That Dodger Lead Is Almost Gone : Baseball: Giants complete sweep, all by one run. Winning run this time scores on a 25-foot single.

Not only are the Dodgers no longer overpowering opponents, they aren’t even intimidating them, as was proved in the seventh inning of a 4-3 loss to the San Francisco Giants Sunday.

Lenny Harris was standing on second base after his run-scoring double had cut the Giants’ lead to 3-2. Will Clark, the Giants’ first baseman who had followed Harris to second, paused before returning to his position.

Clark reached out and smacked Harris on the chest. Twice.

“It wasn’t mean, but it wasn’t like we were friends, either,” Harris said. “He just kind of gave me that stare.”

A couple of innings later Clark was stalking across the infield, shaking a black-gloved fist and bellowing as a Candlestick Park crowd of 53,759 roared their approval of the Giants’ three-game sweep.

“Another war again,” Clark said. “Ain’t nothing different about today than in the other two days.”

Especially because it contained another strange ending, the third head-scratcher in three days for the Dodgers, who lost all three games by one run. This time it came on a two-out, 25-foot single by rookie Darren Lewis in the seventh inning after Eddie Murray dropped the throw from third baseman Mike Sharperson.

With runners on first and third against Kevin Gross and the score 3-3 after the Dodgers’ comeback, Lewis chopped the ball in the grass in front of home plate. Sharperson made a good running grab and throw.

Even though the replay showed that Lewis had beaten the throw, it appeared first base umpire Randy Marsh was preparing to call Lewis out until the ball dropped out of the web of Murray’s glove.

“Can you believe some of the things that have been happening?” Gross asked after the Dodgers were defeated by one run for the sixth time in their last seven losses. “It’s like all of a sudden, everything is going everybody else’s way.”

And now the Dodgers are suddenly faced with something even more unusual.

Within a couple of days, they could be dragged out of first place after residing there for nearly three months. The Atlanta Braves, who are 20-10 since the All-Star break while the Dodgers are 12-19, pulled to within 1 1/2 games Sunday.

Nobody has been that close to the Dodgers since June 6.

“Get us out of here,” Brett Butler said while hurrying to leave his former home park. “Get us home.”

The Dodgers will play 18 of their next 23 games at Dodger Stadium after going 3-7 on this trip and 5-17 in their past 22 road games.

“Hopefully, this is just a case of the road runner and the coyote,” Butler said. “You know, every time the coyote gets right up to the road runner, the road runner goes ‘beep-beep’ and takes off again?

“I think that’s sort of how we are looking at it. We aren’t panicking, we’re saying like, ‘C’mon, we aren’t really still playing this bad, are we?’ ”

There might not be panic, but slowly, there is anger. Despite a bronchitis condition that caused him to cough after every other word, catcher Mike Scioscia criticized his own performance Sunday after failing to advance runners in two key situations.

It was those sort of fundamental errors that cost the Dodgers this game, because they stranded three runners in the last two innings, including two in scoring position.

They also ended two innings when Butler and Juan Samuel were thrown out attempting to steal.

“I stunk today,” Scioscia said. “I had to execute a couple of times, and I didn’t. I just stunk. It is pretty obvious we are not playing championship-caliber baseball right now.”

Scioscia’s first big chance came in the seventh inning, after Harris’ double. He flied to left, leaving Harris at second. A pinch single by Darryl Strawberry, who has a sore back, tied the score.

Other Dodgers were at fault in the eighth, against reliever Jeff Brantley, when Samuel and Daniels hit consecutive singles. Murray, who earlier hit his first home run in 77 at-bats, grounded to first base and Samuel was tagged out between third and home.

In the ninth, Harris led off with a double to left, but Scioscia failed to advance him again by popping out to second base.

“That was the biggest out this season,” said Giant Manager Roger Craig, whose third-place team moved to within six games.

The Dodgers clearly have a problem, but it is definitely not with their starting pitchers, who have recorded a 2.30 earned-run average in the past 18 games.

Orel Hershiser, despite giving up a two-run homer to Will Clark in the first inning, turned in another quality start.

After the Giants scored three in the first inning, he shut them down on one hit in the next five innings, retiring 16 of the final 17 he faced.

The Dodger hitters continue to be the bad guys in this slump. They scored more than one run in an inning only 10 times during the 96-inning trip, indicating a failure to manufacture the sort of runs that won many games for them as they fashioned baseball’s best record in the first half.

“Our problem right now is fundamentals,” Strawberry said. “We aren’t scoring guys from third with less than one out. We aren’t moving runners. We aren’t doing any of the little things.”

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