Still nothing doing for Dodgers’ hitters

CINCINNATI -- After watching his team get shut out twice in three days over the weekend, Dodgers Manager Grady Little made what seemed to be a safe prediction.

“No matter where we go or where we play,” he said, “there’s nowhere to go but up.”

Score that one a swing and a miss.

Because rather than slowing, the Dodgers’ free fall actually picked up speed Tuesday with the team stumbling to its fifth consecutive loss and eighth in nine games, this one a lackluster 4-0 decision against the Cincinnati Reds.

The Dodgers have been blanked in three of their last four games, have been shut out in consecutive games for the first time since May 2004 and haven’t scored in their last 19 innings.

“We’ll get through it,” predicted Little, who held a brief closed-door meeting with his team after Tuesday’s game. “But other than that, there’s not a whole lot I can say because I don’t have a lot of good to say. So I’m just not going to say anything.”

Left unsaid, then, is the fact that the Dodgers, a season-high 13 games over .500 three weeks ago, are only four games over this morning at 58-54.

Also left unsaid is the fact that the Dodgers, who led the National League West for all of May, much of June and for 18 of the last 19 days in July, are now tied with Colorado for third place. And they’re not likely to get back to the top if don’t play better than they did Tuesday when pitcher Mark Hendrickson, a career .068 hitter, had their only extra-base hit.

“If we’re going to continue to hit like that, what’s going to have to happen is we’re going to have to ask these pitchers to throw some shutouts and hope for a tie,” Little said.

Even the return of Jeff Kent, who missed a week because of a hamstring injury, and the sweltering conditions at Great American Ball Park, where the 97 degree game-time temperature was the hottest in the stadium’s four-year history, couldn’t thaw out the bats: The Dodgers, who had won nine in a row against the Reds, went 0 for 10 with men in scoring position Tuesday, leaving them with one hit in their last 38 at-bats with runners at second or third.

“We’re not winning ballgames, that’s all,” hitting coach Bill Mueller said. “Everybody knows their role in the lineup and what they have to do. And sometimes things just don’t work out. And right now we’re in a little funk.

“Everybody knows what’s at stake. There’s no mystery about that.”

What apparently is a mystery, however, is how to solve it. In his postgame address to the team, Little criticized the impatient approach his team took against Cincinnati starter Bronson Arroyo (5-12), who threw 31 pitches in the first inning but 38 over the next four combined.

Hendrickson (4-6), meanwhile, who might have deserved a better fate after holding the Reds hitless in four of the last five innings he pitched, is banking on hope and a few lucky breaks.

“Hopefully we can have one or two things go our way just to kind of turn it around, pick up the morale a little bit,” he said. “It’s just one of those things that we need to find a way to win a game, to win the series and see what happens.”

But center fielder Juan Pierre, who had three of the Dodgers’ eight hits yet popped out with runners on first and third in the third inning, said it’s time everyone did a little soul searching.

“You’ve got to look yourself in the mirror,” he said. “You can say whatever you want to say but. . . [you’ve got] to look yourself in the mirror and find a way to get it done individually and also to help the team.

“I set the tone. All I’ve got to do is put the ball in play on the ground [and] we probably score a run there. Just a bad at-bat by me. Not to do my job right there is just unacceptable.”

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kevin.baxter@latimes.com