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In thick of wild-card race, D'backs, Dodgers look for bats

To get into baseball's postseason, a team is supposed to be able to hit, at least a little. It's not an iron-clad prerequisite, necessarily. A team can make it into the playoffs with a weak offense. Many have, in fact.

Still, being able to swing a bat with some degree of success never hurts, you know? Scoring a few runs. Taking a little pressure off the pitching. All the best teams do it.

Which is why the folks in Arizona and L.A. have to be a tad worried right now.

The Diamondbacks and Dodgers have little chance at winning the National League West title this season, thanks to the runaway West leaders, the San Francisco Giants, who actually do hit the ball. Yet the D'backs and Dodgers can play in October -- one of them, anyway -- if they can fight through each other and about a billion other teams to win the whacked-out NL wild-card race. It's anybody's call right now.

L.A. and Arizona have the pitching. They're 1-2 in the NL in ERA, with the Dodgers ahead for the year (3.04 and 3.61, respectively). Since the All-Star break, now that they have Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling back, no one has pitched better than the Diamondbacks and their 2.28 ERA.

But, hey, everybody knew the Dodgers and D'backs could pitch. We've known that from the very beginning of the season. The question is hitting.

The question is where is it?

"We have just gone through an all-year slump," says Dan Evans, the Dodgers' general manager, and he's not joking. "In run-producing situations, we've been very inefficient. Overall, we've just been very disappointed."

Look up and down the hitting statistics in the NL and you can see why Evans has been so bummed all year. The Dodgers aren't just bad with the bats. They're horrible.

Let's put it this way: The Detroit Tigers have more power (a .365 slugging percentage, compared to the Dodgers' .361). The Tigers have more home runs than the Dodgers (103-81). So do the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (90-81).

The Rays score 4.4 runs a game. The Dodgers manage only 3.5.

Now that has to hurt.

The Diamondbacks aren't much better and, at times, they've actually been worse. They don't hit homers. They don't take walks. Even with that league-leading pitching since the break, the so-called hitting is killing them.

Arizona is 11-13 since the All-Star Game (before Wednesday). The Diamondbacks have scored four runs, or fewer, in every one of the losses.

It could be worse. Fourteen of the 24 games they've played since the break have been decided by a single run. They're 6-8 in those games.

It really could be worse.

The Dodgers have been a poor hitting team all season -- they've always been a pitching first organization -- but this is relatively new for Arizona. Back in June, the Diamondbacks went on a 12-game winning streak in which they scored more than six runs a game and hit .302 as a team.

But in late July, they scored nine runs in nine games, going 2-7. Included in that stretch was a memorable matchup with the Dodgers.

In three games from July 25-27, the two teams scored a total of five runs. The Dodgers had an 0.84 ERA for the series. And they lost two of three.

"I'm at a loss to explain it," Schilling said afterward.

It's not as if these teams aren't trying to do something about it. Evans went out and got Jeromy Burnitz in a trade with the Mets and signed the irrepressible Rickey Henderson. The Dodgers traded for Robin Ventura, who was made expendable after the Yankees grabbed Aaron Boone from the Reds. None of them has contributed much to the cause.

Burnitz is hitting .196 with five homers and 12 RBIs. Henderson is hitting .234. Ventura is at .231.

Arizona general manager Joe Garagiola Jr. gave up three players in a trade with the Yankees for outfielder Raul Mondesi. He has hit one game-winning home run, but he's been spotty otherwise. Mondesi has stolen three bases in six tries.

Both teams are going to need more from those players -- and everyone else -- if they have any hope of winning the wild card. Arizona, for instance, is hitting only .258 with runners in scoring position. Shea Hillenbrand, who came in an earlier trade with Boston for his offense, is batting a mere .237 with runners on second or third.

The Dodgers, who lost another one-run game Wednesday to the Florida Marlins in extra innings -- the Dodgers have scored one run or been shut out 30 times this season -- are hitting only .248 with runners in scoring position. Dave Roberts is hitting .192 in those situations. Burnitz is hitting just .200. Cesar Izturis, with runners in scoring position, is hitting .215.

As bad as the two teams are going, they are still very much in the wild-card chase. As Wednesday's games started, the Diamondbacks were 1 ½ games behind the Marlins for the NL wild card. The Dodgers were 3 ½ back.

For the past two years, the Diamondbacks rode Schilling and Johnson into the playoffs, winning the World Series in 2001. But both years they got plenty of help from their offense. The D'backs scored more runs per game than anyone in the NL last season, and they were third in that category in their championship year.

On the other side, the last time the Dodgers made the playoffs, in 1996, only two other teams in the NL scored fewer runs per game.

It just goes to show that, if everything else goes right, a team can make the postseason without a good offense. Another example: Only one team in the American League scored fewer runs a game than the Kansas City Royals in 1985, and the Royals won the World Series that year.

No, a lame offense isn't necessarily a killer for postseason hopes. That's something the Diamondbacks and Dodgers ought to take to heart.

But this lame?

John Donovan is a senior writer for SI.com.

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