Dodgers’ Tsao gets battered

For three weeks, Dodgers reliever Chin-hui Tsao has been on an incredible run. In his first 10 2/3 innings, he hadn’t given up a run. Before Sunday, he had gone 14 days without allowing a runner.

He wasn’t giving up any deep explanations either, crediting luck and a good defense for his success.

So it was only fitting that when Tsao’s luck finally ran out in spectacular fashion Sunday, he couldn’t explain that either.

“I was trying my best [on] every pitch. But they still hit it,” he said after the Atlanta Braves scored five times in the seventh inning to beat Tsao and the Dodgers, 6-4. “I don’t know. What can I say?”

And he wasn’t the only one at a loss for words.

“They’re always tough when you let one slip away like that at the end,” Manager Grady Little said. “We’ve gotten kind of spoiled here so far this season with the idea of that bullpen just being lights out every time. And tonight it kind of showed we were human out there.

“He was making some good pitches. But it just wasn’t enough.”

Indeed, the Dodgers bullpen, which has the fourth-best earned-run average in baseball, has been so successful this spring that Little has been managing the games backward, reserving the ninth inning for closer Takashi Saito (nine saves in nine chances) and the eighth for setup man Jonathan Broxton (whose seven holds is the third-highest total in the National League). And since being called up from the minors April 18, Tsao has made a strong case to be the seventh-inning guy.

So when Wilson Betemit gave the Dodgers a 4-1 lead with a pinch-hit home run in the seventh inning -- his second pinch homer in 18 hours -- Little felt he was turning the lights out again when he handed the ball to Tsao. In fact, the Dodgers had not lost a game this season in which they led after six innings.

“It was lined up,” Little said. “But things don’t always happen perfectly. And today they didn’t.”

Tsao started poorly, walking pinch-hitter Willie Harris on a 3-and-2 pitch, ending his string of 24 consecutive batters retired. Kelly Johnson followed with a double -- the first one Tsao has given up since April 21 -- and when Edgar Renteria doubled them both home, the Braves became the first team to score on the right-hander in nearly two years.

But things were just getting started and by the time Chad Billingsley finally got the last out, the Braves had sent 10 men to the plate and five of them had scored, with all the runs being charged to Tsao.

“I try not to think too much, just throw,” he said. “It felt the same. Location, movement. Everything was great. It’s just one day, I hope.”

Tsao’s meltdown not only erased a good start by Randy Wolf, who got seven of his first nine outs by strikeout, and a clutch relief effort by Rudy Seanez, who pitched out of a bases-loaded jam by getting the only man he faced to hit into a double play, but it also wasted a memorable major league debut by Andy La Roche, who doubled and scored in his second at-bat to help the Dodgers to a 2-1 lead two innings before Betemit’s homer.

The challenge now for Tsao is to forget and try to start a new streak -- even as he refuses to recognize the old one.

“I don’t see the numbers, I don’t see the record. I don’t see anything,” Tsao, one of the last Dodgers to dress, said in a quiet and nearly empty clubhouse. “I just do my job every day.

“I just have to let [this] game go.”

kevin.baxter@latimes.com