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CLEVELAND — It had been a while since the Dodgers’ last stress-free win.
Entering Monday, the team had not only won just three times over its previous nine games — but needed extra innings after blown ninth-inning saves in two of them, and a late-game go-ahead home run from Teoscar Hernández in the other.
Such theatrics underscored the club’s underwhelming play in recent weeks, with manager Dave Roberts bemoaning everything from poor fundamentals, to continued pitching injuries, to a lineup that had most of all gotten back out of sync.
Former Dodgers utilityman Chris Taylor has signed a one-year deal with the Angels and will start in center field against the Yankees on Monday.
“We’ve got to kind of lock in our hitting zone,” Roberts said Monday afternoon, “and continue to take good swings.”
In a 7-2 win over the Cleveland Guardians on Memorial Day, the Dodgers finally did.
While Yoshinobu Yamamoto cruised through a six-inning, two-run start, the club’s lineup awoke from a recent lull that had seen them fail to score more than five runs (excluding extra innings) in each of their last seven games.
Shohei Ohtani provided an early spark, hitting a leadoff home run for the second straight game to take the MLB lead with 19 long balls. Andy Pages added an RBI single in the second inning, before the Dodgers mounted two extended rallies in the fifth and sixth, scoring two runs in each inning.
The bullpen was shakier, with Alex Vesia stranding two runners in the seventh before Tanner Scott — coming off two blown saves in his previous three outings — worked around José Ramírez’s second double of the game in the eighth.
But in the top of the ninth, Will Smith punctuated the night with a home run over the tall left-field wall at Progressive Field to ensure the Dodgers (33-21) got back in the win column.
“It was [nice], just to get a lead and then to add on, and to be able to tack on late,” Roberts said, “to kind of make it not an eventful last couple of innings, to win a game like this.”
As he’s done in almost all of his 11 starts this season, Yamamoto paved the way for a smooth path to victory.
In a win that improved his record to 6-3, the Japanese right-hander yielded just three hits and two walks while striking out seven. He lowered his season earned-run average to 1.97, second-best in the National League.
The Dodgers need closer Tanner Scott to quickly make some adjustments because his recent streak of blown saves are making their pitching woes worse.
“I mean, you could argue he’s been our most valuable player,” Roberts said, accounting for the rash of other injuries that have ravaged the rotation. “Just to be able to log six or seven innings and kind of reset your ‘pen, give us a good chance to win every time he goes out there, has been huge. I feel very confident in calling him the staff ace.”
Yamamoto also made a key play with his glove in the third inning. With two on and no outs, Yamamoto raced off the mound to field a bunt that first baseman Freddie Freeman misread, anticipating Cleveland second baseman Will Wilson to angle the ball up the third-base line. With Freeman out of position, Yamamoto fielded the ball and ran all the way to first himself, lunging to tag Wilson on the foot for a key out in an inning that resulted in only one run.
“It’s nice to have athletic pitchers on the mound,” Freeman joked.
The offense made sure to back up Yamamoto’s contributions, too, riding the momentum from Ohtani’s first-pitch home run to a productive all-around performance against the Guardians (29-24) and their hard-throwing starter, Gavin Williams.
The Dodgers racked up eight hits and eight walks, driving Williams’ pitch count to 109 by the time he exited with two outs in the fifth. Each of the first seven hitters in the lineup recorded an RBI, with Hernández and Max Muncy plating runs in the fifth before Mookie Betts and Freeman hit back-to-back RBI singles in the sixth.
“The last couple weeks, it seems like when we’ve pitched, we didn’t hit [and] when we hit, we didn’t pitch,” Freeman said. “That’s kind of the course of a baseball season. It’s going to happen. So hopefully when you put it all together in a game like today, it can really jump-start us.”
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