Redemption night — resilient Muncy and Scott are big part of Dodger win
by Cary Osborne
Redemption came in two forms on Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium.
Max Muncy and Tanner Scott.
Muncy, the slugging third baseman who has moved past an early-season power outage, made a critical error in the fifth inning leading to two runs with Clayton Kershaw on the mound.
But with the Dodgers down by a run in the bottom of the ninth inning, Muncy hit a score-tying home run — his second homer of the game.
Scott, the free agent signing who was given the keys to finish off games for the Dodgers, has been in a deep struggle.
He sliced through the meat of the Mets’ lineup with an automatic runner on second base in the 10th inning. Juan Soto, Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo — out, out, out and out to the inning.
That set Freddie Freeman up to walk the Dodgers off with an RBI double in the bottom of the 10th inning.
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The Dodgers, after losing three of their first four games this season against the Mets, got some redemption as a team with a 6–5 win.
“Making mistakes really sucks,” Muncy said. “But when you do it with a guy like Kershaw on the mound, it kind of cuts deep a little bit more. And so to be able to atone for that a little bit felt really huge for me.”
Muncy hit a two-run homer in the Dodgers’ four-run first inning.
But the Mets ended up taking the lead with their two runs in the fifth and carried a 5–4 lead until Muncy’s solo home run off reliever Huascar Brozobán.
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Muncy hit two home runs on Saturday in the Dodgers’ 18–2 win against the New York Yankees. He homered on Sunday. This makes five home runs in his last eight games.
After beginning the season homerless in his first 28 games and with one in his first 39, he now has nine home runs this season.
Beginning with his homer and three RBI against Oakland on May 14, he has eight home runs and 26 RBI over his last 17 games.
His second on Tuesday brought the Dodgers closer to a 20th comeback win this season.
But they needed something different out of Scott.
Scott threw 10 pitches in the 10th — seven sliders. The Mets swung at six of them and missed four.
Coming into Tuesday, Scott had three blown saves and two losses in his previous seven games.
He allowed 12 runs and 13 hits in six innings.
The first-year Dodger was in the same situation on Monday — 10th inning, automatic runner on second base, and he allowed two runs in the Dodgers’ eventual 4–3 loss.
He said his performance of late was costing the team.
His performance on Tuesday boosted the team.
“I think I’ve shown that I’m going to continue to stick with guys and trust them and believe in them,” said manager Dave Roberts. “I think in this particular instance, I think (pitching coaches) Connor McGuiness and Mark Prior did a great job with some things that we kind of cleaned up mechanically, that he really took to — and you saw tonight that the fastball had a lot more life, the slider had swing and miss to it, which we haven’t really seen consistently. So Connor certainly deserves a lot of credit for that.”
Roberts said one constant was another big piece of the win.
Rookie reliever Ben Casparius entered in the fifth inning, taking over for Kershaw. He retired all eight batters he faced over 2 2/3 innings.
Casparius now has a 2.54 ERA this season.
“We don’t win this game tonight without Ben,” Roberts said.
Redemption night — resilient Muncy and Scott are big part of Dodger win was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.