LOS ANGELES — This is not what they paid for.
The Dodgers committed over $740 million to seven free agent pitchers over the past two offseasons. Only two of them – Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tanner Scott – are currently on the active roster. Fourteen pitchers in all are on the Injured List, an egalitarian group that features the old (Kirby Yates) and the young (Roki Sasaki), the homegrown and the imported.
Stitching together a pitching staff from the available parts has been “not fun” – Andrew Friedman’s description for watching his best-laid pitching plans dissolve over the first two months of the season.
The same two-word assessment applied for watching the pitching struggles continue in a 9-5 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks Monday night.
“I mean, yeah it has (been a difficult stretch),” said Mookie Betts who homered twice in the loss. “We haven’t given up. But you go through certain situations like this. It’s just tough to find a way to get back healthy and get our guys back out there. But we’re battling with what we got.”
The loss was the Dodgers’ fourth in a row, their longest losing streak this season, during which their pitchers have given up 32 runs.
It’s not just this (very) long weekend, though. Over their past 15 games (6-9), they have a staff ERA of 5.37 with 27 home runs allowed in the 15 games. For the season, all of the Dodgers’ investments in pitching have produced a 4.41 ERA that ranks 24th in the majors.
“It’s not the staff we thought we’d have this season,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts acknowledged. “But I feel that what we still do, and have done in the past with injuries, we’re not doing. And I say that in the sense of getting ahead of hitters and keeping them in the ballpark.
“Obviously, we’re banged up a little bit on the pitching side of things. I think the offense is going well, but with that, we still got to make sure our defense is tight enough to give the pitchers the best chance to have success when they do get that opportunity.”
In Plan A, Jack Dreyer and Landon Knack would have been bit players on the margins of the Dodgers’ pitching staff. But they were sent out – Dreyer to open, Knack for bulk – in the series opener against the NL West rival Diamondbacks. It didn’t go well.
The defense let Dreyer down in the first inning. Hyeseong Kim lost a fly ball in the dusky sky for a double that led to two runs. In the second inning, Dreyer’s wild pitch helped set up another run.
“I think that giving extra outs, things like that, for a team right now that just doesn’t strike out a lot of guys – when the ball’s in play, we’ve got to make plays that we need to make, and we also got to get ‘Strike one’ and things like that,” Roberts said.
Tommy Edman returned from his ankle injury on Sunday and played center field with Kim at second base. But Roberts didn’t want to push it and have Edman play center field two days in a row right off the Injured List. So the more inexperienced outfielder, Kim, was in center and Edman at second base Monday.
“He just lost it,” Roberts said of the costly misplay. “I don’t know if it was twilight or what, he just lost it. Unfortunately, that’s something that happened.”
Knack took over in the third inning, and the Diamondbacks teed off. Five of the first six batters he faced reached base and four scored on a pair of two-run home runs by Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Gabriel Moreno. That put the Dodgers down 7-0 before many fans could bite into their first Dodger dog.
“Obviously early on, just execution wasn’t there,” said Knack, who allowed just two more hits over the next four scoreless innings. “I was kind of leaving some pitches over the middle, getting into some deep counts. Just not really executing when we needed to. They took advantage of a couple mistakes. They definitely didn’t miss those.
“Just very frustrating early on to put us kind of in that situation.”
Early deficits have become very familiar recently. The Dodgers have allowed first-inning runs in each of the past five games, 11 runs in all.
“It’s hard to start games behind before you take an at-bat,” Roberts said. “I think the last week we’ve given up runs in the first inning. We got to put up that zero and kind of get a chance to get the game going.”
Brandon Pfaadt didn’t let that happen. He retired the first 10 Dodgers in order and went six innings while reprising some of the themes from his start against the Dodgers in Arizona.
During their four-game series at Chase Field on Mother’s Day weekend, Pfaadt held the Dodgers scoreless into the seventh inning. The Dodgers hit seven balls with exit velocities of 100 mph or higher against Pfaadt. None of them were base hits, either going right at fielders or within the extensive range of the Diamondbacks’ outfielders.
Monday, Pfaadt again gave up plenty of hard contact – eight balls with exit velocities of 100 mph or higher in his six innings – while not getting a single swing-and-miss on any of his 95 pitches.
This time, three of the high-speed hits by the Dodgers did manage to avoid any Diamondbacks gloves. Solo home runs by Betts in the fourth inning and Shohei Ohtani and Betts again in the sixth were the Dodgers’ only hits off of Pfaadt.
It was Ohtani’s 17th home run of the season, the most in the majors, and the first back-to-back home runs by the Dodgers this season.
The Diamondbacks’ third two-run homer of the night, by Geraldo Perdomo off of Matt Sauer in the eighth inning, put the game out of reach, though the Dodgers scored twice in the bottom of the ninth to close the gap.