LOS ANGELES — The World Series pitching hero was on the mound and the back-to-back National League MVP hit a home run, yet the Dodgers still were unable to solve the San Francisco Giants.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto was tagged for a season-high five runs in 6⅓ innings. Shohei Ohtani hit just his second home run in 23 games with a trip to the plate and yet the Dodgers still saw their losing streak reach four games after a 6-2 loss to the Giants.
The longtime rivals have played five times this season and the Giants have won four of them. Yamamoto has taken the loss in two of the four defeats, giving up a combined eight runs.
It was the Giants’ Eric Haase who haunted Yamamoto this time. Haase became just the fourth Giants catcher to hit multiple home runs in the same game. Harrison Bader also hit a home run off Yamamoto, who had allowed five home runs over his first seven starts and never more than one in an outing.
Mookie Betts returned this week and yet the Dodgers’ offense remains disjointed. They have scored two runs or less in eight of their last nine losses going back to just April 28. The one defeat when they scored more was Monday’s three-run effort.
“Certainly, with hitting, it’s hard,” Manager Dave Roberts said before the game. “You don’t want to hear that panic word when guys aren’t hitting, but I do think that there’s a standard on expectations. And I don’t think that status quo, and ho-hum is the way to go, either.
“So I think that for me, just feeling like our guys understand that, that we do need to get better and we are not performing up to our expectations.”
Understanding the need for a higher sense of urgency is one thing. Doing it is another, even for a club that has proven offensive performers like Betts, Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith, Max Muncy and Kyle Tucker.
The Dodgers appeared on track when they loaded the bases four batters into the game on singles from Ohtani and Freeman, while Tucker was hit by a pitch. But they scored just once in the inning on a Will Smith sacrifice fly that Giants right fielder Jung Hoo Lee tracked down near the warning track.
The Giants got Haase’s first home run of the game in the second inning before Ohtani matched it in the same frame with a home run to left-center that was his first in 53 plate appearances.
It was all Giants from there. San Francisco took the lead for good in the fifth inning when Bader and Haase hit back-to-back homers.
The Dodgers have the same number of home runs in the first two games of the series as the Giants had in the fifth inning.
San Francisco put the game away in the seventh inning when Drew Gilbert laid down a run-scoring bunt single and Lee hit a two-run double to the wall in right.
The Dodgers made noise in the eighth inning, loading the bases with one out on a Tucker double and walks to Freeman and Smith. But Muncy struck out and Andy Pages flew out to left.
More to come on this story.