LOS ANGELES — On a night the Los Angeles Queens won a championship in the inaugural season of the Women’s Pro Baseball League, the Los Angeles Dodgers beat a King. Four runs with two outs in the second inning off Michael King paced a 7-0 win for the Dodgers over the San Diego Padres in Tuesday night’s series opener at Dodger Stadium.
With the win, the Dodgers are up five games on the Atlanta Braves for the No. 2 seed in the National League playoffs, with five games remaining in the regular season.
The Dodgers’ magic number to clinch a bye into the NLDS is down to just one.
King hadn’t allowed more than three runs in any of his previous nine starts, with a 2.26 ERA during that span, and he retired his first five batters faced on Tuesday. Then with two outs in the second inning, the next six batters reached, breaking open the scoring.
Teoscar Hernández singles for the Dodgers’ first hit, then Josue De Paula singled on an 0-2 pitch before Andy Pages was hit by a pitch in his very first plate appearance back since getting hit by a pitch one month prior, to load the bases. Tommy Edman walked on four pitches for the game’s first run, Mookie Betts only needed five pitches to walk home another run, then Freddie Freeman grounded a single through the infield, and under the legs of a leaping Edman, to score two more.
Betts hit a ground-rule double in the fourth, followed by another RBI single by Freeman for a fifth run against King.
Solo home runs by Edman in the sixth and Will Smith in the seventh off the Padres bullpen padded the scoring.
With Emmet Sheehan optioned on Tuesday and Tarik Skubal on the bereavement list, the Dodgers have only three active pitchers they plan to use as starting pitchers in the postseason at the moment. That means they have 11 relievers, and on a day following an off day and the day before a start by the MLB leader in innings per start, the Dodgers used .. pitchers to cover the nine innings.
Starters Justin Wrobleski and Roki Sasaki — the latter just activated on Tuesday — each pitched only one inning, both scoreless. Sasaki was hitting 100 mph in his first game action in four weeks.
Kyle Hurt was the only Dodgers pitcher to toss more than one inning, taking care of the sixth and seventh.
Jack Dreyer was the first pitcher of Sunday’s game, and the last pitcher on Tuesday.
It’s only the third time in franchise history the Dodgers used eight pitchers in a shutout of no more than nine innings, done also on September 29, 2019 in San Francisco and May 15 this year in Anaheim. For some perspective, when the Dodgers beat the Expos 1-0 Montreal in 22 innings on August 23, 1989 — Rick Dempsey homered, Tommy Lasorda got Expos mascot Youppi ejected — the Dodgers only used five pitchers that day.
Tuesday particulars
Home runs: Tommy Edman (8), Will Smith (10)
WP — Justin Wrobleski (12-5): 1 IP, 1 hit
LP — Michael King (12-10): 4 IP, 6 hits, 5 runs, 2 walks, 5 strikeouts
Up next
Yoshinobu Yamamoto makes the final start of his excellent regular season on Wednesday night (7:10 p.m., SportsNet LA), with left-hander Robbie Ray on the mound for San Diego.
