Intangibles Pay Off for the Dodgers

All those things the Dodgers love to talk about--cohesion, heart, resiliency--won them a baseball game Saturday. Whether it can get them a pennant remains to be seen.

It’s apparent that the little things are all the Dodgers bring to the table, like Jack coming home with a pocketful of beans.

They magically bounced back from Friday night’s depressing extra-inning loss to San Francisco and beat the Giants, 4-2, Saturday.

On the surface, it wasn’t that impressive.

The Giants didn’t have Barry Bonds in the lineup, out because of a hamstring he hurt the night before. The Dodgers needed their leadoff hitter to drive in three runs on a day the heart of the lineup went one for 11. They came close to wasting a fine effort by Omar Daal, who was the losing pitcher when he left after the seventh inning despite giving up only five hits and two runs.

And yet they emerged victorious, thanks to a three-run rally in the bottom of the eighth. Knowing what they’d been through the night before, when they squandered a 2-1 lead and then wasted an Olympics-frequency triple by Eric Karros in the 11th inning, it ranks among their bigger victories. They took it as a referendum on their season.

“That just shows the character of this team,” center fielder Dave Roberts said.

The Dodgers are in second place in the National League West, a half a game ahead of the Giants.

They’re still here.

You’ve seen just about all their flaws lately. Their bench is thin. They don’t have a pitcher who gives the team the sense they’ve got this game won every time he steps on the mound.

And when Shawn Green’s bat is cold, the way it is now and the way it was in the first month of the season, they have no real other threats in the lineup. As Jeff Reboulet said, “Fundamentals are good, but you’ve got to have those big hits.”

On Saturday, those hits came courtesy of Roberts, who singled home Mark Grudzielanek to tie the score, 1-1, in the fourth inning, then drove in the go-ahead runs with a hit in the eighth. That gave him a grand total of 24 runs batted in this season; then again, that’s not his job hitting in the leadoff spot.

“That’s not my forte by any stretch of the imagination, but that’s what it called for today,” Roberts said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get us over the top.”

His jersey stood as proof. It had dirt stains all over it, and the script Dodgers lettering looked worn and frayed.

But there was some incriminating evidence about the Dodger bats in Roberts’ box score line. When the leadoff hitter gets three hits and steals three bases, he shouldn’t have a 0 in the runs category. Paul Lo Duca went one for five in the second spot, Green went 0 for 4 and Eric Karros was 0 for 2 before he took a fastball to the chin in the seventh inning.

Lately, Green is getting something close to Bonds-like treatment from opposing pitchers. I’m surprised they ever bothered to pitch to him in the first half of the season, when he hit 26 home runs, but he might not see another good pitch until spring training next year.

So they got hits from Roberts at the top and six more from the resurgent bottom of the lineup. They got two from Adrian Beltre, two hits and an RBI from Alex Cora, who is their most valuable reserve, and a couple more hits from Grudzielanek, who is 13 for 35 since the All-Star break.

Add it up and the Dodgers scored four runs Saturday after producing a total of three in their previous three games.

After dropping nine of 10, things had gotten so bad that Manager Jim Tracy said Friday’s game was “a tough loss....I’m not going to skirt the issue on that one.” And he said that had the team’s recent slide come in September, it would “begin to be somewhat of a devastating situation.”

But he said the victory Saturday validated all the good things he had talked about.

“I’ve mentioned about the resolve of this team, the fact that they won’t roll over for you,” Tracy said. “They don’t know how to do that.”

Perhaps turning this thing around is really as simple as flipping a switch.

Silence reigned in the clubhouse before the game, before Odalis Perez wondered, “Why are we not playing music? Because we are down?”

So he walked over to the clubhouse stereo, turned it on and the tunes started thumping. A little bit of life returned.

Power 106 played quietly after the game as well. A five-game losing streak was over.

“As long as we keep with the energy and the good at-bats and we can build on this, we’ll be fine,” Roberts said.

On Saturday, the Dodgers regained some of their confidence. It might be their best asset.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.