The Dodgers are quite possibly the most disappointing team in baseball. Despite Clayton Kershaw, who is baseball’s most valuable player by leaps and bounds in 2016, LA sits 8 games behind the Giants entering Tuesday night’s slate of games and are just 5 games over .500.

Max wrote a few weeks ago about how the Dodgers lack of roster balance was killing them and nothing has really changed. Scott Van Slyke and Trayce Thompson are good ball players, but they can’t be starters on  a World Series contender, especially not when stars like Adrian Gonzalez and Yasiel Puig aren’t pulling their weight. Howie Kendrick is their left fielder. Kendrick is a second basemen though and the Dodgers are bending over backwards to find ways to get both Kendrick and Chase Utley in the lineup at the same time. That’s distressing because Kendrick is batting only .243 with virtually no power and a negative WAR. That’s not a guy you should be working to find a spot for; you should have better options.

Speaking of options, the Dodgers thought they had a lot of them for the 2-5 spots in their starting rotation. Unfortunately, injury has absolutely devastated their crop of starters and the healthy ones that remain haven’t been great. Scott Kazmir‘s ERA is closer to 5 than 4 and Hyun-Jin Ryu, Brandon McCarthy, Brett Anderson, and Alex Wood are all on the shelf. Anderson and McCarthy are on the way, but Wood was good but inconsistent before getting hurt and Ryu keeps having disappointing setbacks in his minor league rehab.

But all of those options just scream of pretty good. None of those guys are causing opposing managers to stay up at night dreading facing a tough pitcher.  The same can be said of the lineup as a whole.  It’s made up of a bunch of pretty good players, none of whom are really all that great.  The problem with this approach is that the Major Leagues are tough and almost everyone is pretty good.  So what’s another word for a majority of the Dodger’s roster right now? Average. Consider: the Dodgers only have three players worth more than 1 Win Above Average and the Dodgers’ 6th, 7th and 8th most valuable batters by that metric are starting pitchers.

Essentially, the Dodgers need an influx of talent to give them a jolt. They need a top half of the rotation starter and a left fielder.

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