Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
Joe Davis” class=”wp-image-73264″/>Scoring in each of the first four innings on Sunday afternoon, the Dodgers took two of three from the Rangers in Texas with a 7-2 victory and continued to keep Chad’s main objective for this farce of a regular season alive.
It was a pretty quick start for Tony Gonsolin, who only threw 62 pitches across 3 innings while striking out five batters (four swinging) to three walks. After a pair of fairly harmless innings in the 1st and 2nd, Gonsolin allowed a pair of singles and a walk to open the 3rd.
Amazingly the Rangers only snapped Gonsolin’s scoreless innings streak due to a wild pitch. Another walk to reload the bases appeared to keep the Dodgers in trouble, but a pop out and pair of strikeouts ended the threat.
Most impressively, Gonsolin’s capped off the inning with an 11-pitch at-bat against Todd Frazier. After getting behind 0-2, Frazier worked the count full thanks to five foul balls and taking a pair of balls on the edge. Gonsolin finally ended it with a swinging strike three on a slider.
Gonsolin only allowed the three singles, but the three walks came in part because he managed just 36 strikes on his 62 pitches. However, this had to be shared.
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In relief of Gonsolin, Victor Gonzalez continued to roll through batters since debuting on July 31. Working into a second inning for the fourth straight appearance, Gonzalez wrapped up his day with 1 2/3 IP and striking out one.
A pair of singles (with exit velocities of just 84.4 and 83 mph) and a sacrifice fly brought home one run against Gonzalez, his first allowed since his first appearance of the season (and his major-league debut).
From there it was Dylan Floro for an inning, Scott Alexander for 1 1/3 and Dennis Santana in the final 2 IP to close it out without allowing another run.
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As for the offense, it was another set of dongs on a Sunday.
Corey Seager drilled the first off the day, a 427-foot no-doubter (even in this park) off of a Kyle Gibson curveball.
An inning later, Will Smith sent a Gibson sinker 439 feet for a 2-0 lead. As the tweet below mentions, it set the franchise record for homers in a month as well as tying the NL record.
Cody Bellinger then set the record in the third inning as Gibson allowed his third homer in as many innings, this time a two-out, two-run shot immediately after Max Muncy was hit by a pitch that killed another cardboard fan.
Here’s a look at where all 57 homers came from, led by the four men you’d expect. Even with his incredibly rough start, Bellinger reached 10 homers this month with six in the past 11 games.
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As for a few other notes about the offense, Gavin Lux recorded his first two hits of the season. Each moved a man over to third with Mookie Betts cashing them in, first with a single in the 4th and then off of a sacrifice fly in the 5th.
Seager added an RBI single in the 8th to score Smith, his third run of the day, to cap off the scoring.
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Unrelated to the game, but entertaining to me on Twitter was this:
Joe Davis and Orel Hershiser‘s commercial, which apparently I have missed for the past few days, for Dodger Stadium food delivery through Postmates provided plenty of entertainment.
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The Dodgers’ 5- game lead in the NL West remained steady as the Padres handled the Rockies while the lead over the 9th-seed in the NL stands at 9.5 games pending the outcome of the Giants and Diamondbacks.
