DENVER –– As snow fell from the sky and temperatures plunged into 30s outside, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts sat in his office at Coors Field on Friday afternoon and reminisced on the coldest game he ever played.
“I think I recall in Buffalo, I played in April in 2000,” Roberts said, thinking all the way back to his minor-league days. “Snow, wind, cold. I mean, it was in the 20s. Miserable.”
The kind of conditions, he added, that make for a “mindset game.”
The Dodgers’ series-opener against the Colorado Rockies later that night wasn’t quite as bad. The snow let up a few hours before first pitch. The grounds crew was able to clear the field of its thick white coating. And while the 35-degree reading at first pitch was the lowest on record in Dodgers history, it was a “dry cold,” Roberts joked, after the skies finally cleared.
Still, such a setting posed a challenge, almost “testing your soul a little bit,” as Roberts quipped.
Then, during a 7-1 win, his team passed in every phase.
“You can’t complain about it,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “You got to go out there. They have to play through it also.”
In a relentless offensive onslaught, the Dodgers (15-4) scored in each of the first five innings to jump out to a big early lead.
In a seven-inning, one-run gem, Tyler Glasnow preserved the advantage against the Rockies (7-13) and their woeful lineup, striking out seven batters despite the frigid weather.
Muncy led the way at the plate, going 3-for-4 with two home runs and an RBI double after entering the game in a 1-for-17 skid.
Shohei Ohtani , Freddie Freeman and Will Smith also had two hits, while Andy Pages and Hyeseong Kim each reached base twice.
It was everything Roberts was hoping to see pregame, when he challenged his hitters to “overcome the cold.”
“It’s gonna be uncomfortable. Your hands are gonna hurt,” he said. “This is one of those days you’ve just got to kind of hunker down and lock in for three hours and lock in for your four at-bats or five at-bats and give the best effort.”
The same went for Glasnow, who turned in his best start of the season while showing further growth and maturation –– especially compared to this time last year, when he came unglued during another bad weather day in the rain in Philadelphia .
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“I think he’s grown exponentially,” Roberts said.
For him and the rest of the team, it was mind over matter.
What it means
The Dodgers just keep on rolling during this opening month.
They’ve now won four in a row, 11 of the last 13 and are the first team in the majors to reach the 15-win mark.
Glasnow’s performance continued a particularly strong run from the starting rotation, marking the third time in this four-game winning streak the Dodgers have gotten at least seven innings from their pitcher.
“I’m usually super hot and sweaty, so it was almost nice,” Glasnow said. “My body temperature is so high to where I went out there and didn’t feel cold, didn’t sweat a ton … I think just feeling good was helpful.”
Who’s hot
Muncy had been in a cold spell following his three-run homer game last week.
All it took was the cold Colorado temps, apparently, to heat his bat back up.
In the second inning, he jumped on a down-the-middle cutter from Tomoyuki Sugano and slugged a 452-foot solo blast deep to center. In the fifth, he turned on an inside cutter from reliever Zach Angos and pulled another solo drive 419 feet.
In between that, Muncy also accomplished a quirky season-first, when he lined an RBI double into the right-field corner to key a two-run rally.
Before that, all five of Muncy’s RBIs on the season had come via solo homers. When Smith crossed the plate on his double, he became the first batter other than Muncy himself that the third baseman had driven in this year.
“I really like the things that I’m working on,” Muncy said, after raising his batting average back up to .254. “I just need to get it to take hold in the game and once that happens, I feel like things are really going to start taking off.”
Who’s not
Sugano.Especially when he faces Ohtani.
Entering Friday, Ohtani had faced his fellow Japanese countryman twice in their careers: Going 2-for-2 in a Nippon Professional Baseball league game in Japan before Ohtani came over to the majors, then going 2-for-2 again with two home runs during Sugano’s debut MLB season with the Baltimore Orioles last year.
Now a member of the Rockies, Sugano didn’t have much better luck when Ohtani and the Dodgers arrived at Coors Field.
Ohtani led the game off with a double, extending his on-base streak to 49 games before scoring on a sacrifice fly from Smith later in the inning. In the second, Ohtani then singled, adding to an eventual total of nine hits that the Dodgers collected off Sugano in his four-inning, five-run, 91-pitch grind of an outing.
The good news for Sugano: He finally retired Ohtani on a ground ball in the fourth.
By then, however, the Dodgers were already putting the game out of reach.
Up next
The Dodgers and Rockies continue their series on Saturday, and this time there’s no snow in the forecast. Emmet Sheehan (2-0, 6.60 ERA) will square off against Ryan Feltner (1-1, 7.30) for the 5:10 p.m. PT first pitch.
