The Los Angeles Dodgers have won four games in a row entering their series against the San Francisco Giants, so it’s not right to describe the Dodgers as a struggling team. They’re leading the National League West, yet again, so it’s also not right to consider their season a disappointment. On the surface, it’s hard to get a situation that’s less unusual than a division-leading Dodgers team coming into Oracle Park in September with an active winning streak. Everything is normal. On the surface.

Peek underneath, though, and the 2025 Dodgers are a curious variant of their typical division-leading selves. They’re leaking oil. They’re leaking transmission fluid. They’re leaking … look, I don’t know what that is, but you probably shouldn’t touch it. Shohei Ohtani is going to be the NL MVP, and both Freddie Freeman and Will Smith will appear on MVP ballots, but all around them, position players are having disappointing seasons, or they’re hurt, or both. The best way to describe the pitching staff is to point out that they’ve used 39 different pitchers this season.

The goal of pointing this out isn’t for your satisfaction or amusement. The Dodgers come into the series with an eight-game lead over the Giants and a three-game lead in the NL West. They’re doing fine! The Giants would give up next year’s first-round pick to trade places with them in the standings.

No, the state of the 2025 Dodgers is an opening to talk about a couple of different things. First is that the general baseball-loving population wasn’t wrong for panicking about how dominant the Dodgers looked in the offseason. If the Dodgers, as currently assembled, can still win 91 games and the division (what they’re on pace for), just imagine how many games they would have won if most of their better laid plans hadn’t gone awry, if Roki Sasaki was a unanimous Rookie of the Year winner, if they could keep their overstuffed starting rotation healthy, if they got bushels of quality, high-leverage relief from their well-paid relievers, if they could unlock whatever they saw hidden in Michael Conforto, if …

Yessir, that team would have been a bear to deal with. It’s just not the team the Dodgers have. Did you catch the part where the Dodgers are on pace to win only 91 games? That’s not very Dodger-like, and the only reason they’re leading the division is because the other teams keep getting their neckties caught in the hot dog roller, so to speak. It’s been a real slapfight in the NL West, which is remarkable, considering how the season started. Halfway through the first month of the season, the Dodgers, Giants and Padres had winning percentages over .700. The Diamondbacks’ winning percentage was .611. There was a sense that 101 games wasn’t going to be enough to win the division. Now 91 games should be.

The lesson here, if there is one, is that chaos can come for even the best rosters. The baseball gods are a cantankerous lot, and you know they took the seemingly impenetrable Dodgers’ roster as a challenge. Some of the best Giants seasons in San Francisco history (1997, 2021) happened because the unbeatable Dodgers turned out to be quite beatable, and this could have been one of those seasons. The Giants, however, are still stuck in the hot dog roller, and they’ve only recently come up with the idea to unclip the necktie.  They’re working on it. Godspeed.

The Giants and Dodgers are a more competitive match-up now than it seemed like it’d be this winter. (Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)

If there’s a bigger-picture story about the 2025 Dodgers, though, it’s with the players you’re not seeing. Here’s where the Dodgers’ farm system has ranked in Keith Law’s Organizational Rankings before the last several seasons:

2025: 3rd
2024: 3rd
2023: 1st
2022: 1st
2021: 10th

These were uncontroversial rankings. Everyone has loved the Dodgers’ farm system for a long time, and we all know that a conveyor belt of prospects is the true secret sauce of every perennially contending team. (That 10th-place ranking was their lowest in a decade, too.)

Which leads us to the obvious question about the 2025 Dodgers in this context: Where are all the players from those lists? Where is the prospect cavalry that should have arrived for the Dodgers this season? The answers vary wildly. Some of the prospects were dealt away, as you might expect from a perennial contender. Some of the prospects were/are teenagers and aren’t expected to arrive for years. Some of them have been hurt or disappointing (one of their most highly regarded prospects of the last decade is now catching for the San Jose Giants, for example).

The actual answers to the “why” aren’t important, though. What matters is that the Dodgers haven’t received a lot of help from those top-ranked farm systems this season. This isn’t to say that the Dodgers haven’t gotten any homegrown help from players under 30. Andy Pages’ offensive game resembles that of Heliot Ramos, but Pages is also a Gold Glove-caliber center fielder, if you can imagine such a thing. Emmett Sheehan is healthy again, and he just pitched seven strong innings.

But in a season where the Dodgers needed to fill more holes than expected, they didn’t get a lot of help from within, outside of Pages and Sheehan. And if you’re wondering what really feels different about the Dodgers this season, that might be it. The great players have been predictably great in most cases, but you can see some of the cracks forming. There haven’t been enough homegrown reinforcements to keep the Dodgers winning at their typical pace.

This is developing concern for a team that’s built around a foundation of over-30 superstars. Pages and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are the only two under-30 players on the Dodgers’ active roster that I would guarantee are still with the organization in 2027. Now consider that the types of superstars the Dodgers have acquired — Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman — aren’t always available. There were a lot of cosmic tumblers that had to click into place there, starting with those players’ original teams screwing up in dozens of unlikely ways. The conveyor belt of prospects was always the most important and reliable part of the Dodgers’ success.

And here’s where I’d love to close with a paragraph contrasting that situation with the Giants, who have the kind of roster and farm system that’s perfectly positioned to take advantage of this temporary and rare Dodgers weakness, except that’s not quite true. The Giants might have more young players than the Dodgers with a chance to be on the team in three years, but they don’t have anything resembling a conveyor belt, and they haven’t since Madison Bumgarner broke the machine that made him. If they’re going to take advantage, it’ll have to be with the crew they currently have, along with a few surprises along the way.

Which … isn’t such a bad thing anymore? With the way the Giants have been playing, this weekend’s series doesn’t look like the on-paper mismatch that it’s typically been over the last decade. The Dodgers are still the better team, and it’s about eight games’ worth of difference, which is substantial. But you don’t need to write science fiction to imagine the gap between the two teams shrinking over the next couple years.

It was just six months ago that the Dodgers looked unbeatable, yet again. Now? Just hard to beat. That’s where they’ve historically belonged, and it’s up to the Giants to take advantage. Considering the understandable doom and gloom after the Dodgers built their super team of the offseason — or, heck, the doom and gloom of just a couple months ago — you’ll take that.

(Top photo: Darren Yamashita / Imagn Images)