over the course of a long season in this sport.
They’ll look to bounce back against a Nationals’ pitching staff that doesn’t really compete with that of the Guardians, hopefully providing some easier looks for the bats. Emmet Sheehan will be on the mound looking to figure out his own issues, while longtime St. Louis Cardinal Miles Mikolas will make his second start of the year for Washington.
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| 10:05 A.M. | Washington D.C. | ||
| DH | Ohtani (L) | RF | Wood (L) |
| RF | Tucker (L) | 1B | García Jr. (L) |
| SS | Betts | LF | Lile (L) |
| 1B | Freeman (L) | DH | House |
| C | Smith | SS | Abrams (L) |
| 3B | Muncy (L) | 2B | Nuñez (S) |
| LF | T. Hernández | 3B | Vivas (L) |
| CF | Pages | C | Ruiz (S) |
| 2B | Freeland (S) | CF | Young |
| P | Sheehan (R) | P | Mikolas (R) |
The Nationals’ offense in 2025 was rather weak, sitting 23rd in wRC+ (93), 24th in OPS (.693), playing a significant part in their 66-96 record. They’ll hope to improve in that department this year, with a full season of 23 year-old Daylen Lile who posted an .845 OPS last year across 91 games, and hopefully another step forward from James Wood who put up 31 homers last season. The surrounding cast is rather similar with old friend Keibert Ruiz behind the plate (still struggling mightily offensively and defensively), and CJ Abrams at shortstop. Washington hosts two defensive specialists in Jacob Young and Nasim Nuñez, and will hope that the offense can be picked up by former top prospect Brady House who had a .574 OPS in 73 games last year, and Luis García Jr. who is now their first baseman after primarily playing second in 2025. Separately, they also feature the best hitter of the 2026 season thus far in Joey Wiemer who they claimed off waivers from the Giants this offseason. Wiemer has two home runs and is slashing .588/.682/1.059, for an OPS of 1.741 and a 360 wRC+.
The Dodgers will keep things pretty normal as they just hope for the top of the order to really kick things into gear. The daunting top four of Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Tucker, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman all have batting averages between .136 and .208, and Freeman leads them all in OPS at… .615. Teoscar Hernández hasn’t been able to translate his scorching Spring Training yet either, hitting just .238 with a .476 OPS. Alex Freeland gets his fourth start of the season at second base, and needs to take advantage of his opportunity toward playing time in the absence of Tommy Edman.
Andy Pages has been red-hot after hitting .340 in Spring Training, and has had zero issue bringing that form into the regular season. He’s hitting .429 with nine hits in 21 plate appearances, has cut down on the strikeouts, improved the hard-hit rate, and looks increasingly comfortable in center field. He just posted a 2025 season where he hit .272 with 27 home runs, 86 RBI, and put up 4.1 fWAR while learning center field on the fly at 24 years-old. He had a disastrous offensive postseason, but came up huge with the glove as we all remember, and looks poised to showcase that he’s one of the premium center fielders in the game.
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Here’s how Sheehan and Mikolas fared last season.
After seven seasons with the Cardinals, the 37-year-old Mikolas signed a one-year $2.25 million dollar deal with the Nationals this offseason as they look to have someone eat innings. That’s essentially what Mikolas is at this point in his career, with a 4.98 ERA over his final three seasons in St. Louis while averaging 176 innings per year. He took the loss in his season debut against the Cubs, where he went five innings allowing four earned runs on six hits and three walks. The command was a little erratic, but the final line was about what you’d expect from him on the road against a good Chicago offense. This is another tough matchup for him, but the Dodgers have been cold at the plate.
Sheehan’s final line in his season debut against the Diamondbacks was 3.1 innings pitched, four earned runs on five hits and two walks with six strikeouts. He struck out the side to start the game, but things unraveled as his velocity and command withered away throughout his start. His final four-seam fastball of the night came in at 91.2 mph against Carlos Santana who was able to foul it off and eventually pull a double down the line to knock Sheehan out of the game.
Sheehan was electric last year, but in Spring Training and now his first regular season outing, just hasn’t looked like the same guy as the game progresses. He’s said that it’s mechanics that they’re trying to get ironed out, but the steep fall off in velocity as the game progresses is obviously worrisome to an extent. Dustin wrote about it after his last outing.
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Some people won’t love the idea of adding in an alternate jersey, but these blue ones are really great.
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River Ryan is obviously good enough to be in the current Dodger rotation, but returning from injury the team will slow play him until they need to call him up.
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First pitch is at 10:05 AM on SNLA.
