Dodgers Turn on Giants, Not One Another : Baseball: Surge after tussle between Offerman, Karros continues with sweep.

Last week’s confrontation between Dodger first baseman Eric Karros and shortstop Jose Offerman may have triggered the Dodgers’ longest winning streak of the season.

Sunday night, the Dodgers defeated the San Francisco Giants, 3-2, before a paid crowd of 37,758 at Dodger Stadium to win their season-high fifth game in a row and complete a four-game sweep.

In last Tuesday’s 7-0 loss at St. Louis, Karros became upset after Offerman made an error, had a mix-up with second baseman Delino DeShields that resulted in two runs being scored, got thrown out trying to advance to second on a fly ball, and didn’t run out a popup in his final at-bat.

Karros and Offerman nearly came to blows. But the Dodgers, who held a players-only meeting the next day, haven’t lost since.

“What can I say?” San Francisco Manager Dusty Baker said after watching the Giants lose a four-game series to the Dodgers here for the first time since April 21-24, 1980. “I’m not proud to be in the record books, but we’ll see them up there. We’ve got four [games] with them the next time they come to us.”

The Dodgers (30-26) have won eight of their last nine games and have moved from last place into a first-place tie with the Colorado Rockies in the National League West.

“I’m not saying the meeting had anything to do with it or the confrontation the night before, but we’ve been playing good baseball since then,” said Karros, who broke a 1-1 tie when he drove in Offerman with a single in the Dodgers’ two-run third inning.

“With the talent on this team we should have been playing a lot better than we had up to that point but we were a sub-.500 team,” Karros said.

“We’re starting to click, things are working well for us, but we’ve still got a long way to go. To get excited over four or five games and think that we’ve arrived would be a mistake on our part. We’ve got to be consistent and continue to work and play well.”

Tom Candiotti, pitching on only three days’ rest after the Dodgers sent Pedro Astacio to the bullpen, registered 11 strikeouts in eight innings, his most as a Dodger and one shy of his career high.

Reliever Todd Worrell worked a perfect ninth inning to earn his 12th save in 12 opportunities. Worrell, who struck out John Patterson for the final out, has struck out 40 batters in 73 2/3 innings and hasn’t allowed an earned run this season.

“It’s fun to come in there and get the last out, especially on a strikeout,” Worrell said. “I’ve probably dominated through a month or two months, but what’s unusual about this streak is that I’ve never started out this hot before and we’re getting way beyond the starting point.”

Dodger right fielder Raul Mondesi extended his hitting streak to a season-high 13 games, going two for three with a home run and a single.

Mondesi drilled a two-strike pitch from Giant starter William VanLandingham, who recorded a career-high 10 strikeouts, into the left-field bleachers in the second inning to tie it at 1-1. It was the Dodgers’ 12th home run in the last five games.

Mondesi also made two outstanding defensive plays, taking an extra-base hit away from Steve Scarsone in the second inning when he slammed into the right-field wall to make a leaping catch.

With the Dodgers leading by a run in the ninth inning, after VanLandingham had doubled in a run in the sixth, Mondesi made a sensational running catch of a sinking line drive by Darren Lewis for the second out.

“You can’t really say anything more about Raul,” said Dodger catcher Mike Piazza, who went two for three and scored a run.

“I had no idea he was going to catch it. He just came out of nowhere. I thought it was a double all the way.”