Andy Pages shook his head with a grin, raised his clasped hands to the sky, then gave thanks with a much-needed sigh of relief.
It didn’t matter that the Dodgers were getting blown out on Tuesday night. Or that his fifth-inning home run did little to halt the team’s unexpected skid on this week’s road trip.
For one moment, for one at-bat, the second-year slugger had finally experienced a moment of reassurance, hitting a two-strike slider beyond the reach of two leaping Washington Nationals outfielders for his first long ball of the season.
"It was definitely a sense of relief,” Pages said in Spanish through a team interpreter after the game. “Just like a big, major breath of fresh air, for sure."
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Up to that point, the 2025 season had begun ominously for the 24-year-old center fielder. He was four for 35 at the plate. He had made several mental mistakes on defense and the base paths. And he’d grown increasingly burdened by the precariousness of his situation, inching ever closer to a James Outman-esque trajectory of regressing from a productive rookie season to a disheartening sophomore campaign.
Pages didn’t show those simmering emotions as he left the batter’s box Tuesday. He kept his head down and face straight as he trotted around the bases.
But back in the dugout, the once highly-touted prospect finally let himself feel some self-satisfaction. For weeks, pressure had been building around him. This was a sudden release.
“It gave me a lot more confidence,” Pages reiterated. “To get some results … was a major lift off my back.”
Despite batting .248 with 13 home runs and 46 RBIs last season — a promising, if inconsistent, rookie performance punctuated by a two-home run, four-RBI performance in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series — Pages knew he’d have few certainties with this year’s title-defending team.
From the beginning of spring training, he said, “the team told me that I didn’t have a guaranteed spot, that I had to work my way to get a big-league spot.”
Although Pages broke camp as the club’s primary center fielder, his early-season struggles had been weighing on him.
“That’s added a little bit of stress to my day-to-day,” he acknowledged. “I feel good. It’s just some of the things that I’ve been working through haven’t worked out.”
Blunders in the outfield (where he has misplayed several fly balls, including a rocket from Philadelphia Phillies star Bryce Harper last weekend) and on the bases (where he has run through stop signs and been caught twice on over-aggressive base-running decisions) were the most glaring moments of failure over the season’s first two weeks.
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“Some plays that I just need to make,” Pages said, “I haven’t made them.”
At the root of his frustrations, however, has been his early inability to consistently produce at the plate — where, even after collecting four hits and two home runs in his last three games, he is batting just .171 with a .648 OPS.
After all, the main reason Pages is on the big-league roster over other triple-A options such as utilityman Hyeseong Kim (the slick-fielding offseason signing from South Korea who opened the year in the minors to work on revamping his swing) and outfielder Esteury Ruiz (the 2023 American League stolen base leader the Dodgers acquired from the Oakland A’s last week) is because of his bat.
Thus, even over an exceedingly small sample size entering this week’s series in Washington, his lagging overall numbers had become cause for concern.
“I’m trying to do the things that I can do every day, to work hard, to get better at the plate, making adjustments,” Pages said on Monday, when manager Dave Roberts kept him out of the lineup to let him reset mentally.
“I’ve been doing a lot of good things,” he insisted. “But balls aren’t falling.”
To Roberts, Pages’ slump had less to do with swing mechanics, and more with “passivity” in his offensive approach.
An aggressive hitter ordinarily, Pages had seemed too cautious in the box in the early going this year. Batting near the bottom of the Dodgers lineup — often, in the No. 9 hole with Shohei Ohtani behind him in the leadoff spot — he started taking more pitches than usual, and shortening his swing to go the other way.
It has helped Pages walk more, drawing free passes at double the rate he did last year. But the pop in his bat had gone missing. Routine fly outs to right field were an overly common occurrence.
“Just to be a little bit more aggressive, shifting the field a little bit more towards the center, the big part of the field, I think would be more beneficial,” Roberts said.
Tuesday’s home run, hit on an arching line to the left-center-field bullpen, served as a long-awaited first example.
Another came on Wednesday afternoon, in two starkly contrasting mid-game at-bats.
In the fourth inning of the Dodgers’ series finale against the Nationals, Pages took three consecutive thigh-high, center-cut sinkers from right-hander Jake Irvin, kicking himself after going down looking with Ohtani looming on deck.
“I'm not used to hitting in that part of the order, and I'm trying to see as many pitches as I can,” Pages said, concurring with Roberts’ assessment of his overly conservative early-season approach. “Sometimes I get too passive for that reason, which isn't good for me.”
Thus, his next time up in the top of the seventh, Pages swung at three straight sliders from reliever Eduardo Salazar. The first two, he whiffed on. But the third, which was left up in the zone and out over the plate, he launched to the left field seats for a game-tying blast — his second home run in a 24-hour span.
“I just tell him to go aggressive,” said veteran teammate Teoscar Hernández, who has become a close mentor of Pages’ since early last season. “He’s an aggressive hitter. So just get ready to hit.”
Roberts agreed, noting Pages is still “calibrating” the right balance of patience and aggression.
“He needs to kind of figure out where his strengths are in the hitting zone,” Roberts added, “and if he sees it there, then just be as aggressive as you need to be.”
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It’s all part of the continuing education for Pages; the kind of growing pains the Dodgers are willing to tolerate, for now, in hopes he can blossom into a more consistent offensive force as an everyday big-league player.
There are still defensive fundamentals to drill home, and baserunning mistakes to eliminate.
There are still alternatives down the depth chart, too, if Pages can’t turn this week’s two-homer outburst into a more prolonged period of success.
But, “for him to start getting results is good,” said another veteran teammate, Kiké Hernández. “I know what it is to be young and struggling in the big leagues. There’s people behind you trying to take your job. I know how that feels. But once you start getting a little more calm and loose — that’s what it seems like with his at-bats right now. He’s starting to get in a rhythm.”
Added Teoscar Hernández, with a wide smile after Pages’ home run on Wednesday helped lead the Dodgers to a come-from-behind win: “He's gonna hit. He's a good hitter. He's gonna be fine. And he's gonna help us a lot this year, too.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
