SAN FRANCISCO — For most of the week-long trip to Milwaukee and San Francisco, it looked like the All-Star break couldn’t get here soon enough for the Dodgers.
As it turned out, they actually needed to postpone it a little bit.
Two outs away from reaching the midsummer pause with a two-game winning streak, Tanner Scott gave up a two-run pinch-hit home run to Luis Matos. It was Scott’s seventh blown save this season, second this week, but the Dodgers rebooted the winning streak with three runs in the 11th inning to beat the San Francisco Giants, 5-2, Sunday afternoon.
The Dodgers shut down for four days now, hoping for short-term memory loss after losing seven of their last nine games. Still, they reached the All-Star break in first place in the National League West for the sixth time in the past eight full seasons – with a lead of at least five games for the fifth time in those years. Sunday’s win gave them the best record in the National League at the break for the fourth time in the past eight full seasons.
In a pitchers’ duel between All-Stars who won’t pitch in the game on Tuesday, Yoshinobu Yamamoto got the better of Robbie Ray, holding the San Francisco Giants to three hits in seven scoreless innings.
Erasing the bad taste from his previous start in Milwaukee, where he failed to make it out of the first inning, Yamamoto cruised through seven against the Giants.
He retired 21 of the 26 batters he faced, striking out seven. He walked two, gave up a pair of singles and a double. But only one of those baserunners reached second base safely until Jung Hoo Lee’s two-out double in the seventh. Casey Schmitt singled with one out in the fifth inning and advanced on one of the two ground outs that followed. After Lee’s double, Yamamoto froze Schmitt for a called third strike to end that inning.
Yamamoto’s splitter was his most effective pitch again Sunday, getting six of his 13 swings-and-misses with it and helping to induce eight ground-ball outs.
The Dodgers needed that kind of effort because the offense reached the break slumping. Over the last nine games, they hit .203 as a team while scoring just 24 times (seven of those runs coming in Friday’s loss to the Giants).
Sunday’s meager output featured just single runs in the fourth and fifth innings against Ray.
The left-hander walked Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts to start the fourth inning. Two batters later, Freddie Freeman lashed a double into the right field corner, scoring Ohtani.
In the fifth, Miguel Rojas fouled off a pair of full-count fastballs from Ray, then turned on a slider, sending it into the left-field seats for a solo home run.
Ohtani singled two batters later but that was the last of the Dodgers’ three hits in the first 10 innings. Three more came in the decisive 11th-inning rally, all with two outs. A bloop RBI single by Freeman reclaimed the lead. Another run scored on an infield single by Teoscar Hernandez and Andy Pages added a third consecutive two-out RBI single.
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