Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
Zack Greinke didn’t pitch particularly well against the Angels. Clayton Kershaw, by his lofty standards, didn’t either. Dan Haren did. Baseball is weird, and it hates you.
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Dodgers
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Angels
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7:05 p.m. PT
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Anaheim, Ca.
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2B
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Turner
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SS
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Aybar
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CF
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Puig
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CF
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Trout
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1B
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Gonzalez
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DH
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Pujols
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DH
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Ramirez
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LF
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Hamilton
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RF
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Kemp
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2B
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Kendrick
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LF
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Van Slyke
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2B
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Freese
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3B
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Uribe
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C
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Ianetta
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C
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Ellis
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DH
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Cron
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SS
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Rojas
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RF
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Cowgill
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Tonight, it’s Hyun-jin Ryu‘s turn in the finale of the split four-game set, and he’ll face fellow lefty C.J. Wilson. That’s a thing you say, of course, but since this is in an American League park, Ryu won’t actually face Wilson at all. They might as well be hundreds of miles away considering how often they will be sharing the field at the same time. Again, baseball.
Dee Gordon gets the night off against the lefty. It’s worth noting that he’s actually got a better wRC+ against them (118) than righties this year (108), although in less than a third of the playing time. Either way, Justin Turner has been outstanding, so it makes sense to see him in there.
Not in there, as always, is Andre Ethier, and Pedro Moura talked to him about his new role off the bench:
“It just helps to maybe get a little timing and rhythm back, if you haven’t been in there for a couple days,” Ethier said before the game. “That’s the tough part about being a pinch hitter, coming off the bench. Sometimes the game doesn’t present you with the opportunity to get an at-bat or maybe two every night. Anytime you get a spot start where you can get four or five at-bats, you can really try to feel comfortable again up there.”
Ethier is easily having the worst year of his career this year, by just about every measure; then again, it can’t be easy to adjust to playing so rarely. At the very least, he’s been publicly supportive of what the team is doing, though I doubt he feels that way privately.
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Chris Reed, who seemed to rejuvenate his career this year in Double-A, has been promoted to the Triple-A Isotopes, turning around a recent trend of top pitching prospects bypassing Albuquerque. That obviously hasn’t gone so well thus far for Zach Lee, so it will be interesting to see how Reed handles it. I still don’t think we’ll see Reed starting a game in Los Angeles very soon, but either or both could be up for the September roster expansion.
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Josh Beckett‘s locker was cleared out in Anaheim. That sounds bad, but is considerably less meaningful than if the same thing had happened while the Dodgers were at home. Either way, it sounds all but certain that he’ll be on the disabled list by this time tomorrow in order to make room for the newly-acquired Roberto Hernandez, and it’s not a stretch to say that we might never see Beckett wearing Dodger blue again.
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