The Dodgers built up a formidable seven-game NL West lead over the first half of the season. While they had to withstand a late charge by the Padres — whom they’ll face in a Division Series that starts on Saturday, a rematch of the 2022 pairing that ended up sending a 111-win Dodgers squad home — they were able to do so despite their starting pitching fraying at the seams. Even before Mookie Betts and Max Muncy returned from lengthy absences due to injuries, the emergence of Gavin Lux as an offensive force played a key role in the team’s second-half offensive uptick.
Lux’s overall numbers for 2024 — .251/.320/.383 with 10 home runs — don’t scan as particularly special. Dragged down by a September slump that he began to emerge from during the season’s final week, he finished with a modest 100 wRC+. Based on his overall batted ball data, including a .262 xBA and a .393 xSLG, it’s tough to make the case that he should have done much better. The key point is that he had to hit well enough to get his head back above water after a slow start that looked as though it might cost him his spot in the lineup.
The Dodgers have shown great patience with the 26-year-old Lux, both in the past and this season. A 2016 first-round pick out of a Kenosha, Wisconsin high school, he placed second on our Top 100 Prospects list as a 70-FV prospect four years later (behind only Wander Franco). While he had already debuted in the majors the previous September, he didn’t get a foothold until 2021, and needed a strong September to prevent that season from being a disappointment, though interruptions due to wrist and hamstring injuries probably played a part in his woes.
Lux finally spent a full season in the majors in 2022, hitting a respectable .276/.346/.399 (113 wRC+) while splitting time between second base and left field. The Dodgers planned to move him back to shortstop for the 2023 season after Trea Turner departed in free agency, but on February 27, 2023, he lost his balance while running to second base, and took a spill. He came up clutching his right knee; he had torn his anterior cruciate ligament as well as his lateral collateral ligament. His season was over before it had begun; he underwent surgery on March 7.
The loss of Lux led the Dodgers to play light-hitting Miguel Rojas at shortstop on a regular basis, with a handful of other players — Chris Taylor, Enrique Hernández, and Amed Rosario — pitching in. The most interesting of them was Betts; the six-time Gold Glove right fielder, who originally came up as a second baseman with the Red Sox, moved back to the middle infield in midseason when the Dodgers demoted rookie Miguel Vargas. Betts not only made 62 starts at second base, he started 12 at shortstop, a position he’d only briefly dabbled at in the low minors, and he looked like a natural.
The Dodgers planned to keep Betts at second base for 2024, but Lux’s defensive struggles in the spring — specifically with his throwing, a problem that had intermittently reared its head earlier in his career — led them to rethink their plan. With the team’s Opening Day in Seoul, South Korea just 12 days away, manager Dave Roberts decided to take some pressure off Lux by shifting him back to second, with Betts going to shortstop, a decision both players accepted.
Lux’s fielding proved less of a problem than his hitting, as he collected just eight hits in his first 16 games. Even while largely being shielded from lefties (just 13 of 83 plate appearances), he finished the month batting .182/.241/.208 (31 wRC+) with a pair of doubles being his only extra-base hits. As he struggled, Roberts maintained that the team would stick by him, giving him a chance to adjust after such a long layoff.
“I don’t think that would be fair to anyone, to be quite honest,” said Roberts of judging Lux too harshly too early, citing 150 plate appearances as a fair sample. Lux improved somewhat in May (90 wRC+) but regressed again in June (67 wRC+). He had blown well past the 150-PA mark, but his overall numbers still looked unsightly. After slumping through the first half of July, he reached the All-Star break with a .213/.267/.295 slash line and just three homers in 277 PA.
Among players with at least 250 PA in either league, only five out of 207 had a lower wRC+ than his 60. By his Statcast expected numbers, he wasn’t quite getting his money’s worth, but even those (.251 xBA, .353 xSLG, .289 xwOBA) were nothing to write home about. Only solid defense and projections for positive regression kept him off my Replacement Level Killers list, but it seemed quite possible the Dodgers — who by this point were without both Muncy, who had strained an oblique in mid-May, and Betts, who had suffered a fractured left hand after being hit by a pitch in mid-June — would shop for an upgrade ahead of the July 30 deadline, particularly with both Taylor and Hernández struggling as well.
During the All-Star break, Lux went home to Wisconsin, where according to The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya he worked with his uncle, Augie Schmidt, a former Golden Spikes Award winner and minor league infielder who has served as the longtime coach at Kenosha’s Carthage College. Reviewing footage of Lux’s better days, the coach and hitter concluded that he needed to generate more power, and to put more trust in his surgically repaired right knee. “Together, they looked back at his best swings. They were violent, looking to generate slug more than just putting the ball in play,”
Ardaya wrote. “To generate the force he wanted, he was going to have to rely on flexing out, or ‘locking out’ his right leg.” “He’s like, ‘Screw it. If I’m going down, I’m going down aggressive,’” hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc told Ardaya. “I think there’s some freedom in that.” The change in mindset quickly paid off.
Lux collected multiple hits in five of his first seven starts in the second half, and hit home runs in back-to-back games for the first time all season on July 20 and 21 in Boston; he earned NL Player of the Week honors for that stretch. The Dodgers reacquired Rosario and added a rehabbing Tommy Edman at the trade deadline, but Lux continued to rake. Rosario made just two starts at second base before being designated for assignment; as it turned out, those two games were the only ones in which the Dodgers faced lefty starters in a 22-game span. Betts returned on August 12, as a right fielder, with Rojas retaking the shortstop job after his own IL stint, and Muncy returned on August 19.
Lux hit .333/.403/.610 with seven homers from the All-Star break through the end of August, a month during which the Dodgers went 19-8 but only increased their division lead from 4.5 games to six. His 180 wRC+ over that stretch ranked seventh in the majors behind some real thumpers: Aaron Judge, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bobby Witt Jr., Yordan Alvarez, Juan Soto, and Lawrence Butler. Inevitably, he cooled off, with a 4-for-44 slide (all singles) from September 6 to 24, but he appeared to right the ship in the final days of the season, going 7-for-16 with two doubles in four games against the Padres and Rockies.
Overall, he had the 13th-highest wRC+ of any player in either league after the All-Star break: Highest wRC+ in…
