Mark Saxon, ESPN Staff Writer 10y

Fielding an issue, but will it matter?

LOS ANGELES -- Hours before the Los Angeles Dodgers played the Philadelphia Phillies on Monday, manager Don Mattingly wanted to get something off his chest. So, in the hitters' meeting that is customary before every series, he brought up a topic that had been eating at him for a while.

Just make the routine plays. That simple.

"Your range is your range, but you can always be in the right spot," Mattingly said.

As this first month of Dodgers baseball has played out -- remember, the season started way back on March 22, way over in Australia -- you can sometimes find yourself wondering whether this team is so good in two phases of the game as to make the third practically irrelevant. You can also find yourself wondering whether the third, at some critical point, might undo all the good the first two compiled.

Apparently, Mattingly spends some time in both schools, because he has continued to express frustration at his team's sloppy fielding, though he was given a respite in the Dodgers' fairly routine 5-2 win over Philadelphia on Wednesday night.

As long as the Dodgers keep Hanley Ramirez at shortstop and Matt Kemp in center field, they probably are going to be a below-average defensive team. They've both been doing this for a while, after all, and the defensive metrics, new and old, haven't treated them kindly in, roughly, forever.

Only one major-league shortstop, Washington's Ian Desmond, has made more errors than Ramirez's five and those only hint at his general ineffectiveness. Every double play could prove an adventure this season.

According to UZR, one of the more widely followed defensive stats nowadays, Kemp is having his worst season as a center fielder since 2006 and he has been below average in all but two of his big league seasons.

The Dodgers, though, are 13-9 with the best pitcher in baseball on the shelf for a month and a glut of star-caliber outfielders and Ramirez all bouncing around the Mendoza line, so how can that be?

They're that good at pitching, good enough to do what few pitchers want to do -- work around their fielders at times. Without anyone making much of it, Zack Greinke (4-0, 2.45 ERA) has been just as good as Kershaw probably would have been, making himself into a swing-and-miss machine once again, and the other main starters -- Hyun-Jin Ryu (3-1, 2.12), Dan Haren (3-0, 2.16 ERA) and Josh Beckett (0-0, 2.57 ERA) -- haven't been too far behind.

And here's what should be scary for this team's opponents: They're probably that good at hitting, too, even if they're just beginning to show it. Five-eighths of their position-player lineup has been slumping on any given night and they've kept cruising along, pulled by Dee Gordon's speed, Adrian Gonzalez's consistency and Juan Uribe's streak.

Now, some other cylinders are starting to fire. Ramirez's hand must be feeling better. He says his swing is. He roped a double into the left-field corner and lifted a two-foot high pitch over the center-field wall. Kemp smacked a pair of doubles. Yasiel Puig yanked an RBI single through the hole and hit a soaring RBI triple. So, yeah, they're coming.

"We're going to be a better club if we get more consistency with our big boys, that's for sure," Mattingly said.

This team might never hit on all cylinders, because one of them seems capable of misfiring consistently for the rest of the summer. This is more of a raw horsepower than a precision team anyway. At least for now, there's no reason to doubt the formula. People will fret about how different things can get in October, but it seems a bit frivolous to worry about such things before the first of May.

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