Dodgers’ pitching hits a blip
It was fun while it lasted.
The Dodgers’ nine-game winning streak, built around a series of surprisingly strong starts and an impressive turnaround by a bullpen that had been battered early in the season, went up in flames Wednesday night.
Torched by the Padres early and often, the Dodgers wasted a chance to grab a share of the NL West lead in a 10-5 loss that brought them back to a sobering reality.
The pitching in the rest of the division has gotten better this season. Theirs has looked good for nine games.
They had held opponents to three runs or fewer in those nine games, enough of a foundation to negate the loss of NL batting leader Andre Ethier, who missed his fourth game after fracturing his right pinkie. But their pitching wasn’t good enough Wednesday at Dodger Stadium to prevent the light-hitting Padres — whose .237 team batting average entering the game ranked 14th in the NL — from pounding out 14 hits, seven for extra bases.
But Manager Joe Torre insisted it was an aberration, not a cause for deep concern.
“We feel good about ourselves. Tonight obviously was one of those days,” Torre said. “We’re swinging the bats well. Tonight we hit. We had a lot of opportunities. We scored five runs.
“But again, our success has been based on how well we’ve pitched, and we didn’t pitch well tonight.”
Starter Ramon Ortiz was excused after 3 1/3 innings and a five-run, six-hit, three-walk, one-balk performance. Reliever Ramon Troncoso faced three batters in the fourth and couldn’t retire any, ending the bullpen’s streak of 15 1/3 consecutive scoreless innings over the previous six games.
After Troncoso was, mercifully, yanked and replaced by Jeff Weaver the official scorer summed up the carnage but omitted Troncoso’s pitch count. No problem. Just ask the folks in right-center field. They had up-close-and-personal looks at two of those pitches, a three-run home run slammed there by Adrian Gonzalez and a solo shot dispatched with equal ease and almost as much distance by the next batter, Chase Headley, giving San Diego an 8-3 lead.
Torre said Ortiz “wasn’t locating. He wasn’t throwing the ball where he wants to. When that happens, the results aren’t usually good. Unfortunately it happened early.”
The Dodgers got a run in the fourth after loading the bases with one out, and they gave the faithful who turned out on a chilly evening reason to rise to their feet in the fifth inning when Manny Ramirez, scratched from the lineup minutes before game time because of a minor foot injury he incurred while stretching, came up as a pinch hitter with runners on first and second.
But Ramirez killed their hopes with a five-pitch strikeout, rung up on a foul tip that drew boos from the remainder of the announced crowd of 40,138.
The Dodgers scored again in the seventh, on Casey Blake’s leadoff home run. And the fact that Ramirez was able to pinch hit suggests he’s not seriously hurt and might not be out of the starting lineup for long. Torre said as much, that Ramirez’s toe was merely sore after striking the table in the trainer’s room. Xavier Paul did a nice job filling in on short notice Wednesday, producing a sacrifice, a run-scoring double and an RBI-groundout in his first three trips to the plate.
But the Dodgers didn’t lose for the lack of Manny. They lost because of a bad night for Ortiz and Troncoso and George Sherrill, who gave up the last two runs. They had lived by their pitching during their winning streak and fell because of it on Wednesday and it will remain the key question for them as this season progresses.
Torre said one loss after nine consecutive wins isn’t cause to panic, and maybe it isn’t. The Dodgers still have a 12-4 record against the NL West and that’s solid. But if they can’t have pitching be their backbone again, they face a summer of futilely chasing the Padres and Giants.
“We’re in a good place,” Torre said. “We feel good about ourselves. We’re playing hard.”
That will matter only if their pitching comes through better than it did on Wednesday.
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