Funny thing about baseball. You usually don’t win the game when the other team scores more than you.
After sweeping the Arizona Diamondbacks to start the season, the Dodgers lost two-of-three to the Cleveland Guardians. Most concerning at the moment is the lack of production from the offense.
In Wednesday’s loss, the top six in the lineup went 1-for-21 with eight strikeouts. And the one hit came from Freddie Freeman who hit a solo home run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Shockingly, that was not enough to mount a comeback when the other team had already scored four runs.
Before Wednesday’s game, a rare thing happened. Shohei Ohtani took batting practice on the field. As Doug Padilla of the OC Register points out, the last time Ohtani took batting practice on the field was Game 3 of the NLCS when he was in a slump, only having gone 2-for-25 in the playoffs to that point. We all know what he did in Game 4 of that series.
So far this season, Ohtani has a slash line of .167/.423/.167. If it weren’t for his pitching prowess, he wouldn’t be much of a show at all. So maybe if we extrapolate from that one occurrence, Ohtani is bound to have a breakout game in the first game of the Washington Nationals series that starts on Friday. That’s how that works, right?
Freeman mentioned that he hoped the off day for the team on Thursday would help the bats get hot again. Coincidentally, the Dodgers will be playing day games while in our nation’s capital, and the weather is expected to be in the high 80’s so something is guaranteed to be hot.
Looking even further ahead, Ohtani’s next pitching start is slated to be in Toronto, where the crowd is sure to be super friendly.
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