Dodgers blow the lead, then their top
Jansen gives up tying homer in ninth, then teams trade angry words after the game.
The crowd rose as “California Love” played on the speakers. Kenley Jansen emerged from the bullpen, the final piece of a seemingly perfect plan.
Manager Dave Roberts, whose Dodgers failed to add a top-end reliever at the trade deadline, called for the most formulaic of orders. Walker Buehler went six scoreless innings. Pedro Baez took the seventh. Adam Kolarek and Joe Kelly handled the eighth.
Jansen was the final variable in the equation, on for the save with the Dodgers ahead of the Arizona Diamondbacks 2-0 in the top of the ninth. He was punished for a misplaced cutter.
Carson Kelly took the closer deep, a game-tying two-run homer that soured a Dodger Stadium crowd already suspicious of the club’s bullpen. The Dodgers’ 3-2 defeat wasn’t sealed until Kelly went deep again against Julio Urias in the 11th inning, and the Dodgers came up short.
After tallying just two hits all night — doubles from Corey Seager and Will Smith during a two-run third in
ning — their typical lategame magic was quelled by reliever Archie Bradley, who worked around a leadoff walk in the 11th and caught a break on an upheld video review of a potential hit-by-pitch against A.J. Pollock.
Tensions ran high at the end. After the video review, former teammates Pollock and Bradley exchanged words. After the final out, the benches cleared and an animated Roberts got into a yelling match with Arizona starting pitcher Robbie Ray.
“They missed it. That’s just a fact,” Roberts said. “When you have the system in place to get it right, and it was clearly wrong, that impacted the game.”
Jansen’s fifth blown save began with a bloop single off the bat of Nick Ahmed. Kelly batted next, fouling off a pair of high cutters to force a seven-pitch at-bat. Catcher Smith appeared to want another cutter low and away, but Jansen left it up. Kelly put it in the right-field seats.
After Kelly homered the second time, depositing a Urias changeup into the seats in right for his first career multi-homer game, a Dodgers offense that produced just two hits over the first 10 innings couldn’t respond.
Buehler took a tough nodecision after posting a stat line that belied the struggle behind it. He threw six scoreless innings, but faced one of his most stressful home starts of the year a week after cruising to a 15-strikeout complete game.
The first signs of trouble showed up in the second inning, when Buehler — who entered the night leading baseball in strikeout-to-walk ratio — walked leadoff hitter David Peralta, hit Jake Lamb, then fired another ball four to Kelly. Ray couldn’t make him pay and struck out to end the frame.
Buehler produced perhaps his best sequence of the evening the next inning. Back-to-back singles led off the frame, putting runners on the corners. Then he pumped nine straight pitches over the plate, producing a line out and pair of punchouts to escape.
His command was spotty, leading to three free passes, matching a season high, and a hit-by-pitch in the ballpark where he hadn’t walked a batter since May 29.
But Buehler defused every situation. On a night he didn’t have his best stuff, he relied on tough mental resolve. Buehler impressed in an entirely different way to lower his ERA to 3.08.
After recording his final out, Buehler toweled sweat from his brow while Roberts shook his hand for a job well done. The back end of the Dodgers’ pitching staff, however, wasn’t so lucky — nullifying all the work that had come before it.