Slumping Dodgers Still Don’t Know the Score

The San Francisco Giants can check their rearview mirror this morning to find the Dodgers farther away than they appear.

The National League West standings show the Dodgers five games behind the first-place Giants, hardly an insurmountable deficit five weeks before the All-Star break. But if the submissive manner in which the Dodgers completed a nine-game home stand Sunday with a 10-3 loss to the Chicago White Sox is any indication, that deficit could swell as if nourished by Miracle-Gro.

Odalis Perez was hammered for the second time in his last three outings, giving up eight hits and seven runs -- six earned -- in five innings, and the Dodger offense continued to sputter before a sellout crowd of 52,637 at Dodger Stadium.

“Today was just the good old butt-kicking,” said Paul Lo Duca, who extended his career-high hitting streak to 17 games in the second inning on an inside-the-park home run.

White Sox starter Esteban Loaiza proved to be the bully, giving up seven hits and three runs in seven innings as the Dodgers dropped to 10-22 when scoring three runs or fewer.

The Dodgers (34-28) have lost eight of 12 since winning 10 in a row and are now closer to the third-place Colorado Rockies, whom they lead by three games, than the division-leading Giants.

Nevertheless, Dodger Manager Jim Tracy said he likes his team’s position heading into interleague series this week against the lowly Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians.

“Obviously, we’d like to be closer to the Giants than we are,” Tracy said, “but a month or so ago we were 8 1/2 games out. So we’ve made progress, we know there are still some things for us to do offensively, and there’s a little bit less than four months of baseball to be played.”

The Dodgers can take some solace in the fact that they have already shown the ability to catch San Francisco, wiping out an 8 1/2-game deficit in 32 days to draw even with the Giants on May 26 before their most recent slide.

But considering the Dodgers’ inability to score, that’s not a position they would like to be in again. The club averaged 2.8 runs a game on the home stand and could muster only one run in the final seven innings Sunday after home runs by Shawn Green and Lo Duca had staked Perez to a 2-0 lead.

“We keep tipping our caps to their pitchers,” center fielder Dave Roberts said, “but there comes a point where it doesn’t matter who they’re pitching, we have to score some runs.”

Roberts drove in the Dodgers’ third run, on a single up the middle in the fifth, but by then the White Sox had already built a five-run bulge.

Perez started the game on a promising note, retiring the first nine batters before giving up four consecutive singles to open the fourth. Chicago blasted Perez (4-4) for five runs in the fifth, two on Tony Graffanino’s double to the wall in left-center field and two more on Frank Thomas’ home run into the Dodger bullpen in left.

“The first time around, all my pitches were working fine,” Perez said. “After they set everything up, they were waiting for any kind of pitch I threw and they were hitting the ball.”

Lo Duca provided the crowd with a spine-tingling moment when he became the first Dodger to hit an inside-the-park homer since Mitch Webster on June 21, 1994, at San Diego. Tracy had wanted to give Lo Duca, the Dodgers’ hottest hitter, a day off but said he couldn’t afford to considering the lack of production from the rest of the lineup.

Lo Duca hit a pitch down the right-field line, and the ball caromed off the base of the wall in foul territory past an oncoming Magglio Ordonez and into right field. Lo Duca chugged around the bases as Ordonez chased the ball and beat the throw, slapping the plate with his left hand just ahead of the tag from catcher Miguel Olivo.