The best player on the Dodgers not named Ohtani? A...

Andy Pages didn't just struggle in the Dodgers' playoff run last year -- he was historically bad. As a 24-year-old being counted on for the first time, he went 4-for-51 with 11 strikeouts and zero walks and was benched in the middle of the World Series. Among those with at least 50 plate appearances, his .211 OPS was the lowest ever for a single postseason. Three months later, at the start of spring training in early February, a group of Dodgers coaches called Pages into a conference room in Glendale, Arizona, for their version of a debriefing. The goal was to figure out why Pages' production began to fade in the second half and why it snowballed when it mattered most, but first, they wanted to restore his confidence. They assured him that every player, even the best ones, struggle. They reminded him that the team's second straight championship wouldn't have been possible without his game-saving catch in Game 7. They told him, most of all, that this slump would not define his career. "What they didn't realize," Pages said, "is that as soon as the season ended, that was already over for me. To me, it was as if that never happened." Pages has proved that with his play in 2026. On one of the most star-laden teams in baseball history, Pages has been the best player not named Shohei Ohtani. He's slashing .282/.326/.528 with 15 home runs -- 10 of them over his last 30 games -- and a major league-leading 56 RBIs, all while providing Gold Glove-caliber defense in center field. His 2.7 FanGraphs wins above replacement trails only Ohtani for the lead on a club with the second-best record in the sport. Pages began the season hitting eighth, buried in a lineup sprinkled with future Hall of Famers. Now, he hits second. "It says a lot about his mentality and his fortitude," Dodgers special assistant Nelson Cruz said in a phone conversation. "My concern was that he would carry what happened last year with him, but that obviously wasn't the case." Cruz joined that spring training meeting alongside Raul Ibañez, another longtime major league outfielder now on staff with the Dodgers, and the team's two hitting coaches, Robert Van Scoyoc and Aaron Bates. After it was over, Cruz pulled Pages aside. He watched as Pages stoically nodded along to their words of encouragement, polite but clearly eager to move on, and told him how impressed he was that someone so young could be so hardened. A slump that long, on a stage that large, can derail careers. And yet it seemed obvious that Pages would not let it. In his mind, he had already overcome much worse. "It's possible that everything we go through, all the difficulty, to get to where we are, the things we go through as kids -- it all makes you stronger," Pages said in Spanish. "It gives you a stronger heart, in that sense." At 16, Pages left behind his family in Cuba to chase his dream of becoming a major league player. His father used to make his bats out of spare lumber and his mother was a key support figure throughout his youth. But apart from a brief visit three years ago, he has not seen them since. Like so many of those who defect from the baseball-loving island, Pages made his toughest transition by himself. And as he emerged to stardom, connecting with his parents only became more difficult. Major League Baseball games are not broadcast in Cuba, a country that has spent seven decades operating under economic sanctions imposed by the United States. Pages' mom, dad and 18-year-old sister are limited to box scores and YouTube clips. Long an impoverished nation, Cuba's situation became especially bleak after the U.S. ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and forced the acting government to halt oil shipments early this year, cutting off Cuba's primary source. The nation is now experiencing a severe energy crisis that has hampered transportation and devastated its power grid. Pages' calls home usually don't go through. He'll routinely go days without hearing from his parents. Sometimes they'll call when he's asleep in the middle of the night, taking advantage of the few times when power is restored. Often, he'll take the field without knowing if they're OK. Said Pages: "I've just had to get used to it." Through that, he has learned to focus only on what's in front of him. "Anything can happen to me in a game, and it won't be harder than all of that," Pages said. "I have a bad game with four strikeouts, I tell myself, 'I've gone through worse than that.'" Graduating from the minor leagues and carving out an everyday role on a Dodgers team that routinely splurges in free agency and plays under unimaginable expectations has proved difficult for several promising prospects in recent years. For a while, the only homegrown position player to establish himself was Will Smith, who has become one of the game's best catchers. For Pages to join him, he needed to persevere and evolve. Signed for $300,000 in the spring of 2018, Pages was initially billed as an all-or-nothing hitter who did not possess the footspeed to remain in center field. After hitting just .236 in Double-A in 2022, Pages dedicated himself to working out and shed roughly 30 pounds, getting down to about 210. He tore a labrum in his shoulder 34 games into the 2023 season, then returned in 2024, dominated Triple-A and debuted in the majors. A year later, he made a case for the All-Star team. "I have the highest regard for him in that I know how strong he is mentally," said Bates, who previously worked with Dodgers minor leaguers and has known Pages since he first came to the organization. "He's a fighter." Every morning this spring, Pages dialed up Trajekt Arc, the pitching simulator located in the Dodgers' hitting lab, and spent the first 10 to 20 minutes merely tracking pitches. After a season in which his walk rate ranked 139th among 145 qualifiers, Pages needed to do a better job discerning balls from strikes. He has been chasing at roughly the same rate over the first 11 weeks of this season, but he has made a notable gain in walk rate (4.6% to 6.9%) and is seeing more pitches per plate appearance. More importantly, though, he's going into at-bats with a plan. Never was that more evident than on May 19 in San Diego, when Pages worked a nine-pitch at-bat against all-world closer Mason Miller, ultimately hitting a run-scoring sacrifice fly and handing Miller his first loss. To Pages, it was merely a hint of what's possible. Dodgers officials have long pegged him as an All-Star-caliber player, but Pages sees himself improving as a hitter and says he believes he's trending toward something even he can't fathom. "I don't know how far I can go. I really don't," Pages said. "Because you'll look up one day and I might hit 20 home runs in a month. Or I'll hit 10, but I get 50 hits. It's hard to control those things, but I feel like if I work to accomplish those things, I can accomplish them. Is it going to take time? Is it going to be a process? Yes. But I feel like I'm going to accomplish it. And when I get to that point, that's when we'll really see how far I can go and what type of player I can be." Pages' postseason slump had actually been building for some time. After the All-Star break, his offense started to slip and his acceleration started to fade. Bad habits that could have been addressed earlier became worse. A nagging right hamstring injury that could have been managed more proactively got so bad that Pages could not put weight on his backside by October, causing him to constantly drift forward and swing off balance. Pages says he believes his body shut down because he overworked himself in the first half. And so, as he met with coaches this spring, the focus became about identifying a more efficient, consistent routine that would give him the requisite preparation but also keep him fresh. Pages cared about how he could be better for the next October. The last one was irrelevant. "To me, it was a bad moment," Pages said. "It was simply my turn to go through that. But as I told them in there -- on this team, I'm sure that won't be my last World Series. I'm going to get back there, and we're going to see what happens."