Dave Roberts has a high bar for his $400 million baseball team.
Sure, the Dodgers entered Friday winners of 13 of their last 17, tied for the best overall record in baseball and leading the National League West by six games.
Sure, they already have one guaranteed All-Star in Shohei Ohtani, and seven other finalists who advanced to the second stage of fan voting that will begin next week.
But, in the eyes of their manager, “I still just don’t believe we’re playing our best baseball,” Roberts said Friday afternoon. “I don’t think we’ve played complete baseball for a stretch.”
On Friday night, that remained the case. Dustin May managed just four innings in a four-run start. The lineup produced only four total hits. Kiké Hernández and Teoscar Hernández made run-scoring defensive blunders in the outfield. And the bullpen danced in and out of trouble down the stretch.
Read more: Why Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman have struggled at the plate lately for the Dodgers
But amid this soft portion of the team’s schedule, flawed performances have often still been enough.
And in Friday’s 5-4 win over the badly slumping Kansas City Royals, that once again proved to be the case.
May gave up a run in the first after Kiké Hernández airmailed a throw to the plate with two outs, negating Ohtani’s leadoff blast (his 29th home run of the season, and eighth to lead off a game).
The Royals added three more in the third after Teoscar Hernández let a hard-hit, but very much catchable, line drive get over his head in right to score one run, and Bobby Witt Jr. added a two-run homer with two outs in the inning.
“Obviously, tonight Dustin wasn’t sharp,” Roberts said. “And we certainly didn’t help him out defensively.”
And yet, the Dodgers (52-31) still wound up with the lead entering the latter innings. Max Muncy continued his two-month-long tear with a two-run homer in the second, giving him 12 long balls and 46 RBIs in his last 42 games.
Shohei Ohtani hits a home run in the first inning against the Royals on Friday. (Charlie Riedel / Associated Press)
Ohtani tied the score with an RBI triple in the fifth, before being driven home on a Mookie Betts single in the next at-bat.
In the fourth, fifth and seventh innings, the Royals (38-44) stranded a runner in scoring position — frustrating missed chances for a team trying to snap a 10-game home losing streak.
Then, in the bottom of the ninth, the game came down to a bases-loaded, one-out opportunity, with struggling rookie prospect Jac Caglianone at the plate.
Caglianone, the sixth overall pick in last year’s draft, swung at a first-pitch slider from Tanner Scott that was up and out of the zone. His ground ball went right to second baseman Tommy Edman, who initiated a game-ending double play that required Freddie Freeman to make a sprawling scoop at first base.
“That was a sweet double play,” said Scott, who has converted eight straight saves this month with a 1.35 earned-run average. “Freddie’s pretty good. He’s got a Gold Glove for a reason. He’s a special player.”
“Incredible,” Muncy added. “I don’t know how he did that one.”
Freeman, of course, has also epitomized the Dodgers’ inconsistent play of late, going 0 for 4 on Friday to lower his batting average over the last 21 games to .152. Betts, too, has been slumping, hitting just .194 over his last 18 games despite his go-ahead single Friday.
“We haven’t gotten everyone to click at the same time,” Muncy said. “But we’ve had enough guys to take over on certain nights, that we’ve been able to kind of roll through it.”
May, meanwhile, has fallen into an extended funk, giving up 15 earned runs in his last 21 innings to raise his season ERA to 4.68.
“I mean, it’s just [crappy] all around,” he said, after yielding six hits and three walks in his 84-pitch outing. “Don’t know what to say.”
Mix in the bad defense, and virtually nonexistent offense from the lineup late in the game (a ninth-inning walk from Muncy was the team’s only baserunner after Betts’ go-ahead single), and the Dodgers found themselves in what’s been a familiar situation of late: grinding through a dogfight against an inferior opponent. Playing the type of sloppy baseball that usually portends a mid-season slump. Yet doing just enough anyway to take sole possession of the best record in the majors.
As summed up by Roberts, who seemed unimpressed with the performance but took consolation in the victory: “We’re finding ways to win baseball games, which is most important.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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