Ashby Helps L.A. Sink in the West

Late Friday afternoon on the 5 Freeway, 40 miles north of San Diego, a flat tire caused Dodger first baseman Eric Karros, on his way to Qualcomm Stadium, to come to a grinding halt.

How fitting.

With a spare in place, Karros was soon on his way, but the tone of the day had been set.

A few hours later, it was Karros’ Dodgers, needing a win against the lowly San Diego Padres to keep pace with the San Francisco Giants in the National League wild-card race, who came up flat, losing 8-4 to the worst team in the NL West.

The Dodgers fell two games behind San Francisco, 5-1 winners over the Milwaukee Brewers, with eight to play.

Having just come off a tension-filled four-game series against the Giants before packed houses in Dodger Stadium, the Dodgers came into less-than-half-filled Qualcomm, against the nothing-to-lose Padres and played down to the level of the opposition, much to the delight of the crowd of 23,595.

“It wasn’t a matter of a letdown,” Dodger Manager Jim Tracy said. “It had nothing to do with that. There was plenty of life. There was plenty of momentum in our dugout. This is not a crippling defeat. It is a crippling defeat if the Giants win out. I don’t know about the likelihood of that, but if they do, you just tip your cap to them. We have to put this aside and move on. We’ve obviously fallen back a game, but we have to keep on.”

Once starter Andy Ashby got shelled for five runs in the third inning, the air seemed to go out of the Dodgers’ balloon as swiftly as it had gone out of Karros’ tire.

The Dodgers committed two errors, were outhit 14-10 and could have lost by an even wider margin had the Padres not left 10 runners on base.

One play in the fourth inning best illustrated the level of Dodger futility.

With San Diego in front, 5-3, and the bases loaded with Padres with one out, the Dodgers needed a big play to keep their southern neighbors within sight.

And they got it.

For an instant.

San Diego outfielder Gene Kingsale hit a bouncer to first. Karros fielded it, did a 360-degree turn and fired a strike to catcher Paul Lo Duca, who stepped on the plate for the second out.

With Kingsale two-thirds of the way up the first base line, Lo Duca had a clear shot at an inning-ending double play. Instead, he threw the ball over Karros’ head, allowing a run to score.

Ashby had called his last outing--4 1/3 innings against the Colorado Rockies in which he gave up five runs on seven hits--”embarrassing, an absolute joke.”

He wasn’t exactly holding his head up Friday, either, after an even more devastating performance. This time, he gave up six hits and five runs without getting a batter out in the third.

And it wasn’t a case of bad luck or bloop hits or poor fielding. Ashby (9-13) was racked for line drive after line drive, looking more like a batting practice pitcher than a veteran trying to keep his team in a pennant race.

The Dodgers had taken the lead in the top of the inning on a Shawn Green run-scoring grounder.

Then Ashby took the mound. And the Padres took aim.

In his last 20 1/3 innings, Ashby has given up 22 runs and 34 hits.

“We got beat in the third inning tonight,” Tracy said. “That’s all there is to it. Ashby hasn’t had a good start his last three or four times out.”

The Dodgers climbed back into the game in the fourth inning off San Diego starter and winner Brett Tomko (10-10) when Karros hit his 13th home run and Mark Grudzielanek his ninth, both with the bases empty.

But on a night when the Padres would collect six doubles and Vazquez would tie a career high with four hits, that would not prove to be enough.

“I think it would have been a little optimistic to think we would have won the last nine games,” Green said, “but obviously we would have liked to have won the first one. For some reason, they really swing the bats well against us.”

But perhaps Green should be looking inward. Fixing a flat tire is one thing. Fixing a flat team is quite another.