Dodgers victorious first time in Houston since tainted Series
HOUSTON » To borrow a metaphor from a baseball movie, the memories were so thick you had to brush them away from your face.
The Houston Astros’ public address announcer hammered home the point, oddly choosing to reference the home team as “2017 World Champions” nearly four years after the fact — not ordinarily part of the pre-game script — just as Mookie Betts was about to step into the batter’s box for the first pitch of an eventual 9-2 Dodgers victory over the Houston Astros on Tuesday night.
The crowd cheered — and a real crowd it was, Minute Maid Park having been thrown open to full
capacity for the occasion. But the substantial number of Dodger fans among the 34,443 made their presence felt as well, booing the reference to that tainted title.
“A couple of guys in the second, third inning — I think it might have been Luxy (Gavin Lux) saying, “It actually feels like a real baseball game,” Justin Turner said of the crowd. “We knew it was gonna be loud. We knew it was gonna be energetic. But it was really cool seeing how well the Dodger fans traveled and how loud they were.”
Clayton Kershaw took the mound at MMP for the first time since Game 5 of that World Series — one of the deepest scars from the postseason wounds Kershaw carried with him when he ran in from the bullpen after Game 6 of last year’s World Series triumph, the most euphoric and relieved man in the world at that moment.
That pivotal night in 2017, he was given multi-run leads twice and couldn’t hold either one – for reasons that might or might not have become evident after MLB’s investigation into the Astros’ sign-stealing, depending on whether you live in the greater Houston area or, well, anywhere else in the baseball universe.
Kershaw exorcised his demons, retiring the first 10 Astros in order and 18 of 20 through six scoreless innings as the Dodgers extended their winning streak to eight games.
“That’s a hard one to answer. I was kind of thinking about it — just like what it felt like being there tonight and pitching again after the World Series in 2017. And I don’t know,” Kershaw said when asked the inevitable questions about his motivation to cleanse the bad taste from his 2017 start in Houston. “I don’t really know how to express it. It did feel like a little more important game. Maybe that’s just because it was a full crowd. That was fun to see tonight, to have a sellout crowd or max capacity again, get to have that energy tonight. The crowd was really, really into it. So that was a lot of fun.
“But — motivation or not it felt good to get the win tonight for sure.”
Kershaw has said before that he doesn’t dwell on past performances. The unique circumstances surrounding the 2017 World Series didn’t change that for him, he said.
“Yeah, I’m still in that camp,” he said Tuesday. “I think there’s nothing you can change about what happened, and so thinking about it and going through details and things like that is probably not worth it. Everybody’s going to handle it differently and this is just how I deal with things. But if I can’t change something I don’t really want to go back and hash it out.
“So I’m not going to. But — no ... I think that’s my answer.”
Dueling former teammate Zack Greinke, Kershaw was fairly brilliant. He allowed just one run on a solo home run by Alex Bregman in the seventh inning and four hits overall while striking out six and pitching into the eighth inning for the first time this season.
Greinke could only maintain his end of the pitcher’s duel for three innings, retiring the first nine Dodgers in order. Walks got him in trouble after that.
He walked Betts to start the fourth inning then hung a 68-mph curveball to Justin Turner. Turner drove the pitch over the wall in rightcenter field for a two-run home run.”
Two innings later, Turner got the Dodgers’ second hit of the game, a two-out single. Greinke lost his way again, walking Max Muncy and Will Smith to load the bases. Chris Taylor got just enough of another slow curveball to drop a 65-mph flare into shallow center field, any harder and it would have carried to the center field, any softer and second baseman Jose Altuve could have caught up to it. It dropped safely for a tworun single that doubled the Dodgers’ lead, giving Kershaw a 4-0 lead at Minute Maid Park ... for the second start in a row here.
It didn’t stay 4-0 for long that night. This time, the Dodgers added one on a runscoring wild pitch in the seventh, absorbed Bregman’s homer and broke the game open with three runs in the eighth inning. They had just one hit in that eighth (a single by Will Smith) but three Astros relievers hit a batter and four in a row, the last three with the bases loaded.
Kershaw got two outs in the eighth, his longest start of the season, before he was replaced by Joe Kelly.