First the Dodgers made history. Then they had to make sure it wasn’t lost.
Despite consecutive home runs by Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman early Saturday night — the first time in Dodgers history the team has gone deep in its first three at-bats of a game — the Dodgers had to scrape out an 8-6 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field to win the first two games of this weekend’s crucial division series and move six games ahead in the National League West.
“Tonight, man, a lot going on, a lot to unpack,” manager Dave Roberts said on a night when he had just three available relievers and used all four position players on his bench. “A lot of grit, a lot of fighting spirit, from both teams. Those guys gave us everything we could.”
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The Dodgers, however, were able to absorb all the offense and survive a game in which they had only three relievers and blew three leads to take their largest division lead in more than a month.
“Winning games like this at the end of the day is just preparation for what we’re going to face in the playoffs,” shortstop Miguel Rojas said. “Hopefully we can clinch the division in September. But at the same time, I want this team to go into these games. That way, we know how to win these games by one point, close games… That’s really important for us to have.”
Saturday was certainly not a masterpiece.
The evening began on a high note, as the Dodgers’ top three hitters squared off in a feat never seen before in the club’s 141-year history.
Ohtani hit his 44th home run of the season straight to center field, continuing his quest for the first 50-homer, 50-steal season in MLB history.
Two pitches later, Betts hit the ball to left, his 14th of the year and his fourth since returning from a broken hand earlier this month.
Freeman completed the historic trifecta with a line drive to right field.
“You’re at a high,” Roberts said of the sequence. “You feel good.”
But then the tensions that characterized the unexpectedly exciting battle in the NL West this year immediately returned.
The Diamondbacks scored four times in the top of the game, taking advantage of poor Dodgers defense on a home run by Corbin Carroll (Kevin Kiermaier misjudged a bounce off the center field wall and had no one to back him up as the ball rebounded to the infield) and a two-run double by Lourdes Gurriel Jr. (which passed Teoscar Hernández in left).
The Dodgers (82-54) responded with two runs in the second inning, but saw the Diamondbacks (76-60) tie the score with a homerun by Gurriel Jr. in the third inning.
The Dodgers led by one run again in the fifth inning, thanks to an RBI single by Max Muncy, but this was erased in the seventh inning by a small-ball from Arizona.
“It’s just the guys’ fight,” Roberts said, “to give up the lead, not give up and keep fighting.”
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The Dodgers finally took the lead in the ninth inning. After singles by Will Smith and Gavin Lux, and a sacrifice bunt by Kiké Hernández, key trade deadline acquisition Tommy Edman singled to right field to drive in two go-ahead runs.
“It was awesome,” said Edman, who came on as a pinch-hitter for Kiermaier in the sixth inning. “The first big hit I’ve had with this team.”
Until then, the Dodgers had been teetering on the brink of collapse.
A night after Clayton Kershaw’s toe injury forced the already overtaxed bullpen to pitch eight innings in a dramatic 10-9 victory, the Dodgers were down to three relievers: Evan Phillips, the only reliever not used Friday, and Ben Casparius and Brent Honeywell Jr., minor league call-ups who arrived Saturday to give the bullpen some warm-up players to rely on.
The Dodgers hoped to get length out of rookie starter Gavin Stone, but after five stressful innings and 84 pitches, Roberts ruled “he was tapped out” early in the sixth.
Any hopes of a winning offense were dashed by squandered scoring opportunities in the seventh inning (when the Dodgers left the bases loaded) and the eighth (when Edman was eliminated for an overly aggressive play on the bases).
Still, Honeywell surrendered just one run in two innings. Casparius, the club’s 2021 fifth-round pick, pitched a scoreless eighth inning that ultimately earned the win in his MLB debut.
That set the tone for Phillips to take the mound in the ninth inning, where he continued his recent return to form by retiring the side in order — knowing there were no other relievers Roberts was willing to use behind him.
“The challenge is not to get too excited or too emotional,” said Phillips, who bounced back from a poor July in which he gave up just one earned run in 14 games in August. “I think I was really proud of how I handled those emotions tonight.”
After the win, Phillips reflected on the Dodgers’ current position in the standings, a nine-game lead that had shrunk to just two games a few weeks ago.
“You could say that the last couple of years where we had these bigger division leads and we celebrated early and things like that, it didn’t do us any good in the postseason,” he said. “So battling that kind of adversity at a lot of points throughout the year I think has been good for our guys.”
Roberts echoed that same message, adamant that despite regaining some breathing room atop the division (the San Diego Padres, who are tied for second place with Arizona, also lost on Saturday), the Dodgers will need the intensity they’ve shown the past two nights to sustain themselves the rest of the season.
“It brings out the best in us,” Roberts said. “I think there’s definitely some things on the mic that we have to clean up. A little bit of defense. There was a baserunning play in there. But overall, the way we’re competing and we’re winning pitches — the battle, that’s fun to watch.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
