It might be a cliché this time of year, how injured players who return after the trade deadline can serve as de facto deadline acquisitions themselves.
But in the case of Max Muncy and the Dodgers, the team needed it to be true. Badly.
Immediately after Muncy went down with a knee injury in early July, the club’s lineup entered a deep midseason slump. Its actual deadline acquisitions, which included only one hitter in outfielder Alex Call, had underwhelmed the fan base.
Thus, when Muncy returned to action Monday night, the Dodgers were desperately hoping the veteran slugger could provide a spark.
Twenty-four hours later, he did it with two thunderous swings.
In the Dodgers’ 12-6 win over the St. Louis Cardinals, Muncy officially christened his comeback with a four-for-five, four-RBI performance that included a pair of no-doubt home runs off Miles Mikolas — picking up almost exactly where he left off before suffering a July 2 knee injury that he feared would end his season.
“As I was laying there on the ground that night, I thought for sure this is it,” Muncy recalled this week, after not only recovering from what proved to be just a bone bruise, but doing it two weeks faster than the initial six-week timeline the team had expected.
“It’s hard to stay positive in a moment like that,” Muncy added, while reliving Michael A. Taylor’s slide into his left knee a month earlier. “But extremely thankful and blessed to be back on a baseball field this year.”
Muncy did have some rust to knock off, going hitless in three at-bats with a walk and strikeout in his first game back Monday night against crafty Cardinals right-hander Sonny Gray.
On Tuesday, however, Mikolas gave him the chance to do some long-awaited damage.
In the first inning, after Shohei Ohtani doubled and scored on a Freddie Freeman sacrifice fly, Muncy clobbered a center-cut, first-pitch sinker 416 feet into the right-field pavilion, giving the Dodgers a quick 2-0 lead.
In the third, after the Cardinals leveled the score on Nolan Gorman’s two-run homer off Emmet Sheehan an inning earlier, Muncy went deep again, whacking an elevated fastball 404 feet for a two-run blast.
“I was getting to the pitches at the top of the zone,” Muncy said. “As long as I’m doing that, I feel like my swing is in a really good spot. The pitches I was able to hit tonight, I felt really good about.”
The Dodgers (66-48) wouldn’t relinquish the lead from there, going on to their first double-digit scoring effort since June 22 thanks to a five-run rally in the seventh, when Muncy also added an RBI single, and two more runs in the eighth, when Muncy tacked on his fourth hit.
“That’s something you hope can kind of catapult the lineup,” Muncy said. “Hopefully, we keep that going.”
Indeed, there were other positive signs for the Dodgers’ recently scuffling lineup on Tuesday.
Mookie Betts, who was mired in a career-long five-game, 22 at-bat hitless streak, recorded three knocks: A double right before Muncy’s second homer in the third, a line-drive single in the fifth, and a seeing-eye grounder in the eighth.
Andy Pages, who was batting just .211 since the All-Star break, made hard contact on doubles in the sixth and the seventh.
Then there was Teoscar Hernández, who was hitting just .213 since returning from a groin strain in May, but came roaring to life with a two-homer game. In the third inning, he went back-to-back with Muncy on a solo home run to left. In the seventh, he smashed a game-sealing three-run drive after Muncy’s RBI single.
Leading up to the deadline, manager Dave Roberts cited that subset of slumping hitters as potential quasi-deadline additions in their own right. Part of the reason for the team’s relative inaction at the deadline was its trust that the healthy, but scuffling, members of its lineup would get back on track down the stretch.
Mookie Betts runs to first after singling in the eighth inning.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Still, Muncy’s eventual return had long been seen as the Dodgers’ biggest potential boon, especially after they went from leading the majors in scoring before he got hurt to ranking last in runs over the 25 games he missed.
“We’ve certainly missed him,” Roberts said ahead of Muncy’s return Monday. “The night he came off the field, you’re starting to think of it potentially being season-ending. So to get him back in a month, we’re all excited. He’s put in a lot of work to get back with this timeline. And yeah, we’ve needed him.”
Two games in, the importance of his return is already being felt.
“That presence in the lineup is so additive,” Roberts said. “He just makes everyone around him better.”
