Steve Webb
LOS ANGELES, CA — With James Outman sent packing for Oklahoma City on Friday, the Dodgers’ lineup welcomed back Jason Heyward to the active roster. But the flurry of roster moves that greeted the team’s return from San Francisco papered over the one question that has plagued the club since Opening Day: what do you do with Chris Taylor?
Taylor, an All-Star in 2021 who has a slew of memorable moments on his resume, is having the worst season of his career and it’s not even that close. As I write this, his batting average is .083. His slugging percentage is .294. He has no home runs and just five RBIs. His OPS+ sits right now at a laugably bad -12 (league average is 100). He’s been warming the bench for most of the season, and has been completely supplanted as a righthanded option in the outfield by Andy Pages and Kike Hernandez, and even Miguel Vargas got a start in right over him on Saturday. In the last thirty days, he has had just 22 at-bats in eleven games, tied for the lowest number of plate appearances during that stretch with Austin Barnes. Literally, nothing has gone well for Taylor in 2024.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. According to a recent article in the LA Times, Taylor spent much of the offseason trying to rediscover his swing, and reported to camp feeling good about the progress he’d made during the winter. “I wanted to trust it was eventually gonna work,” Taylor said, according to the Times piece by Jack Harris.
But alas, it has not, and it’s left Taylor and the Dodgers coaching staff searching for answers. “He’s a hot-and-cold guy,” Roberts said of Taylor. “He’s a streaky hitter, always has been. He’s been in-between and uncertain. I’d like to think there’s improvement in his work. I know the effort is there. So, you know, we’ll see. I’ll keep trying to find opportunities to get him in there.”
The problem is those opportunities are becoming increasingly few and far between. He did get a start on Thursday in the loss to the Reds and collected one knock in four at-bats. But the same old Chris Taylor problem was there, too: strikeouts. Taylor whiffed twice in Thursday’s game, and has been walking back to the bat rack far too often this year. Taylor’s A-swing only approach is great when it works, but more often than not lately, it doesn’t. Fully 50% of his plate appearances have ended in strikeouts. That’s more than double the league average in that stat and simply not sustainable. Indeed, James Outman, who just got optioned to OKC, strikes out a lot, but even he has a better K-rate than Taylor (his is around 40%).
So what are the Dodgers to do with their struggling utilityman? With Teoscar Hernandez having a bounceback season in the outfield and Andy Pages coming on strong as a rookie, it’s hard to see where Tayor gets a whole lot of touches for the rest of the year. The Times article kicks around a couple of options. First, the idea of Taylor volunarily going down to the minors to try to work through his swing issues in a lower-stakes environment. The Astros’ struggling first baseman (and former MVP) Jose Abreu did just that earlier this month. That is something that Taylor would have to agree to, given his service time in the big leagues. He just might do that.
The other idea, described as a “nuclear option” in the Times piece would be to simply DFA Taylor, wish him well, and send him on his way. Though that might be satisfying for some Dodger fans growing increasingly frustrated with his play, it might not necessarily please the Accounting Department of the team. Doing that would mean eating nearly $30 million of salary that remains on Taylor’s contract. CT3 signed a lucrative deal following the 2021 season and is only half way through his commitment. The Dodgers’ have a club option on the contract, but that is not in play until after the 2025 season. So, essentially, it’s you broke it, you bought as far as releasing Taylor is concerned.
Now sometimes, you have to bite the bullet and do it. But that doesn’t mean that the player is done. Look at the feel-good story of Jason Heyward last season. After his release from the Cubs, the Dodgers were able to pick him up at a bargain basement price. The North Siders paid J Hey over $20 million in 2023 while the Dodgers got to enjoy his services for the entire year for under a million bucks. Same thing happened with the Angels and Albert Pujols. So, while it would hurt to eat the Taylor salary, when it comes to this sort of thing, the Dodgers are right more often than they are wrong. Win some, lose some.
Still, Taylor has a depository of memories that make this player in particular especially hard to walk away from. There was the leadoff home run that started the World Series in 2017. That amazing sprawling catch in left to save a run in NLCS Game 7 in Milwaukee in 2018. The clutch walk-off homer in the Wild Card game in 2021. If there is any chance of finding the guy who did those things again, the Dodgers need to try to look for him.
Beyond his health, the most precious asset in a baseball player’s career is time. And for Chris Taylor, the hourglass is dangerously close to empty.
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