It was team picture day at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday, one of those quaint baseball traditions that has endured long past its usefulness.
So the team set up three rows of aluminum risers in shallow center field and the players, wearing impossibly bright white uniforms, filed out of the clubhouse just before 3 p.m., passing up batting practice to pose for the cameras. For a sport that thrives on routine, the afternoon had a unique last-day-of-school vibe.
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“It’s a weird day,’” manager Dave Roberts agreed.
But picture day also serves to bring the end of the season into focus since it usually happens in the final three weeks. And the players who climb those risers are the ones who will decide the team’s postseason fate.
That was especially true for the Dodgers, who rode another splendid pitching performance — this one from Emmet Sheehan — to a 7-2 victory over the Colorado Rockies. The win was the team’s third in a row, one victory short of matching its best streak of the second half.
And that result, combined with San Diego’s loss to Cincinnati, expanded the Dodgers’ lead in the National League West to two games over the second-place Padres with just 17 left to play.
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“It’s getting down to the wire,” Roberts said.
The pitching rotation is certainly in postseason form, posting a 1.41 ERA over the last five games. On Tuesday it was Sheehan’s turn on the mound and he set down the first 15 Rockies in order, becoming the third Dodger starter in four games to take a no-hitter into the sixth inning.
He wound up scattering three hits and a walk over seven innings, striking out nine to earn his fourth victory in five decisions. The win was also Sheehan’s fourth victory in as many appearances against Colorado.
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The hitters? Not so much.
The Dodgers entered Tuesday second to last in the majors with an average of 3.14 runs a game in September. But against Colorado starter Germán Márquez (3-13), whose ERA (6.31) looks more like a mortgage rate, they needed less than four innings to top that number.
Will Smith gave the Dodgers the lead for good in the second, doubling to left in his first at-bat since taking a foul ball off his right hand six days earlier. He took third on a fly out, then scored on a wild pitch.
An inning later Shohei Ohtani walked with two out and Mookie Betts followed with a home run, upping the lead to 3-0 and running his streak of reaching base safely to 15 straight games. Teoscar Hernández’s solo homer on a full-count pitch — his first homer since Aug. 20 — made it 4-0 in the fourth and Ohtani’s bad-hop single past first baseman Michael Toglia scored Andy Pages to made it 5-0 an inning later.
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Márquez’s night was over three batters later.
By then the game had been decided and the focus turned to Sheehan, who needed just 59 pitches to cruise through five perfect innings, striking out five. But the suspense — and the perfect game — ended quickly when Kyle Karros lined Sheehan’s first pitch of the sixth inning over a leaping Max Muncy at third for a single.
Two more singles brought Karros around to score, ending the shutout as well.
Sheehan (6-3) did not come out for the eighth, with Roberts calling on Alex Vesia and Kirby Yates to close out the game. Vesia, pitching for the first time since going on the injury list with an oblique strain last month, threw a perfect eighth, striking out two, while Yates gave up a two-out solo homer to Hunter Goodman, his 30th of the season, in the ninth.
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Eighth-inning solo homers from Freddie Freeman and Hernández accounted for the Dodgers’ final two runs.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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