Dodgers have Clayton Kershaw, and that’s enough against Blue Jays
The Dodgers celebrated their victory with a fish feast. On Thursday, Adrian Gonzalez and Yasiel Puig caught salmon on Lake Ontario. On Saturday, the Dodgers consumed that salmon.
The consuming thought after a month this season: Are the Dodgers better than their .500 record, or is there something fishy going on?
They won Saturday, a 6-2 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays, behind Clayton Kershaw.
The Dodgers are 6-1 when Kershaw starts. They are 9-14 when he does not. The Dodgers do not have a winning record with any of their other four starters.
Kershaw had a bad day, by his stratospheric standards. He struggled to command his fastball. He said his sliders moved so little that the Blue Jays might have thought they were changeups. The talented Toronto hitters fouled off plenty of balls and ran up his pitch count.
This was what his bad day looked like by the numbers: seven innings, two runs, no walks, 10 strikeouts. For the first time in his career, he has four consecutive games with at least 10 strikeouts. He has 34 strikeouts since his last walk. These season totals are almost cartoonish: three walks, 64 strikeouts.
“We get spoiled with what he can do,” Manager Dave Roberts said.
What Kershaw can do, and what makes him so special, is that he can dominate on a day he is not at his best. None of the Dodgers’ other four starters has been great enough on his own, or great enough to overcome the inconsistency of the team.
That is not an indictment of the other starters. There is only one Kershaw.
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But, for a team with World Series aspirations, is this all there is?
“Once you get one facet of the game going, the other facet goes, and it all kind of clicks at once,” Kershaw said.
“I think we’ve had different facets going at different times. That causes a .500 record.”
The Dodgers rank in the middle of the National League pack in runs scored, next-to-last in home runs. Their bullpen has lost six games, more than any NL team except the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds.
On Saturday, Joc Pederson hit his team-high fifth home run. Justin Turner hit his first.
Corey Seager had two hits, matching his total over his 16 previous at-bats. Gonzalez drove in two runs, his first multi-RBI game since April 22. The Dodgers had four runs by the third inning.
Pedro Baez, who faced five batters and gave up three runs in his previous outing, pitched a perfect eighth inning. Closer Kenley Jansen, who had faced one batter in the previous week, worked a scoreless ninth with a four-run lead . It was a non-save situation, but better to use Jansen to prevent a big inning than to rush him in to try to interrupt one.
“Today was a good formula,” Kershaw said. “That’s kind of a typical good game for us.
“This is what it should look like. We just need to start repeating this performance.”
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That can be difficult to do when players do not get the chance to play every day. The Dodgers generally use platoons at catcher, second base, left field and center field.
After the game, Roberts met in his office with President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman, General Manager Farhan Zaidi and Vice President Alex Anthopoulos. In his subsequent meeting with the media, Roberts emphasized that the platoons might not show their full value until late summer, when the Dodgers’ position players should be fresher than rival players who have competed every day.
“I think that will show more fruit come October, and September,” Roberts said.
The Dodgers, after all, count October on their schedule.
Follow Bill Shaikin on Twitter: @BillShaikin
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