by Cary Osborne
With the struggles the Rockies were having coming into this three-game series, the thought was this was going to be a get-right series for the Dodgers.
It was for the Dodger offense with three straight games of double-digit hits, 19 total runs and 52 times reaching base.
The Dodgers batted around in the first inning and scored seven runs en route to an 8–7 win on Wednesday — and a sweep of Colorado at Dodger Stadium.
But the series was particularly beneficial for Dodger third baseman Max Muncy.
The veteran slugger came into the series batting .176/.232/.255/.487 with 24 strikeouts in 56 plate appearances.
Muncy went 2-for-3 with two singles and a walk on Wednesday. It wasn’t the thunder that Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman provided, with each hitting a home run on Wednesday.
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But it was part of a series in which Muncy reached base eight times in 12 plate appearances with five walks, a hit by pitch and two hits this series.
“The last three days I really felt like myself,” Muncy said.
Muncy’s night and his three-game series pushed his on-base percentage to .309 and his OPS to .572.
Still numbers far below his career numbers and Major League averages in each category — particularly in OPS.
But Muncy said the series and the work during and leading up to it helped him to get some distance from some of the troubles that plagued him in the first weeks of the season. He said the ball sped up on him and his pitch recognition was off. Some mechanical adjustments helped get him reset.
Muncy, who ranks ninth in Los Angeles Dodgers history with 190 home runs, is still looking for that first one in 2025, though.
But prior to Wednesday’s game, Muncy was pounding batting practice pitches into the upper reaches of the Right Field Pavillion.
In the fifth inning, Muncy punished a four-seamer from Rockies reliever Luis Peralta. The ball came off the bat with a 109-mph exit velocity and traveled 358 feet but landed foul.
Three pitches later, he singled off the left-hander — the ball leaving the bat at 108.4 mph.
“I don’t care about the homer as much as I care about just having good at-bats,” Muncy said. “I know the homers will come whenever they come. And if they don’t, they don’t. As long as I can keep having good at-bats, that’s what I care about.
“For me, those first two weeks, I was having pretty terrible at-bats, and I was putting my teammates in rough positions, and that’s the last thing I want to do. So for me, just having good at-bats, allowing my teammates to be themselves and have their at-bats I think for me is huge. I think it’s huge for this team. And I think the last couple days, we saw good results out of that. And it allows the whole lineup to just get deeper.”
The plate discipline was much different this series.
Muncy came into the series with an O-swing% (percentage of pitches swung at outside of the strikezone) of 29.8% — more than 10% higher than his career average. He saw 34 out-of-zone pitches this series and swung at three of them. One of his singles on Wednesday was on a ball out of the zone.
He struck out once in the 12 plate appearances.
“He has turned a corner,” said manager Dave Roberts. “His work’s been good. He’s seeing the ball much better. He’s not as jumpy, not as quick onto his front side. When he’s walking, those are good signs. He took a good at-bat versus the left-hander. So yeah, when he’s getting on base — and it was a ton this series — then that’s a good thing. So I do think that he’s turned the corner.”
Max Muncy starts to turn the corner in Dodgers sweep of the Rockies was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.