Once again, the Dodgers projected confidence in the wake of defeat Monday night.
The way things have been going lately, that’s about the only thing they’ve been able to do consistently well.
“We’re back-to-back champions for a reason,” third baseman Max Muncy said after a 9-3 loss to the Giants. “We find ways to get out of this.”
“We just have too much talent and too much desire to keep doing this for much longer,” echoed manager Dave Roberts, despite his team losing for the 13th time in the last 22 games.
“It’s not fun when you’re going through it. But you’ve just got to remain positive,” Roberts later added. “It will turn. It always has.”
As encouraging as those might quotes sound, they did little to dampen the sting of yet another frustrating performance in Monday’s series opener against their division rivals at Dodger Stadium.
This time, the Dodgers’ slumping offense not only remained in a funk, but their previously stout pitching staff didn’t offer much support either.
After trading runs with the Giants early, and tying the score at 3-3 when Muncy hit his team-leading 11th homer of the year in the bottom of the sixth, the Dodgers’ bullpen suffered a rare late-game implosion when Alex Vesia was charged with three runs in a decisive seventh-inning rally.
Not even the return of Mookie Betts , who went 1-for-5 after being activated from a month-long stint on the injured list with a strained oblique, could help them recover down the stretch.
“The effort, the focus was there,” Roberts said. “I thought the fight was there.”
Alas, the team’s recent tailspin only continued to get worse.
He yielded three-straight one-out hits, then walked Rafael Devers in a full-count to plate the go-ahead run.
“We’re not taking this lightly right now,” Muncy said. “But it’s also trying not to overreact to something still early in May.”
For a while on Monday, the Dodgers (24-17) seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough against the equally scuffling Giants (17-24).
They generated 10 hits offensively. They got a solid, though still unspectacular, five-plus inning, three-run start out of embattled phenom pitcher Roki Sasaki .
But then came the seventh, when Vesia –– who had only allowed two runs previously all year –– yielded three-straight singles to load the bases, then issued a walk to Rafael Devers that plated the go-ahead run.
Will Klein replaced him at that point, trying to clean up the mess and limit the damage. Instead, he hung a two-strike, two-out sweeper to Willy Adames , who lined a two-run single to right to break the game open.
“I need to be better,” Vesia said. “This one was on me tonight.”
If only it were that simple.
Right now, there’s plenty of other blame to go around.
The Dodgers have repeatedly insisted their recent slide is something every team endures in a 162-game season.
Slowly but surely, however, bigger concerns continue to arise.
The most pressing one at the moment remains the impotence of their offense. In the last 12 games, the team has scored three runs or fewer nine times, eight of which have been losses.
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Muncy said the club has had “a lot of conversations” behind the scenes searching for a fix. He noted that “the hard thing about when you’re going through a funk like this as a team is, you get in situations (to score) and you want to do something big instead of just keeping it simple.”
That appeared to be the case again Monday, as the Dodgers went 2-for-10 with runners in scoring position –– including a fourth-inning fizzle when they managed just runs from a bases-loaded, no-out opportunity –– and left eight men on base.
“There’s going to be a stretch coming up real soon where everything we touch finds grass, and we’re scoring a whole bunch of runs, and no one’s gonna be talking about (this stretch),” Muncy argued.
For now, however, that’s still not happening. And after Monday’s defeat, the team is now back in second place in the National League West, trailing the San Diego Padres by half a game.
For the first time in a while, Teoscar Hernández .
Entering the night, the veteran slugger was hitting just .196 over his previous 26 games. He hadn’t recorded an extra-base knock since April 21.
Because of that, Roberts dropped him to the No. 8 spot in the batting order, trying to shake things up for the two-time All-Star.
Right on cue, Hernández responded, going 2-for-3 with a third-inning double, plus an impressive sliding catch in left field on the first pitch of the game.
He was one of four players on Monday with two hits, along with Muncy, Freddie Freeman and Will Smith .
“I felt we were going to break out,” Roberts said. “It just didn’t happen. But I still feel encouraged about some things tonight.”
Shohei Ohtani … still.
Despite taking another round of pregame batting practice on the field (already his third time doing so this year), the slugger remained ice cold on Monday, going 0-for-5 to extend a recent 4-for-38 slump over his last 11 games.
Two of Ohtani’s outs came in situational opportunities, rolling over to second base with a runner in scoring position in both the third and sixth innings. Two others were strikeouts on pitches well out of the zone, a “classic example” to Roberts that Ohtani was clearly “trying to swing out of” his struggles.
“Tonight, they clearly weren’t going to give in to him,” Roberts said of Ohtani, who is now batting .233 with a .767 OPS on the season. “And he took the bait.”
The Dodgers and Giants continue this four-game series on Tuesday. Yoshinobu Yamamoto (3-2, 3.09) will face right-hander Adrian Houser (0-4, 6.19 ERA) on the mound.
