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Second win gives reliever a second wind

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Times Staff Writer

When you go more than four years and 194 professional appearances between your first and second major league victories, you’re susceptible to a little teasing.

Brian Falkenborg’s parents often joked about the framed picture of the Dodgers reliever high-fiving catcher Paul Lo Duca that they had given him to commemorate his first victory on May 9, 2004.

“After a while,” Falkenborg said Monday, “my parents started saying that we should have put ‘first and only win’ on the picture.”

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No more. Falkenborg recorded his second big league victory by pitching a scoreless inning Sunday during the Dodgers’ 5-3 triumph over San Francisco.

Falkenborg, who made 155 minor league and 39 major league appearances between the victories, remembers in detail his first big league win, a 14-inning triumph over Pittsburgh in which Olmedo Saenz hit a two-run, pinch-hit home run.

“It was Saenz’s first homer as a Dodger, and I remember they wanted to give him the game ball from the final out,” Falkenborg said. “I said, ‘No, no. He’s hit a lot of homers in the big leagues. It’s my first win. Hand it over.’ ”

Falkenborg, a Newport Beach native who pitched briefly with San Diego in 2005 and St. Louis the last two seasons before rejoining the Dodgers, said wins aren’t the best gauge of his success as a reliever.

“Hopefully, there’s some more out there for me,” he said, “but as long as I get to pitch in games and help this team out and the team continues to win, that’s all that matters.”

Ready to pitch in

Having pitched in fewer games each month this season, Joe Beimel called his irregular workload “definitely weird.” Last season, the reliever set a franchise record for a left-hander with 83 appearances.

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“I’m used to being out there pretty much almost every other day, but it’s not really my decision when I pitch and when I don’t,” said Beimel, who made nine appearances in June and has pitched only twice this month. “It’s one of those things [where] you have to be ready whenever you’re called upon and just kind of roll with it.”

Beimel said Manager Joe Torre was divvying up the workload so that relievers were “coming in in different situations, and that’s just the way it’s going right now.”

Short hops

Although Matt Kemp’s statistics as a leadoff hitter before Monday compared favorably to those of the injured Juan Pierre, Torre described Kemp’s patience batting atop the order as “a mixed bag.” The manager cited one game on last week’s trip in which Kemp reached base in his first two at-bats by working counts, before back-to-back strikeouts. “At times you see the patience there and at other times the anxiousness returns,” Torre said. “Hopefully, the good stuff will outnumber the other stuff.” Before Monday, Kemp was hitting .286 with a .423 on-base percentage in the leadoff spot, an improvement on Pierre’s .256 and .294 figures. . . . In his first start for double-A Jacksonville since being sent back to the minors last week, top prospect Clayton Kershaw gave up four hits and three runs -- two earned -- in six innings during a 4-3 loss to Mobile. Kershaw had four strikeouts and two walks. . . . Jason Schmidt is scheduled to throw about 70 pitches tonight in a rehabilitation assignment for triple-A Las Vegas.

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ben.bolch@latimes.com

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