The Dodgers’ Magical Win Streak Appears to Have No End in Sight

Los Angeles is on an 11-game tear following an improbable home run from the struggling Austin Barnes.

When a win streak reaches double digits, it tends to develop a kind of elasticity, stretching all surrounding reason and logic.

Another win begins to seem fated. It does not matter the opponent, the lineup, the fact that the game in question is scoreless in the bottom of the eighth. All of that shifts to accommodate the weight of the streak. The question of how the next win might happen starts to seem far less important than the assumption that it simply will. The details are but technicalities.

The Dodgers entered Thursday riding a 10-game win streak. This week and a half has sent them from a tenuous grasp on a division lead—3.0 games up Aug. 5, the day of their last loss, when they fell to the Padres 8–3—to a nearly insurmountable one. A team whose rotation appeared thin and patchy in the weeks leading up to the trade deadline now looks somehow perfectly set. As the Dodgers have won, and kept winning, they have answered just about every question that existed about them. They no longer feel like a compromised, injury-ridden version of the ever-successful Dodgers. They simply feel like themselves.

In short, everything has been working for the Dodgers. That’s typified by Thursday’s starter, Lance Lynn, who was acquired at the deadline from the White Sox. The veteran had posted a 6.47 ERA in 21 starts with Chicago this season—a scuffling, frustrating year up and down. But he’s all but transformed since being traded. Each of his starts for the Dodgers has been productive. And Thursday was his best yet. Against the Brewers, Lynn shone, throwing seven shutout innings with just one walk and four hits.

But he was going up against Milwaukee ace Corbin Burnes, who was spinning a comparable gem. The Dodgers could get nothing going against him. After the seventh inning both starters retired, and the game was scoreless.

Which soon led to the bottom of the eighth, one out, no one on. It was time for Austin Barnes.

That the Dodgers’ catcher has had a rough year at the plate seems almost impolite to point out. Why go out of the way to address something this obvious? Barnes has never been particularly valued for his bat. But this season has been something new. If it generally feels passé to identify any hitter by his batting average, it should be at least somewhat understandable when that batting average is .136, a number horrifying enough to communicate a full picture without any further elaboration. Barnes entered Thursday with just two extra-base hits on the season. He currently has an OPS+ of 8—one sad, awkward digit, indicating performance equal to 8% that of a league-average hitter. In all of modern baseball, a century and change with thousands upon thousands of players doing their best (and worst) since 1901, there have been just 32 seasons with an OPS+ of 8 or less. The group is disproportionately pitchers, more than half played before ’35. This kind of performance is mercifully, historically rare. And now here is Barnes.

The catcher came to the plate in a scoreless game, Los Angeles’s win streak held in abeyance, facing Milwaukee reliever Joel Payamps. The righty is having a career year. He strikes out more than 10 batters per nine innings. In 55.1 innings of work entering Thursday, he’d allowed just six home runs.

By the general logic of baseball and probability and common sense, Payamps retires Barnes for an easy out. A gentle, dribbling grounder. A strikeout. Anything that feels like a foregone conclusion. Yet by the logic of a double-digit win streak? By that magical, stretching force of belief? You already know.

THE AUSTIN BARNES GAME. pic.twitter.com/NnZvkfNspW

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) August 18, 2023

Barnes’ first home run of the season was all it took. The Dodgers won, 1-0, and it was easy to believe for a moment they might never lose again.