Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
The Dodgers fell to the Rockies 5-4 on a rainy Thursday night, thus ending the Rockies 11-game slide.
Brett Anderson came into the game generating swings and misses on just 5.6% of strikes thrown compared to a league average of 9.3%, but he managed to whiff eight Rockies tonight. Out of nowhere, he induced 18 swinging strikes out of 58 strikes, resulting in a surprisingly dominating outing. In a rain-shortened effort, he surrendered just five hits and a walk in 5.1 innings.
Unfortunately, one of those hits was a Wilin Rosario solo shot, and since Anderson left with runners on the corners, another run was charged to Anderson when Juan Nicasio took over after the rain delay. However, even if that wasn’t Nicasio’s fault, as the run came home on a Jimmy Rollins error. Speaking of Nicasio, he came in throwing gas at 97-98 mph and struck out four of the five batters he faced, escaping major damage and continuing his streak of looking mighty effective out of the pen.
After a 1-2-3 inning by Chris Hatcher, everything seemed setup perfectly for Yimi Garcia, who was facing the bottom of the Rockies order. But two singles later, and the stage was set for what was eventually a Carlos Gonzalez bomb half way up the pavilion in right field. The second-guessing is that Don Mattingly had J.P. Howell up in the pen and CarGo has been terrible with lefties, but the bottom line is that CarGo has been terrible against everybody so far, and Yimi just needed to not throw a fastball right into his wheelhouse.
For their part, the Dodgers scored in the first and second innings off doubles: a two-run shot over the right fielder’s head by Adrian Gonzalez that scored Rollins and Howie Kendrick, and an opposite field gapper by Anderson (yes, really) that scored Andre Ethier from second. In the fifth, Yasmani Grandal drove in A-Gon with a single just to the left of second base that beat the shift. Unfortunately, there was nothing much else doing, and the Dodgers fell after Scott Van Slyke struck out in the ninth representing the winning run.
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– The game had a rain delay of about an hour and 25 minutes, which at least gave us this picture:
¯_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/TMMck1QHzb
— SportsNet LA (@SportsNetLA) May 15, 2015
– Joc Pederson went 0-for-5 with no strikeouts and no walks, which was a rarity on this young season.
– Yimi was always going to give up homers with his fly ball tendencies, it’s just a matter of when it would happen and how often. Unfortunately, over the last two outings they’ve come with men on base and at basically the worst possible times.
– That previous item is also why Kenley Jansen coming back tomorrow is great news and why despite some fans wondering about his closer spot, it was never in jeopardy for what should’ve been obvious reasons.
