With a Hot Start, Andy Pages Has Turned the Page on a Dismal Postseason

Andy Pages was the starting center fielder — and the youngest starter, period — on championship-winning Dodgers teams in each of his first two campaigns, showing considerable year-to-year improvement in the regular season but practically disappearing in October due to epic slumps. Now, the 25-year-old has put those postseason indignities behind him and emerged as one of the game’s hottest hitters to start 2026, while also helping the team jump out to the best record in the majors.

Through 15 games, the Dodgers are 11-4, a game and a half better than the second-best team thus far, the Padres (10-6). Pages, who has played all but four innings, has multiple hits in eight of his 15 games; only the Rangers’ Brandon Nimmo (nine) and the Rays’ Chandler Simpson (eight) have as many or more such games. In his latest multi-hit effort, on Friday against Texas, Pages went 3-for-3 with a walk and two key extra-base hits. He smoked a two-run double down the right field line off Robert Garcia in the seventh inning, turning a 4-3 deficit into a 5-4 lead, and followed up with a two-run homer to left-center field off Luis Curvelo in the eighth to extend the lead to 7-4. The Dodgers needed all of those runs as they hung on to win 8-7 on Max Muncy’s walk-off home run, his third dinger of the game.

To date, Pages is hitting an absurd .429/.467/.714 (233 wRC+). He finished the weekend leading the NL in all of those categories except slugging percentage; he’s also first in WAR (1.2, tied with Jordan Walker) and RBI (17). Two and a half weeks into the season isn’t enough to confirm whether he’s unlocked a new level of performance — he’s obviously not going to maintain those slash stats — but he’s shown some promising signs, and his prominence atop the leaderboards at least merits a closer look.

Pages has been the Dodgers’ youngest regular since arriving in Los Angeles on April 16, 2024, no small matter on a team whose hitters have been the oldest in the majors in each of the past two seasons. Even including Pages’ contributions (1.3 WAR) that season, the team received a lower percentage of its WAR from position players 25 and under than all but two others. Last year, the Dodgers improved to 21st in that category, again mainly due to Pages (4.1 WAR):

Those modest shares of WAR from the youngsters didn’t prevent the Dodgers from winning it all, but sooner or later, age will catch up to their veterans — we’re already seeing it from future Hall of Famers Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman — and they’ll need infusions of youth to continue winning. Pages represents their main beachhead toward that end, and the team has been working 25-year-old Dalton Rushing into the lineup as Will Smith’s backup since mid-May of last season. In the early going this year, injuries to Betts, Tommy Edman, and Enrique Hernández have opened up playing time in the middle infield for 23-year-old rookie Alex Freeland, as well.

Pages entered the 2024 season having just missed the cut for our Top 100 Prospects list after a torn left labrum — suffered in his first game at Triple-A Oklahoma City — ended his previous season in mid-May; he slipped from a 50-FV grade to a 45+. After a hot start, with just 15 more games at Oklahoma City under his belt, he was called up to patch a particularly unproductive outfield, as James Outman, the team’s 2023 rookie surprise, turned back into a pumpkin. Aside from optioning Pages back to Triple-A in mid-August 2024 amid a roster crunch, the Dodgers have never looked back.

Pages was just about league average as a hitter in 2024, batting .248/.305/.407 (98 wRC+) with 13 home runs while providing defense that was a mixed bag according to the metrics (-8 DRS, -1 FRV). Last year, he put up significantly improved numbers at the plate, on the bases, and in the field, hitting .272/.313/.461 (113 wRC+) with 27 homers, 14 steals (up from one in 2024), and exceptional defensive metrics (8 DRS, 12 FRV). As in 2024, he spread his time across all three outfield positions, with 973 innings in center, 153 in left, and 243 in right, often replacing Teoscar Hernández in one corner or another in the late innings. He showed off 98th-percentile arm strength and 97th-percentile range, according to Statcast, though he missed out on a Gold Glove.

For all of those contributions, Pages has remained on a shorter leash than any other Dodger during the postseason, to the point that he was benched in consecutive Octobers. While he went 3-for-4 with a pair of homers in Game 5 of the 2024 NLCS against the Mets, those came when the Dodgers were in the process of getting blown out, 12-6; he collected just one other hit in his seven games over the first two rounds, and didn’t appear at all in the five-game World Series against the Yankees, as manager Dave Roberts chose to go with Enrique Hernández and Edman in center. Last year, Pages played all but one postseason game, but collected just three plate appearances after Game 3 of the World Series, hitting .078/.113/.098 with 11 strikeouts in 55 plate appearances overall. He did make a spectacular series-saving catch in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7, running down an Ernie Clement fly ball — and running over Hernández — with the bases loaded and two outs to keep the Dodgers’ championship hopes alive:

Whew, that’s a World Series ring well-earned, even with his offensive struggles.

Pages found himself on the bench in October in part because of his tendency to chase pitches. Indeed, he’s been something of a free swinger during his time in the majors, with a 6.5% walk rate in 2024 and then 4.6% last year. He’s back up to 6.7% this year, which itself is nothing to write home about, but he’s seeing a lot more pitches. Last year, Pages averaged 3.78 pitches per plate appearance, which placed him in the 33rd percentile among batting title qualifiers, but this year, he’s up to 4.46, boosting him into the 97th percentile; only Nick Kurtz (4.71), Cal Raleigh (4.61), Smith (4.61) and Spencer Torkelson (4.51) have higher averages. Batter swing rates are among the first stats to stabilize, at around 350 pitches seen, but with 272 pitches to Pages, it’s still premature to plant a flag on this as definitive improvement; rather, I’d call it the seed of a promising development:

While Pages is swinging less in 2026, he’s also making less frequent contact than in ’25, though you can see how he improved last year relative to his rookie season. His chase rate actually dipped from the 32nd percentile in 2024 to the 18th percentile last year, but it’s back up to the 38th percentile thus far. Again, this is something to be cautiously optimistic about more than definitively impressed by. A look at his Statcast Swing/Take rates — now available on our player pages under “Statcast – Strike Zone Breakdown” —shows that his drop in swinging at pitches in the heart of the zone (from 78.1% to 65.6%) has been offset by swinging at more pitches in the shadow zone (from 55.7% to 61.2%). Still, the intent is there, as Pages has worked to become more selective, developing a routine this spring using the team’s Trajekt Arc machine, which can simulate different pitchers and pitches. From The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya:

First, he’d spend 10 minutes simply reading pitches. Next, 10 minutes calling out borderline pitches to determine not just if they were a ball or strike, but a pitch worth swinging at. Only then, in the final 10 minutes, would he swing.

Roberts has been impressed, telling reporters after Friday’s game, “He’s adapted, evolved, adjusted in all fronts,” and adding, “(He) knows exactly what he wants to do every time he gets up to bat. There’s complete clarity and just kind of letting him be himself as a ballplayer.”

Pages has made some minor adjustments at the plate, according to Statcast’s bat-tracking metrics, most of which fall within his month-to-month variations, as he was all over the map in 2025 in terms of his stance. He does appear to be crouching more, and his feet are farther apart, 23.8 inches, up from an average of 17.1 inches in 2025, and from 15.8 inches during the final month of the regular season, with his stance more closed off than the extreme he reached late in the year:

I’m not sure it means all that much amid the other variations, but Pages is also letting the ball travel a bit more, with an average intercept of 1.2 inches behind the front of the plate (that is, -1.2 inches) compared to -0.3 inches last year. He has been swinging hard more often; his average bat speed of 73.1 mph is up 0.5 mph from last year, while his fast swing rate of 31% is nearly 10 points ahead of last year. That harder swing has translated to better contact:

Forty batted balls is on the edge of where exit velocity starts to stabilize, so in that light it does appear that Pages has added some extra oomph. At the same time, it’s worth noting that last year’s improvement didn’t hinge on improved exit velocity, barrel, or hard-hit rates, and instead owed considerably to his 50-point swing relative to his expected slugging percentages, from falling 27 points short in 2024 to exceeding it by 23 points. He’s pulling the ball in the air more often than ever, but he’s also hitting to the opposite field more:

“If you look at all of baseball, to see how many times he’s hit balls from line to line, he’s got to be number one in that category,” Roberts said after Friday’s game. Pages does lead the majors with nine opposite-field hits, but four other players have eight (Simpson, Yandy Díaz, Gleyber Torres, and Brice Turang), and seven more have seven, so it’s not like he’s distanced himself from the pack or even put himself in the company of superstars atop the leaderboard. That he’s collected five RBI on opposite-field hits — and is batting .571/.571/1.143 with runners in scoring position overall — is no doubt amplifying this development.

April is a dangerous time when it comes to analyzing baseball, given that most stats have yet to stabilize, so there’s danger in jumping to conclusions based on small samples. Pages has never quite been on a heater like this, running a .526 BABIP through 15 games…

…but the cold reality is that nobody maintains a .526 BABIP for very long. While Pages has laid the groundwork for improvement, the best we can do right now is note his progress and watch to see whether the changes he’s made will stick.