SAN FRANCISCO — It might’ve been more frustrating, had it not been so predictable.
The Dodgers starting to turn a corner, only to stumble to the kind of maddening late-game loss that has come to define their season.
Entering this weekend’s series against the San Francisco Giants, the team had won four straight games. It had started to stack better offensive performances from its slumping lineup. It had begun to believe that better health and improved pitching could spark a surge to carry it through the rest of the campaign.
Then, they came out of an off day looking flat at Oracle Park.
Then, reality once again smacked them square in the face.
The Dodgers’ 5-1 loss to the Giants might have ended in a familiar way, with Tanner Scott giving up a walk-off hit — this time, a grand slam to Patrick Bailey in the bottom of the 10th — for the third time in the last eight days.
But on this night, the embattled $72-million closer was far from the only person culpable for a slice of the blame.
The Dodgers (82-65) did not hit on a cool night along the San Francisco Bay, with a seventh-inning home run from Michael Conforto accounting for the entirety of their scoring.
They did not back up another gem from Yoshinobu Yamamoto, letting his latest dominant outing (seven innings, one run, one hit, 10 strikeouts) go to waste.
Mostly, they squandered an opportunity to continue the momentum they had finally built with this past week’s long-awaited winning streak. They let the game come down to Scott’s unreliable left arm, and reignited long-standing doubts about their ability to maintain any level of consistent play.
“When you score one run and you’re in a tight ball game, then there’s just no margin [for error],” manager Dave Roberts said in another somber postgame address. “When you’re playing these close ball games, where any flare, any mistake costs you, that’s a tough quality of life too. So it’s not just those guys in the ‘pen.”
Indeed, the Dodgers’ loss was set in motion long before Scott threw an elevated fastball that Bailey lined to left for his walk-off slam.
It started with their inability to hit Justin Verlander, who pitched seven innings of one-run ball with a heavy dose of curveballs and sliders. It escalated when they came up empty in a string of scoring opportunities, going 0 for 5 with runners in scoring position. It’s a problem they’ve tried to address in recent days, including with reps of simulated situational at-bats in batting practice.
Dodgers starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto delivers in the second inning Friday.
(Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
Little by little, the turning points began to snowball. And ultimately, it all ended in an avalanche of orange Giants jerseys celebrating at home plate.
“We had opportunities to get a hit, to drive some runs in,” Roberts said. “We had some chances late to put up a crooked number. We just couldn’t come through.”
In the first and third innings, the Dodgers couldn’t capitalize upon one-out walks. In the fourth, they had two on with no outs, and yet still came up empty.
Yamamoto, fresh off his near no-hitter in Baltimore last week, made sure they stayed in it. He gave up one run in the first inning on a Willy Adames double, which plated Rafael Devers from first base after Andy Pages bobbled the ball for an error. But after that, he retired the final 20 batters he faced, lowering his ERA to 2.66.
Conforto, meanwhile, tied the score in the seventh, hitting only his 11th home run of the season to straightaway center.
From there, however, the horrors of the Dodgers’ horrendous play over the second half of the season quickly returned. They were handed a winnable game, and found a way to give it away.
They left another runner stranded in the eighth, after Max Muncy was hit by a pitch in the right forearm that eventually forced him to exit the game (but isn’t expected to keep him out going forward, after postgame X-rays came back negative).
They caught a break in the bottom of the ninth, when Giants pinch-runner Grant McCray was thrown out at home plate by Pages on an aggressive send on a shallow fly ball to center. But then they gave it right back in the top half of the 10th, when catcher Ben Rortvedt (once again filling in for Will Smith, who continues to nurse a bone bruise on his right hand) made his own out on the bases trying to advance as the automatic runner from second to third base.
It all set the stage for the bottom of the 10th, when Scott was thrust into the kind of situation that has haunted him repeatedly of late.
Matt Chapman led the inning off with a ground ball against Blake Treinen, moving the winning run over to third base with left-handed hitter Jung Hoo Lee due up next. At that point, rookie southpaw Jack Dreyer had already pitched in the eighth and ninth inning. Fellow lefty Alex Vesia was down after making back-to-back appearances in his return from the injured list earlier this week.
Thus, Roberts came to the mound, and summoned Scott into the game.
“He had three days off [before this],” Roberts said. “I felt it was the time to run him out there.”
At first, the decision seemed to work. Scott pitched Lee carefully to work a full-count. Then, he snapped off a slider that appeared to induce a putaway foul-tip.
But as Lee waved at the pitch, and home plate umpire Bill Miller initially signaled for strike three, third base umpire Chad Fairchild quickly overruled the call, motioning the ball had instead bounced off the ground and into Rortvedt’s glove — even though replays showed that Rortvedt had secured it without the ball hitting the dirt.
“Obviously we looked at the replay, it didn’t hit the ground,” said Roberts, who was left helpless in the dugout on what was a non-reviewable play.
“I thought I got it clean, it definitely didn’t bounce,” Rortvedt added. “But I think the way I caught, it might have been a trap.”
Either way, the at-bat continued. The next pitch was a slider out of the zone, putting Lee on base as disaster began to stir.
The Dodgers elected to intentionally walk the next batter, right-handed hitting Casey Schmitt, to bring Bailey to the plate. Scott’s first pitch to him was a slider in the dirt. The next: A 96.5 mph fastball just above the zone that Bailey timed up for a grand slam to end the game.
“Gave up a bad pitch to a hitter that can hit fastballs [and] it cost us again,” said Scott, who has a 5.01 ERA in his debut Dodgers season with nine blown saves, four losing decisions and 11 home runs allowed (tying his total from the past three years combined).
“I’m tired of it happening,” he added.
Dodgers pitcher Tanner Scott watches after San Francisco’s Patrick Bailey hits a game-ending grand slam in the 10th inning of the Dodgers’ 5-1 loss Friday at Oracle Park.
(Godofredo A. Vásquez / Associated Press)
Roberts tried to give the closer a vote of confidence afterward, saying “we’ve just got to continue to try to give him confidence and, when the time’s right, run him out there and expect good things to happen” — even though, the manager also acknowledged, it might be time to finally use Scott in lower-leverage sequences of games.
Rortvedt also took blame for the decisive pitch selection, even though he insisted the location of the fastball was one that “no one’s supposed to hit.”
That didn’t seem to give Scott much solace. He was so dumbfounded by his latest late-game implosion, he openly wondered if he was simply tipping his pitches.
“They’re on everything, it sucks,” he said. “I have no friggin’ clue right now. … I’m having the worst year of my life.”
The Dodgers, of course, aren’t having a banner year as a team, either. They might not have ceded ground in the National League West standings on Friday, remaining 2½ games up on the San Diego Padres after that club’s own stunning loss at home to the Colorado Rockies. But, the Dodgers did lose all the momentum they had carried into this rivalry series; putting Scott in a position he has so often struggled, thanks to their earlier inability to put the game away.
Sasaki’s next steps
Roki Sasaki could rejoin the Dodgers’ big-league roster before the end of the regular season. But first, he’ll have to pass one more minor-league rehab test.
Roberts said Sasaki, the rookie right-hander who finally rediscovered his 100 mph fastball last week after missing most of the season with a shoulder injury, will make one more start with triple-A Oklahoma City next week after experiencing a calf issue in his start last week.
If Sasaki comes through that outing OK, Roberts said he hoped to see Sasaki back in the big leagues, where he hasn’t pitched since posting a 4.72 ERA in eight starts to begin the season.
“I don’t know in what capacity,” Roberts said of Sasaki’s role, which would likely be in the bullpen if he were to make the postseason roster. “But I’m hopeful that we’ll see Roki here before season’s end. … From my understanding, Roki is in a good place to do whatever it is to help the team.”
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