Slumping Dodgers lose again to the lowly Pirates

PITTSBURGH — It was a pivotal second, in a pivotal recreation, in what’s grow to be a pivotal week for the Dodgers in the National League West standings.

Which, moderately predictably given their lately floundering kind, meant they discovered a new means to mess it all up.

In the top of the second inning on Wednesday evening at PNC Park, the Dodgers appeared to be in optimum place.

Earlier in the day, the second-place San Diego Padres had been swept by the woebegone Baltimore Orioles, opening the door for the Dodgers to prolong their 2½-game lead in the division. And despite trailing by a run in their own showdown against a last-place staff, the Dodgers had the Pittsburgh Pirates on the ropes, loading the bases with no outs for a likelihood to take the lead.

The process, at that level, was simple.

Get the ball in play. Manufacture some early scoring. And, at the very least, set a constructive tone for a evening in which the NL West lead might grow.

“That’s a situation where you get shorter with your swing, use the big part of the field and you’ve got to drive in a run,” supervisor Dave Roberts said.

That method, however, never materialized.

Over the relaxation of an inexplicable 3-0 loss to the Pirates, what occurred next would instead loom large.

First, second-year outfielder Andy Pages got here up, labored another full depend against Pittsburgh starter Braxton Ashcraft … then went down swinging chasing a slider that would’ve been ball 4.

Next, rookie infielder Alex Freeland again ran the depend full, obtained an elevated slider up in the zone to hit … but stored the bat on his shoulder as the umpire rung him up for a called third strike.

A Kiké Hernández flyout would finally end the inning. But it was the first two at-bats that had Roberts fuming afterward.

“You never want to say that one inning kind of win or loses a game,” Roberts said. “But the second inning, bases loaded, nobody out — I just felt that we had two bad at-bats and didn’t come away with anything.”

“That flipped the game,” Roberts later added. “It flipped the momentum.”

Indeed, on a evening the Dodgers (78-61) failed to rating any of their 11 baserunners or document a hit in seven at-bats with males in scoring place, no sequence was more irritating than their second-inning fizzle.

It was the latest epitome of the staff failing to produce in a clutch scenario. Another instance of their roster flunking some basic fundamentals.

“We’ve got to collectively get all of us on board understanding the magnitude of each at-bat, each situation,” Roberts bemoaned from his workplace postgame. “I sound repetitive [about how] it’s got to get better. But I do believe that having the right approach, the right mindset, the right urgency in a particular at-bat lends itself to better results.”

This has been a recurring theme for the Dodgers during the second half of the season; the form of fine-margin miscues that have haunted them during a perplexing 22-29 stretch since July 4.

Sometimes, it’s their big-name superstars that falter. In other instances, it’s youthful contributors like Pages and Freeland who fail to execute when required.

The only fixed: Every time the Dodgers appear to be turning a nook, they discover another means to journey themselves up.

“I do believe that the guys that we have in the room are capable of putting together consistent team at-bats of urgency from the first pitch on,” Roberts said. “But at the end of the day — and I’m sure our players are echoing the same message — we just got to get it done.”

This week’s sequence at PNC Park (the fourth straight the Dodgers have dropped right here over the last 4 years) has exemplified the membership’s maddening current rut in other methods.

One evening, they explode at the plate for seven runs … only for their pitching workers to give up 9 as it did in Tuesday’s loss.

The next, they piece together a first rate pitching effort (even after Shohei Ohtani was scratched from his scheduled start because of an sickness) … only for the offense to squander every single alternative that they had to take control of the contest (and lose catcher Will Smith along the means to a bruised hand he suffered on an errant foul ball, though postgame X-rays got here back unfavorable).

“We haven’t really put it together at all for a while now,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said. “We need to start playing better.”

On Wednesday, the Pirates jumped in entrance in the first inning, when Bryan Reynolds homered in the twelfth pitch of his at-bat off spot starter Emmet Sheehan. Andrew McCutchen doubled the lead in the second, including to the sting of the Dodgers’ squandered bases-loaded alternative with a line-drive home run in the recreation’s very next at-bat.

After that, “we just really couldn’t put anything else together,” Roberts said.

Or, more exactly, they failed to end any other possibilities off.

The Dodgers loaded the bases again with two out in the third, before Alex Call hit a dribbler up the first-base line to retire the facet.

The staff had two runners aboard again in the fifth and seventh, but continued to come up empty each and every time.

“We had guys on, we just didn’t get the hit,” said Freeman, who rolled into a fifth-inning double-play to extinguish that risk. “Frustrating night.”

The only saving grace proper now is that the Padres (who have misplaced 4 in a row while dealing with a string of deflating accidents) haven’t made up ground against them.

“I’m very much aware of that,” Roberts said. “But they’re feeling the same thing we are. We’ve got to control what we can control. And we’re certainly not.”

A different method in Wednesday’s second inning might need modified all that. Instead, it served as another regrettable failure, turning a doubtlessly pivotal likelihood to stretch the division lead into one of the season’s most dispiriting losses.

Smith update

Smith exited Wednesday’s recreation after the second inning, when a foul tip bounced off the grime and hit his proper throwing hand as it was hanging behind his proper thigh.

Because Smith’s X-rays got here back unfavorable, Roberts said the membership was hopeful he might keep away from the injured record. However, given the swelling and soreness he was feeling postgame, the staff was still planning to call up a third catcher on Thursday for more roster insurance coverage.