Dodgers get into a giving mood

If patience is truly a virtue, then there are few major league managers more virtuous than the Dodgers’ Grady Little.

But even he has his limits. So after watching the Dodgers stumble their way through a second consecutive loss to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, this one a 9-4 drubbing Sunday, Little let it be known that he has grown tired of waiting for his team to show up.

“When you start getting deeper into the season, every game starts to mean a little bit more,” he said. “That’s about the point where we are at right now.”

Especially when those games are against the teams you trail in the division race, which is where the Dodgers find themselves since their next seven games are against the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres, beginning tonight in Phoenix.

“It’s not do-or-die, but you want to play well,” said Luis Gonzalez, one of the few Dodgers who played that way over the weekend. “The next two teams we’re playing we’re chasing. And everybody’s bunched up.”

Momentum is what you make of it, though, so everybody in the Dodgers’ quiet clubhouse struggled to dismiss Sunday’s debacle in which their Gold Glove backup catcher let two runs in by dropping one throw and failing to stop another, their stingy bullpen suddenly turned generous, giving up six runs in the span of three outs, and their lackluster lineup made a winless pitcher -- Edwin Jackson, who came in 0-8 with a 7.85 earned-run average -- look like Bob Gibson.

Not exactly the way to prepare for the biggest week of the season.

“It means nothing,” Little said. “Either way you come out of a game, the next day when you take the field, what you did yesterday doesn’t mean a thing. These guys are professionals. They better be able to turn the page on what’s happened and go forward.”

That might involve a slight change of course for a Dodgers team that has lost five of its last eight, is only .500 in June and has spent more time in third place than first place this month after leading the National League West for 44 of the previous 45 days.

The Dodgers seemed headed in the right direction early Sunday, getting two runs and four hits -- one of them a two-run homer by Gonzalez -- against Jackson, a former Dodger, in the first inning. But that was all they got until James Loney’s two-run homer in the ninth. And by then the Devil Rays had the game well in hand.

They got there by breaking a tie in the sixth inning when a sliding Brendan Harris knocked the ball out of Mike Lieberthal’s glove to score the go-ahead run. The Devil Rays added to their lead two batters later when Lieberthal failed to block a wicked Rudy Seanez breaking pitch in the dirt, allowing Ty Wigginton to score from third base.

Tampa Bay then put the game out of reach an inning later, batting around and scoring five times against left-hander Joe Beimel, who didn’t retire a batter.

Not surprisingly, the talk afterward was of Arizona, not Tampa Bay, which the Dodgers seemed only too happy to be leaving.

“We had a couple of weird things happen. But you’ve just got to put them behind you,” Beimel said.

“We’ll put this behind us and move on” said Gonzalez, who added that the Dodgers will get a big boost from Brad Penny’s start tonight. “We know we’ve got a big four-game set there and ... we’ve got our ace going tomorrow, so the confidence level will be there for our ballclub.”

kevin.baxter@latimes.com