LOS ANGELES — The sun’ll come out tomorrow.
Bet your bottom dollar, the Dodgers will be glad to see it after a 10-day stretch of unseasonably chilly weather at home and all-too-typical Midwest spring sogginess on the road.
The start of Sunday’s game was delayed 36 minutes by the latest round of rain moving through Southern California, making for a Dodger Stadium rarity – rain delays in consecutive games (Saturday’s start was delayed over two hours).
Even sloppier than the weather, though, was the Dodgers pitching. Starter James Paxton and the bullpen walked 14 batters in the game, fueling a 6-3 victory for the San Diego Padres.
“Just bad command tonight. It’s tough to win ballgames when you give guys that many free passes,” Dodgers catcher Will Smith said. “Yeah, not good.”
Four of the Padres’ six runs were scored by runners who reached base on a walk.
The 14 walks by Dodgers pitchers are the most issued in a game since they walked 16 New York Mets on June 29, 1962. It matched a franchise record for the Padres who also drew 14 walks against the Pittsburgh Pirates on August 25, 1979 — in 19 innings.
“It’s hard to win a baseball game when you give up 14 bases by way of walk,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
“You’re sort of trying to thread a needle every inning, and trying to play perfect baseball or make a perfect pitch or have the ball hit at the right person in the right spot and hope it doesn’t find outfield grass. You’re playing with fire. You just can’t play that game.”
While battling the elements over the past fortnight, the Dodgers have gone 4-5, losing series to the Cubs in Chicago and the Padres at home.
“It’s been uncertain. But I will say that no one has used that as an excuse,” Roberts said. “I certainly appreciate the question. I think it is a variable. But we have an opportunity to go out there every night and play good baseball. At times we have and at times we haven’t. For me, there’s only been about three or four games all year that we’ve played a complete baseball game, when you look at all facets.”
Paxton walked a career-high eight but still managed to dodge danger with a pair of double-play ground outs and a replay-assisted caught stealing. The Padres got to him for just one run in the first five innings – 418-foot solo home run by Manny Machado in the top of the fourth.
The Dodgers topped that in the bottom of the inning.
Freddie Freeman led off with a double into the right-field corner off Padres starter Yu Darvish. Will Smith drove him in with an RBI single and Max Muncy followed with a two-run homer to give the Dodgers the lead, 3-1.
That lead disappeared in the sixth inning without a ball leaving the infield.
Paxton walked the first two batters in the inning and was finally pulled by Roberts after throwing 95 pitches, only 50 for strikes.
“I just didn’t really have a feel for anything that I was throwing today,” said Paxton who has walked 14 in 16 innings over three starts this season. “So I was just competing out there, doing the best I could. Just didn’t have a feel for what I was doing.”
Usage limited Roberts’ bullpen options Sunday and he fired one of his few high-leverage bullets early, sending Ryan Brasier in to relieve Paxton in the sixth. But Brasier has not been consistently sharp this season and he made it three consecutive walks to open the inning. That loaded the bases before Luis Campusano bounced into the Padres’ third double play of the game.
A run scored on the play, though. And the tying run scored when Mookie Betts smothered Jackson Merrill’s ground ball on the outfield grass behind second base but couldn’t throw Merrill out at first.
“Fortunately, Gavin Stone last night gave us some breathing room,” Roberts said. “But there was still a handful of guys who weren’t available tonight. So you’ve got to get some uncomfortable matchups. But you still gotta give your defense a chance to make plays. And we didn’t do a good job of that tonight.”
One of those “uncomfortable matchups” proved costly for the Dodgers when Roberts sent J.P. Feyereisen out to face the top of the Padres’ lineup in the seventh inning. Feyereisen retired just one of the five batters he faced, walking two and giving up a three-run double off the center field wall by Jurickson Profar.
“That’s certainly not an ideal run there, given the part of the lineup, the leverage, the inning, whatever the score was,” Roberts said of turning to Feyereisen who was promoted from Triple-A earlier this weekend. “But we couldn’t get out of the sixth inning. And then we had to try to find a way to keep that game at bay. So Fire and Brasier right there. Then you’ve got Joe Kelly left, and you’ve still got two innings to cover, or three innings to cover at that point in time. So you got to figure out a way to make it happen.”
Depleted by the delayed arrivals of Brusdar Graterol (on the 60-day Injured List with a shoulder problem) and Blake Treinen (recovering from a spring rib injury), the Dodgers’ bullpen has not been reliably making good things happen so far this season with an ERA of 4.69, a 1.32 WHIP and 12 home runs allowed in 18 games.
“This was definitely not a good one,” Roberts said of the bullpen. “But I think in totality, you look and there’s been a lot of good things, a lot of innings that they’ve covered.
“It’s hard when you look back at a couple pitches we would like to have back. The walk is something that is tough to watch. But the guys that we have we really like. Their track records speak for themselves. And we just gotta be more consistent.”
Bill Plunkett
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