After a quiet first few innings, the Los Angeles Dodgers offense looked as expected on Opening Day, teeing off on the Arizona Diamondbacks pitching staff in an 8-2 win.
And even better, the team’s biggest hit came from the player that arguably needed it most entering the season.
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The last time we saw Andy Pages in a game that counted, he was — well, OK, he was making an incredible catch to save the Dodgers’ bacon in Game 7 of the 2025 World Series. But that was only the end of perhaps the worst offensive postseason by a player in the history of baseball, a 4-for-51 stretch of abject misery.
Among hitters with at least 50 plate appearances in a single postseason, Pages’ .211 OPS ranked the worst in MLB history. You have to go back to 1926 to find the next closest.
So one of the team’s biggest questions entering the season was what kind of player they would get in center field, the nearly All-Star caliber talent of the regular season or the completely lost player of October.
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Pages gave them an encouraging sign in the fifth inning, when he clubbed a three-run homer off D-backs starter Zac Gallen to give his team a lead it did not relinquish (video above). He finished the game 2-for-4, adding a single in the eighth inning.
Andy Pages was one of the Dodgers’ biggest question marks entering 2026.
(Ronald Martinez via Getty Images)
A single home run doesn’t mean a player is fixed, but it’s something Pages never did last postseason. And it comes after a strong spring, in which the 25-year-old hit .340/.370/.500 in 54 plate appearances.
An operational Pages makes the Dodgers’ lineup an even bigger issue for opposing pitchers. Pages was penciled in as the No. 8 hitter on Thursday, behind one of the best top 4s in all of baseball (Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Tucker, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman) and then a collection of veterans with significant power (Will Smith, Max Muncy, Teoscar Hernández). If Pages is no longer an easy out, that’s a problem.
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We saw that on Opening Day. Gallen held his own all the way up to the Pages homer, but the wheels came off soon after. Two more batters reached base to chase the right-hander out of the game, then Smith scored another run on a single.
Then came the seventh inning, when a Tucker double, Betts single and Smith homer all scored runs to make the game a season-opening rout.
On offense, Yoshinobu Yamamoto did just fine. The reigning World Series MVP allowed a two-run homer to Geraldo Perdomo in the fourth inning, but was otherwise effective and finished with a line of 6 innings, 5 hits, 2 earned runs, 0 walks and 6 strikeouts.
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The 2026 Dodgers certainly have their vulnerabilities, but they weren’t apparent on Thursday. The team is now 1-0 after while its three possible NL West challengers — the D-backs, San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants — all began their season with losses.
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