Washington’s James Wood, right, steals second base in front of Dodgers second baseman Miguel Rojas during the Dodgers’ 6-4 loss Monday. (Nick Wass / Associated Press)
Defensive miscues cost the Dodgers two runs on Monday. Stellar defense from the Washington Nationals prevented two, if not more.
In the Dodgers’ 6-4 loss at Nationals Park to open a three-game series, that proved to be the biggest difference. And, with the team having lost three of their last four games, it reinforced what is fast becoming a disconcerting early-season theme.
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As was the story in this past weekend’s series defeat to the Philadelphia Phillies, when defensive breakdowns and baserunning blunders ended the team’s 8-0 start to the season, the Dodgers continued to struggle with the fundamentals on Monday, digging an early hole from which they never fully recovered — even on a night Shohei Ohtani came up a double short of the cycle.
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With two on and one out in the top of the second, Mookie Betts let a hard-hit one-hopper blaze by him at shortstop, misjudging a low bounce on an error that allowed an unearned run to score.
“I missed it,” Betts said. “Whether it hopped up or stayed down, doesn’t matter.”
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With two outs, Miguel Rojas booted a more routine grounder at second base, resulting in yet another error and unearned run.
“Defensively today, we gave them a lot of chances for them to score some runs,” Rojas said. “So we gotta clean that up.”
The Nationals’ defense, on the other hand, twice took away hits that doused potentially dangerous Dodgers rallies.
In the top of the third, Max Muncy was robbed of extra bases on a diving catch in right field by Alex Call — just three batters before Ohtani whacked a two-run homer that otherwise would have scored three.
In the fifth, Rojas was denied a hit when shortstop Paul DeJong made a diving stop deep in the hole — just two batters before Ohtani laced a triple that would have brought him home, but instead was wasted in a scoreless inning.
Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani hits a triple during the fifth inning Monday against the Nationals. (Nick Wass / Associated Press)
Then, as the Dodgers tried to rally from a 6-4 deficit in the ninth, a leadoff double from Muncy was followed by a diving stop on a Hunter Feduccia ground ball from Nationals second baseman Luis García Jr., likely saving yet another run as the Nationals sewed up a series-opening win.
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“It just seems like each night there’s some things fundamentally that, we’re just not playing clean baseball,” manager Dave Roberts said. “Giving teams extra outs or giving up outs on the bases, or whatever it might be.”
Opposing teams’ defense, of course, is out of the Dodgers’ control.
But their own repeated mistakes have emerged as a growing source of frustration in this campaign’s opening weeks.
The Dodgers (9-3) have committed seven errors, all within the last six games. They have yielded 10 unearned runs, most in the majors. They have even struggled to slow the running game, giving up steals on all 12 attempts by their opponents so far, including three to the Nationals (4-6) on Monday.
“We need to clean some things up on all sides of the ball,” Muncy said. “We know we’re better than what we’ve been playing.”
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“We expect the best out of us every single day, and it’s supposed to be good every single day,” Rojas added. “But I mean, it happens. We have to keep working on it … We gotta pay attention to details a little bit more.”
Some of this was to be expected. Betts is still reacclimating to shortstop after his three-month cameo there last year. A primary outfield alignment of Michael Conforto, Teoscar Hernández and Andy Pages (who got a day off Monday amid his season-opening slump, even with left-handed MacKenzie Gore on the mound) is not exactly a full-proof defensive unit.
And generally, this year’s Dodgers’ lineup was built with offense as the primary consideration; helping them rank top-five in scoring, and second in home runs, even though they’ve been without Freddie Freeman (who remains on the injured list with an ankle injury) for all but three games.
But on Monday, their bats couldn’t bail them out.
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The Dodgers (9-3) managed just two runs over six innings against Gore, who racked up seven strikeouts while yielding five hits. They scored twice in the eighth, but stranded the potential tying runs when Kiké Hernández struck out to end the inning. Then, in the ninth, they couldn’t do anything with Muncy’s leadoff double, even with Nationals closer Kyle Finnegan going for a five-out save on his third-straight day of pitching.
To make matters worse, their best moment of defensive excellence — when center fielder Tommy Edman threw out a runner at home in the seventh — came in an inning the Nationals (4-6) scored three other times off relievers Anthony Banda and Matt Sauer.
“If you lose a couple games and you don’t play clean baseball, you look back at a game and you say, ‘We could have done this, or that might have changed the outcome,’” Roberts said. “There’s still some good things that happened tonight. … But yeah, I just think in totality, the bar, the standard, is pretty high for our club. And I know they feel the same.”
It all overshadowed Ohtani’s monstrous night at the plate, which included an infield single in the first, his two-run blast to the right-field bullpen in the third, the fifth-inning triple that hit off the top of the wall in center, plus a walk in the ninth one at-bat before Betts grounded out to end the game.
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It also left starting pitcher Dustin May with a tough-luck loss, having given up just one earned run in a six-inning outing that — after some early command issues led to three walks that compounded the defensive miscues — saw him retire the last 11 batters he faced.
“We just gotta continue to come every single day and clean those things up,” Rojas said. “Hopefully we can start getting better overall, and not just waiting for the miracle to happen in the last couple innings. I think we’re gonna clean it up a little bit more defensively and on the bases, and we all know that.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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