SAN FRANCISCO –Thirteen hours after the players reported to the ballpark to play seven hours’ worth of baseball, a light rain briefly fell on AT&T Park Saturday night.
No doubt Dave Roberts could have found a silver lining even in those clouds.
“It’s a tough month for us,” the Dodgers manager said after his team split Saturday’s doubleheader with the San Francisco Giants, once again failing to gain any positive traction on this season. “The solace is that no one’s making excuses and we’re playing hard. Guys are trying to make pitches. It’s just not happening right now. That’s encouraging. It really is.”
Roberts might land on the DL with a strained oblique reaching for positive signs in the fact that “no one’s making excuses” about the way the Dodgers have underachieved over the past month. But he insists there is value in that “when you’re playing and you’re getting beat and you’re not playing up to your abilities but you’re looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, ‘We’ve got to get better’ as opposed to making excuses about why you’re not winning.”
That’s just as well — it would be hard to pin things down to one explanation. Saturday was another example of the Dodgers showing progress only to slide back into sluggish play.
In the first game, the Dodgers’ offense pounded the Giants for season-highs in hits (20) and runs, backing Walker Buehler in a 15-6 defeat.
But in the second game, the Dodgers went quietly, managing just two hits after the first inning in an 8-3 loss.
The day started well enough. Ten of the first 14 Dodgers hitters reached base and they scored eight runs in the first three innings of the opener. The Dodgers finished the game with nine extra-base hits – a solo home run by Chris Taylor, back-to-back RBI triples by Cody Bellinger and Joc Pederson later that inning and six doubles (three by Chase Utley).
Utley and Pederson each had four-hit games (the first of Pederson’s career). Taylor and Bellinger had three-hit games. Pederson drove in four runs, Bellinger three. Taylor and Utley each scored four times.
It was the first time since 1994 the Dodgers had two players each score four runs in a game and the first time since September 1930 those two players were the No. 1 and 2 hitters in the starting lineup.
“I think everyone saw the ball pretty well,” Pederson said. “We’d been scuffling a little bit. It was nice that everyone could contribute and give our pitchers some breathing room and let them get comfortable again.”
It did make it easier for Buehler to settle down after an erratic first inning.
Buehler needed 34 pitches to navigate the first inning of his second big-league start. He walked one, threw a run-scoring wild pitch and did himself some more harm by missing the bag while covering first on what should have been an inning-ending ground ball.
The Giants scored twice in that inning but Buehler stabilized after that to get through five innings. After his first-inning struggles, Buehler threw first-pitch strikes to the next 12 Giants batters and retired 12 of the 15 batters he faced before coming out of the game after throwing 94 pitches (the most in a game as a professional) in five innings.
“You start trying to beat guys with location instead of velocity. You kind of find your release point,” Buehler said of the adjustments he made after the first inning. “The first inning, the misses weren’t all one way. So to me, I call it ‘sprayed missing.’ The first start I yanked a lot so there was a lot of pull-side misses. The first inning it was just kind of all over. You try to re-set the system and at least miss just one side of that. I was able to locate it better.”
After the game, Buehler was optioned to Class-A Rancho Cucamonga, not Triple-A Oklahoma City – an indication the Dodgers want to keep him close and might have him in their short-term plans.
The offense carried over into the second game – but not for long.
The first three Dodgers reached base against Giants starter Johnny Cueto including a two-run home run by Corey Seager. After that, though, Cueto didn’t give up another hit in six innings, retiring 18 of the last 20 batters he faced.
Dodgers starter Alex Wood was good early, retiring 12 of the first 13 batters he faced. But the Giants strung together four consecutive hits in the fifth inning and took the lead on Austin Jackson’s three-run double.
The Giants broke it open with four runs in the eighth inning against the Dodgers’ struggling bullpen, turning a one-run game into something less compelling. Dodgers relievers have been charged with 20 runs over 18 1/3 innings this week.
“You have to understand that this is just a bad stretch,” Roberts said. “I know with the talent we have if we continue to put forth that effort and prepare the right way and play that way, wins will be there.
“It’s more magnified right now and it’s not pretty. It seems like we’re coming up on the short end of things but we’ve got to keep playing. It’s all we can do.”
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