LOS ANGELES — It was Game 7 of the 2017 World Series revisited at Dodger Stadium on Sunday and this time, the home team embraced the result.
Sunday’s victory hardly made up for the fateful loss of a championship to the Houston Astros eight years ago. Still, it did finish off a sweep of the rival San Diego Padres as the Dodgers regained their grip on first place in the National League West.
Freddie Freeman and Andy Pages hit first-inning home runs off Padres right-hander Yu Darvish, before Mookie Betts saved the day with a tie-breaking home run in the eighth off right-hander Robert Suarez as the Dodgers earned a 5-4 victory.
A bullpen looking for a hero found one when left-hander Alex Vesia (3-2) recorded the final four outs for the win, striking out Manny Machado swinging to end the game.
“We just played a good brand of baseball this weekend,” Betts said after the Dodgers entered the series on a four-game losing streak while going 10-14 since the All-Star break. “But again, we still got a long way to go.”
Vesia recorded the final out of the eighth inning and when he was told he was done for the day, he asked Manager Dave Roberts for the ninth inning if the offense grabbed the lead. Betts immediately followed with a home run and Roberts took his reliever up on his offer.
“We knew coming into it that this was going to be a great series,” Vesia said. “We play the Padres great every time, they play us great every time. I look forward to the series just because it’s two talented groups. We put together three really good games, and we got, like, 40 more, so we got to keep going.”
Darvish was the Dodgers’ pitcher for Game 7 on Nov. 1, 2017, when the Astros scored twice in the first inning and three more times in the second, including a George Springer home run. The offense never got on track, and the disappointment was only intensified when it was discovered that Houston used underhanded tactics to gain an advantage on opponents that season.
The Dodger Stadium mound proved unkind to Darvish again Sunday in what ended up as a lost weekend for San Diego.
“Well, I mean, we have to play better baseball,” Darvish said through an interpreter. “That’s, you know, I think the bottom line. But they’re a great team, and I think they came into this series with great energy, but we do have to play clean, good baseball.”
The series started with the Padres in first place by a game after winning 14 of their previous 17 games. In a visit to L.A., the Padres had as many losses in three days as they had in the previous 2½ weeks.
For more than 48 hours last week, the Dodgers did not occupy the top spot in the division for the first time since April. When the weekend ended, it was the Dodgers (71-53) with a two-game lead, while a four-game series at MLB-worst Colorado (35-89) awaits.
Next weekend, the rematch takes place in San Diego.
“You gotta win the close games,” Freeman said. “We’ve had our chances to win games by one or two runs, and we just weren’t able to pull them off there in the last week. And we were able to pull them off this week. Got to go to Colorado (this week). It’s a tough place to play. So gotta keep it going, keep our foot on the gas.”
Sunday started much like Saturday, when the Dodgers loaded the bases three batters into the game and then scored three times. This time, Shohei Ohtani singled, Betts walked and after a Will Smith lineout to right, Freeman crushed a three-run home run to right-center.
It was Freeman’s fifth home run in 16 games since July 30. Before that stretch, he had not had a home run over his previous 23 games.
Two batters after Freeman hit his 15th of the season, Pages hit his 20th with a solo shot to left-center. Three Dodgers players now have 20 home runs after Teoscar Hernandez hit the mark Saturday. Ohtani leads the club with 43.
Darvish did not give up a hit after the first inning but lasted just four innings while throwing 82 pitches. He gave up four runs, his most in his last 10 starts against the Dodgers, including playoffs.
The first-inning at-bats, anyway, were more of what Manager Dave Roberts has been looking for as the club sits six weeks away from the start of their title defense in the playoffs.
“Guys are trying to cement their numbers or their seasons or whatever, but now, when you’re in it, you’ve got to win baseball games,” Roberts said. “It comes with more sacrifice. Whether it’s a sacrifice (bunt) here or getting a guy over, a sac fly, shortening up on the bat, which you’ve seen, winning pitches. But I kind of default to that type of play all the time. That’s who I was as a ballplayer. So I see no downside in playing that type of baseball.”
As good as the Dodgers’ offense was early, it struggled after Darvish regained his form. The Padres scored single runs in the third and fifth innings against Glasnow and added a run off of Anthony Banda in the sixth and tied it 4-4 in the eighth against Alexis Diaz.
Vesia and Betts stepped to the forefront from there.
“It’s the dawg, right? We still have that,” Vesia said about the bullpen. “That doesn’t just go away. Every single one of us, we’re leaning on each other. And we know as a group how good we are. The last three games, it’s shown, and that’s from one guy picking up the next. … You get kicked down in this game from time to time, right? We put our heads down and keep going.”