ATLANTA — Dustin May knew how key his sweeper would be this season.
“It’s going to be huge,” the Dodgers right-hander said earlier this spring. “Being able to land that is probably going to be my biggest thing for the whole year.”
Lately, however, he’s learning there’s a flip side to that coin, as well.
For as good as May’s Frisbee-esque breaking ball looked, when he returned from a nearly two-year absence by giving up just two earned runs in his first three starts, the pitch has been more inconsistent in the three outings since, dragging May’s overall performance down with it.
In a 4-3 loss to the Atlanta Braves on Sunday at Truist Park, it was two bad sweepers — both to Braves slugger Austin Riley — that sank May on a night the Dodgers saw their seven-game winning streak stopped.
In the first inning, May had two strikes against Riley before throwing a sweeper up and over the plate. Riley launched it to left for a two-run homer.
In the third, May tried his sweeper again against Riley, throwing it over the outer edge of the plate in a 1-and-1 count. But Riley was on it once more, belting another two-run blast that gave the Braves an early 4-0 lead.
Outside of those pitches, May was mostly effective. He got through 5 ⅔ innings. He struck out six batters. He didn’t give up any other runs.
But for this new version of May — who, in search of better health after two major elbow surgeries, has dialed back on his fastball velocity and drastically dropped the arm angle of his already somewhat side-arm delivery — even a couple of misplaced mistakes can spell trouble.
The Dodgers (23-11) didn’t give May much support.
With Braves starter Bryce Elder painting the corners of the strike zone, their recently streaking offense went cold. Max Muncy supplied their lone early RBIs, plating one run on a fourth-inning double and another on a sixth-inning groundout.
Miguel Rojas came off the bench in the sixth inning as a pinch-hitter for ice-cold outfielder Michael Conforto — who struck out twice and is six for 73 going back to early April — and hit a home run off left-handed reliever Dylan Lee to cut the deficit to 4-3.
Teoscar Hernández hits a single in the third inning for the Dodgers against the Braves on Sunday.
(Mike Stewart / Associated Press)
But that was as close as the Dodgers would come against the Atlanta bullpen. In the eighth, they were twice robbed of hits by diving plays from the Braves’ defense. In the ninth, they stranded Hyeseong Kim at third after he stole second as a pinch-runner for Andy Pages and advanced to third on a dropped third strike.
Still, for a banged-up Dodgers rotation looking for someone else to step up alongside staff ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto, May’s recent regression has been the bigger disappointment.
In his last three outings, the 27-year-old has yielded 14 runs in 16 innings.
And each time, an inability to consistently land his sweeper has served as a source of frustration.
Two weeks ago, when an overall lack of command led to May getting knocked around at Wrigley Field by the Chicago Cubs, he was asked how difficult it is to be successful when that pitch isn’t working.
“I think you can see how important it is,” he said that night.
May remained dissatisfied after giving up three runs to the Miami Marlins last Monday.
“I still wasn’t executing very well at all,” he said then. “I just got away with some stuff.”
On Sunday against the Braves, it was a similar story, May looking frustrated with himself as Riley took his two trots around the bases, bemoaning poorly executed sweepers again.
When the Dodgers called up Andy Pages to the majors early last season, one of the first things co-hitting coach Aaron Bates did was seek out veteran outfielder Teoscar Hernández.
That spring, Bates had watched a relationship blossom between Pages, a then 23-year-old prospect who had bounced back miraculously fast from a labrum surgery the previous season, and Hernández, an All-Star veteran who had signed with the club that winter at age 31 in search of a bounce-back performance.
All camp, Pages and Hernández were among the first to arrive at the batting cages each morning. They became almost attached at the hip in the clubhouse and on the backfields, constantly discussing the state of their games.
It was, as Bates and several others around the team have since described it, the start of a “big brother, little brother” relationship between the two sluggers.
Thus, once Pages joined the big-league roster a couple weeks into the regular season, Bates encouraged Hernández to help reinforce the coaching staff’s message to the newly recalled rookie — and to, more important, be a guiding voice as he took Pages under his wing.
“As a hitting coach, you can go to a veteran player if you want him to get a message across to a younger guy, if it’s coming off better or might land a little bit better with the veteran player telling him,” Bates said. “So as Andy was coming up to the big leagues, Teo was a big asset to us to get stuff across to Andy. And Andy is super coachable. You can tell him yourself. But Teo can see it from his vantage point.”
One year later, few Dodgers teammates are closer than Hernández and Pages.
They talk almost daily in their shared corner of the team’s clubhouse. They’ll watch one another during batting practice, and coordinate defensively in outfielders’ meetings. After most home games, they’ll leave the stadium side-by-side (more than once this year, Hernández has waited in the clubhouse hallway, playfully shouting for Pages to hurry up to leave). And the more their bond has strengthened, the more they’ve each benefited from the partnership — leaning on one another while becoming integral pieces of the Dodgers’ offense.
“We’ve always been really close,” Pages said through an interpreter. “We talked through a lot of things. We’ve been talking through a lot of difficult times. A lot of the good times. Obviously, he has a lot of experience in the big leagues, so I utilize him for some of these difficult times. But we’ve had a close relationship since the beginning.”
When Hernández first arrived in Dodgers camp last spring, Pages wasn’t the only young Latin American player that gravitated toward him.
Miguel Vargas — who, like Pages, was signed as an amateur out of Cuba — was transitioning full-time to the outfield. Jose Ramos, a double-A prospect originally signed out of Panama, had also earned an invite to big-league spring training.
“Because they were working in the outfield, we built a good relationship,” said Hernández, a Dominican native who was once in their shoes while trying to break into the majors with the Houston Astros in 2016. “I was trying to teach them some of the things I went through when I came to the big leagues. Trying to make them feel better when things are not going right.”
Teoscar Hernández congratulates Andy Pages after Pages lept at the center field wall to rob the Chicago Cubs’ Michael Busch of a homer during a game at Dodger Stadium last month.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
In Pages specifically, though, Hernández found something of a kindred spirit.
Pages is not as outwardly animated as Hernández, whose “happy-go-lucky” personality, as Bates described it, is evident every time he showers his teammates with sunflower seeds to celebrate home runs. But Pages did have the same persistent work ethic, having spent the 2024 offseason making a rapid recovery from his 2023 shoulder surgery. And he had the same steady demeanor, helping him earn his first big-league promotion in mid-April of last year.
“We all knew he was gonna get to the big leagues last year,” Hernández said. “When you see a good player, you’re gonna see it right away. You’re gonna see the guy has talent. You’re gonna know right away if he can play in the big leagues.”
That’s why, once Pages did join the Dodgers, Hernández helped him hone the mental side of his game.
In the good times, like when Pages hit over .300 in his first 20 games, Hernández reinforced his confidence. In bad stretches, like when Pages was demoted after a 33-game run through July and early August in which he batted .226 with just one home run and 28 strikeouts, Hernández tried to foster positivity.
“This game is hard,” Hernández told him. “You’re gonna fail more times than you have success.”
All players know that when they arrive in the majors. But understanding it is different. And only with experience, Hernández had learned, came the ability to navigate such adversity.
“When you realize that as a player, and you get it, everything becomes easier to handle,” Hernández said.
A similar dynamic was at play early this season.
Despite returning to the majors late last year and exploding for a two-homer game in the National League Championship Series, Pages entered this season on the fringes of the Dodgers’ MLB roster. And even though he made the team coming out of camp, he felt pressure to try and entrench his place permanently in the big leagues.
The Los Angeles Dodgers actually have one of the best records in baseball but no one seems to be too thrilled by it. Injuries, question marks and hitters not hitting are issues.
That strain beget a slump, Pages batting .159 through the season’s first three weeks.
But Hernández continued to support him, both in public comments to reporters and private chats between the two, aiming to simply “keep his mind positive.”
“We’re not talking about what he’s doing wrong, or the slump he’s in,” Hernández said. “Just trying to tell him: ‘OK, let’s try this. Or that. Whatever it is for you to feel good with what you’re doing on the field.’”
Part of the slump, Pages felt, came from adjustments he had while primarily batting in the nine-hole — feeling the need to be overly selective in hopes of getting on base for leadoff man Shohei Ohtani.
So, recently, Dodgers hitting coaches encouraged Pages to get back to his typical aggressive approach at the plate. Hernández, who in another parallel to Pages is a free swinger himself, once again backed up that message.
“I think having someone like that to look up to, and model himself as far as what he wants to be, is great,” Bates said.
Pages not only heeded the advice, but has seen his results improve almost immediately. Over his last nine games entering Saturday, Pages is batting .500 with three doubles, four home runs, nine RBIs and only five strikeouts.
Hernández has been almost as good in that same stretch, snapping out of an early slump by batting .410 with five doubles, four home runs and 15 RBIs (giving him an MLB-high 32 runs driven in on the season) since April 22.
Manager Dave Roberts doesn’t believe it’s a coincidence.
“I think that there is some type of commonality to Andy and Teo’s success [happening] together,” Roberts said this week. “They certainly have a big brother, little brother relationship. And Teo obviously has established himself as an All-Star and has been a mentor to Andy … But I do think that those guys are continuing to push each other, which is fun to watch.”
No sequence was more joyful than last week’s series finale against the Pittsburgh Pirates, when both Hernández and Pages homered in the same inning.
Hernández’s long ball was a milestone moment, marking the 200th home run of his MLB career.
But his reaction to Pages’ big fly later in the inning was noticeably more gleeful, with Hernández flying out of the dugout and pelting Pages with an overhand chuck of sunflower seeds at the top step.
“I was happy, yes. Two hundred, that’s a big one,” Hernández said. “But I was more excited for him.”
To those who have watched Hernández and Pages up close over the last year, that was hardly surprising to hear.
“Teo, he likes those numbers, but I don’t think he plays for that reason,” Bates said. “He just plays to love the game. And I think he’s happier when he sees a younger player like that, that he can help.”
