No Bats, but Candiotti Batty : Baseball: Again, Dodger pitcher gets no support. This night belongs to Phillies’ Tyler Green, who pitches five-hit shutout.

Dodger starter Tom Candiotti looked toward the skies Saturday night, struck out his outstretched palms and posed one little question:

Why?

What did he ever do to the baseball gods to provoke this rotten luck? No matter what he does or how well he pitches, it’s never good enough.

Candiotti, who may spend the night dialing the psychic hot lines searching for answers, once again was left perplexed, watching the Philadelphia Phillies defeat the Dodgers, 3-0, in front of a subdued paid crowd of 37,220 at Dodger Stadium.

“You want to just stand there and scream,” Candiotti said, “but what good will it do except hurt your throat. This stuff can drive you crazy.”

Candiotti (2-5) certainly pitched well enough again to win. He gave up only six hits and two runs in seven innings--a sacrifice fly by Dave Hollins in the first inning and a solo homer by Jim Eisenreich in the seventh.

Yet, it might as well have been a 20-run lead with the way the Dodgers are swinging the bat these days. They extended their scoreless streak to 20 innings, and at game-time today, they will not have scored a run in the last 89 hours.

The last time the Dodgers were shut out in two consecutive games was Aug. 30-31, 1992 at St. Louis.

The Dodgers, who two weeks ago became Tyler Green’s first shutout victim since he last pitched at Wichita State, managed to pull off a beauty of an encore this night.

They became the first team to suffer back-to-back shutouts to the Phillies since May 12-13, 1989, spanning 932 games. The Dodgers were the victim then too.

The pitchers back then were Ken Howell and Larry McWilliams. The pitchers now are Paul Quantrill and Tyler Green.

“Personally, it looked like it was Robin Roberts and Steve Carlton out there,” Candiotti said.

Green, after all, is the same pitcher who never had a shutout in four minor league seasons--spanning 74 games and 59 starts--until facing the Dodgers. The Hardware City Rock Cats and the Portland Sea Dogs gave him tougher times.

The Dodgers have had 64 at-bats against Green in his two starts against them and have yet to produce an extra-base hit, batting .188.

Green (5-4) became the first pitcher to throw consecutive shutouts against the Dodgers since John Smoltz of the Atlanta Braves in 1993, winning 3-0 on April 7 and 2-0 on June 6.

The Dodgers’ greatest accomplishment against Green was producing five baserunners the first two innings.

Mike Piazza and Eric Karros stranded two runners in the first inning, Delino DeShields stranded two in the second, and they simply didn’t have to worry about too many runners the rest of the night.

Let’s see, there was Roberto Kelly’s one-out single in the fourth inning.

Piazza reached base on an error in the sixth.

And Billy Ashley was hit by a pitch in the seventh.

Yep, that was the extent of the Dodgers’ offense.

You know things aren’t going well when Candiotti’s single in the second inning is just one fewer than the combined total of the Dodgers’ No. 1-5 hitters the last two nights.

“What can you do?” Candiotti said. “You keep hoping things will change, and that’s all you can do. You can’t get down on yourself because some things are out of your control.”

Still, when the most productive accomplishment of the day is getting Sandy Koufax to sign your personalized pitching rubber, it’s not exactly the way you care to remember the day.

In fact, the most exciting aspect of the night for Dodger fans was watching highlights of the Dodger glory years in between innings. The fans’ only regret was that they couldn’t show the highlights during the game.

Then again, the Phillie starting rotation is taking the fun away for a lot of teams during their West Coast trip, yielding a 1.19 earned-run average. They’ve pitched through the sixth inning in all eight games, and in the eighth inning in five of the games.

The Phillies (27-14) are going so well these days that switch-hitter Hollins decided to experiment and bat right-handed against Candiotti, a right-handed knuckleballer. Hollins, who had been batting only .189 against right-handers this season, went three for three with a sacrifice fly and had two hits against Candiotti.

It was that kind of night.