WEST SACRAMENTO — They can afford it.
The Dodgers were playing with house money after winning seven of the first eight games on this road trip – but not playing with Mookie Betts, who was scratched from the starting lineup with a sore wrist. They busted, losing to the A’s, 7-1, on Wednesday night at Sutter Health Park.
“It’s hard even taking Freddie (Freeman) out after the fifth inning — it doesn’t feel good,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said of having to put less than his team’s best on the field Wednesday.
“But, yeah, you know, it’s part of it, and you do have to take the long view at times. But it doesn’t always feel good in the middle of it.”
The Dodgers were originally scheduled to finish off their visit to the Athletics’ temporary Triple-A home with Shohei Ohtani on the mound. But the Dodgers opted to push back Ohtani’s next start (to Friday), trading a bullpen game for the potential big-picture benefits of extra rest for Ohtani.
The relief relay has not necessarily been a signal for the Dodgers to go into punt formation. Before Wednesday, the Dodgers had won 20 of their 33 bullpen games from the start of the 2022 season (including splitting four during the 2024 postseason).
The Dodgers’ red-hot offense seemed to make it a good bet. They hit .321 as a team with 12 home runs and 56 runs in the first eight games of this trip.
They stopped one game short of the trip’s end. A’s starter J.T. Ginn, who seemed to suck the life out of the Dodgers’ offense in the first three innings.
The Dodgers had seven baserunners in that time against Ginn (the Dodgers’ first-round draft pick in the 2018 draft who went back to college rather than sign with the team). Four of those came on walks against Ginn, who threw 68 pitches in the first three innings, only half of them for strikes.
But Freeman was the only Dodger who touched home plate. He hit a 431-foot solo home run into the berm beyond the right field wall in the third inning (and then got the rest of the night off after the fifth inning).
Ginn transformed himself after that. He didn’t give up another hit after Freeman’s home run (though he did walk three more batters) and got through six innings – not a good bet during the first half of his outing – retiring nine of the last 10 batters he faced.
Promoted from Triple-A Oklahoma City to handle bulk innings on Wednesday, left-hander Charlie Barnes at least did that.
After Jack Dreyer struck out the side in the first inning, Barnes swallowed seven innings. But he gave up seven runs on 12 hits (including home runs to Jonah Heim, Alika Williams and Shea Langeliers) along the way, giving the rest of the Dodgers’ bullpen the night off and bloating the ERA he will leave behind when he returns to OKC.
“It was great to come in and give them length. That was something they needed with today being a bullpen day,” Barnes said, as accommodating to the media as he was to the Dodgers’ relievers. “Obviously the results weren’t what I wanted. I don’t think they were what the team wanted. But I was happy to provide some length.”
Barnes was thanked for his service after the game and given a ticket back to OKC. Right-hander Paul Gervase will join the Dodgers in Los Angeles on Thursday.
“Unfortunately, I’ve had a lot of practice, and it’s not a good conversation,” Roberts said of the move. “But a lot of these guys understand that they are stopgaps right now, and that’s part of having options, so you can kind of go up and down and fill holes when needed. But for him it’s the longest he’s gone, certainly in the big leagues, and so that’s a learning experience and an opportunity that he earned, we gave him, so that’s a positive. But I mean, we still got to be able to cover our downside and add arms and things like that.”
Even with the loss Wednesday, the Dodgers head home with a 12-game lead in the National League West over a San Diego Padres team that has lost five in a row (starting against the Dodgers last weekend). The Dodgers and Padres play a four-game series at Dodger Stadium this weekend, a chance for the Dodgers to all but pull the plug on the division race.
“They’re all big for us. They really are,” Roberts said. “We try to take every series with the same importance, but obviously you know winning that series is the goal.
“I think the takeaway was we played good baseball (on this trip), I thought we pitched really well, we were fundamentally sound, there were a lot of games that the bats came to life, I thought they were a better team at-bats this road trip. Hopefully we can take it into this week.”