Andy Pages was named the National League player of the week on Monday after opening the season with 16 hits in the first nine games, the most in the majors entering the day. He also entered Monday tied with the Marlins' Xavier Edwards for the major league hits lead, a startling start for a hitter who had not batted higher than sixth in the Dodgers' order until Sunday.
For a club that had been leaning on a backup-heavy lineup in Sunday’s sweep-clinching win over the Nationals, Pages has been the most productive regular through the first week. He led Dodgers hitters in WAR with 0.9 entering Monday and topped qualified club hitters in OPS at 1.294. The numbers have put him in a very different spotlight, especially with Mookie Betts' oblique injury over the weekend raising the question of whether Pages could move up in the batting order.
Freddie Freeman kept the mood simple when asked about the surge. “I don’t want to talk about it, let’s just keep it going,” he said, before adding that it has been “an incredible start that you can only dream of” and that the club hoped to keep it going without making too much of it. The Dodgers have needed that kind of production. Their biggest stars were off to a slow start, and Pages has filled the gap with a bat that has suddenly looked much more dangerous than it did a year ago.
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Dave Roberts was not ready on Monday to call the change permanent. Asked whether Pages had moved into a new tier, Roberts said, “Not yet.” He added, “More of a sample, then I will. I really like his work. I trust his head. He’s very mature. He’s matured a lot over the last couple of years. He’s hungry. I just felt that he was due to take another step forward.”
The step forward has been built as much on discipline as on raw swing. Pages said the coaching staff kept telling him that chasing bad pitches makes it harder to do damage in the strike zone, and that message stuck. He said, “I saw that in myself but also they kind of pounded that in my head as well.” During spring training, he spent 30 minutes to an hour most days working with the Trajekt pitching machine, often setting it to mimic Paul Skenes before turning to the day’s actual starter.
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Pages said he does not think his swing has changed. What changed, he said, was what happened between the pitches. “I just took notice that last year when I went on my bad runs, I just saw I was undisciplined at the plate, taking bad swings, and that tended to let in negative thoughts and being able to go in that bad headspace,” he said. That has shown up in the chase rate, which dropped from 33.2% last season to 27.6% entering Monday.
For the Dodgers, the question now is less whether Pages has arrived than how far they let this run carry him. He was one of the few players producing from the start, and if Betts’ injury reshapes the lineup, Pages may not stay where he has been hitting for long.
