SAN FRANCISCO — If the Dodgers thought they could drown their sorrows in McCovey Cove, those sorrows have learned to swim.
Shohei Ohtani’s ‘splash hit’ home run seemed to point the way to a turnaround, but the San Francisco Giants piled an 8-7 defeat onto the Dodgers’ growing stack of woes on Friday night.
The loss was the Dodgers’ seventh in a row, their longest losing streak since that inexplicable 11-game detour in September 2017.
Their seven runs and 11 hits were at least building blocks for a moral victory. The offense had been the biggest drag, managing just 10 runs in the first six losses of this skid. But seven runs Friday were the most the Dodgers had scored since an 8-1 win in Colorado on June 25.
So pitching and defense pulled the rug out from under them this time.
Dustin May followed the best start of his comeback season (he was perfect for five innings and pitched into the eighth in the Dodgers’ most recent win on July 3) with one of his worst.
Willy Adames burned him for a solo home run in the second inning, but May really lost his way in the fourth and fifth.
He walked the first two batters in the fourth inning and both scored on Jung Hoo Lee’s two-run triple over Teoscar Hernandez’s head in right-center field. Not running well in his first game back after missing four with a foot contusion – or since returning from a May groin muscle injury – Hernandez couldn’t get to the deepest part of Oracle Park’s challenging outfield to catch up with Lee’s drive.
May’s command continued to desert him in the fifth. Dominic Smith started it with a home run and the Giants batted around, chasing May from the game after two more walks. Anthony Banda couldn’t stop the bleeding. He gave up a two-run triple to Adames and an RBI single to Lee when Banda stumbled off the mound and was late covering first base on a bouncer to Freddie Freeman.
The five-run inning seemed to put the game out of reach of a Dodgers’ offense that needed four previous games to score that much.
All they managed through the first five innings against Giants ace Logan Webb was Ohtani’s two-run drive into the drink in the third inning. Ohtani’s National League-leading 32nd homer of the season was the Dodgers’ eighth splash hit in the history of Oracle Park (and all of its prior aliases), the first since Max Muncy hit one into the ocean in May 2021 – and the first by a Japanese player in the stadium’s history.
Down 8-2, injury seemed to partner with insult when Mookie Betts was hit in the leg by a pitch from Webb to start the sixth inning. Betts went down in pain near home plate before limping to first base.
Betts came back to life with the Dodgers’ offense, going to third on a double by Will Smith. Both scored on a double by Hernandez (his first extra-base hit since June 26) and Michael Conforto made it an embarrassment of offensive riches with a two-run home run.
An inning later, Betts was running well again, going to third when Lee misplayed his double to the wall in left-center. Smith drove him home with a two-out single to make it a one-run game.
Hyeseong Kim doubled with two outs in the eighth inning (his third hit of the game), putting the tying run in scoring position with two outs. He was stranded there.
Betts singled with one out in the ninth and pinch-runner Esteury Ruiz stole second base, putting the tying run in scoring position again. But Smith bounced into a game-ending double play.
The one-run decision was the 54th time since 2015 that the slimmest margin separated the two rivals in a game.
More to come on this story.
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