Dodgers Diaries

How does the Dodger offense stink? Let me count the ways

The Dodgers are 5th in the NL in hits, but they have more singles than a Canoga Park strip joint.

Lionel Richie has more hits.

The only offensive category in which they lead the league is getting hit by pitches.

TV censors have never flagged them for doing anything offensive.

Chad Billingsley has the fifth-highest OPS on the team.

Catholic schools send people home more often.

Casey Blake hasn’t played since April 24, yet he’s still fourth on the team in runs scored.

James Loney has gone 18 for his last 56 (.320) to RAISE his batting average to .230.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

It’s time to add another entry to the best games of Vicente Padilla’s career .

Wednesday night’s shutout of the Padres may be the best of all. Like the others, he gave up two hits. Unlike the others, Joe Torre actually left him in the game to finish the job. When the Dodgers tallied five times in the bottom of the 8th to put the game out of reach, you could smell Torre wondering whether he should bring in Travis Schlichting or Elmer Dessens to close out the ninth. Instead, he let Nicaragua’s second-greatest pitcher finish his 105-pitch outing and saved the bullpen for Thursday’s finale.

It may all be too little too late for the Dodgers. But there are still 54 games to go. The Dodgers will have to win at least 35 of those games, and probably 40. But if the starting pitchers continue to put on performances like they’ve been doing since the All-Star Break, they have a chance.

Nice to see Andre Ethier wake up with a big game: Two doubles and a homer. With Matt Kemp taking a step back in his development, Furcal hurt, Martin possibly out for the season, Blake struggling, and Manny Ramirez returning who knows when, Ethier will have to carry the team offensively. James Loney will have to help.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Monday night’s game wasn’t lost in the first inning; no game that ends with 15 runs scored and 28 hits is decided that early on. But the Dodgers set the tone for losing by running themselves out of an opportunity to score first.

Matt Kemp and James Loney had singled successively with two outs, and Kemp apparently scored on a third straight hit by Casey Blake. But Loney was thrown out at third before Kemp crossed home plate, negating the run.

Given that Reed Johnson didn't score the tying run against the Angels in the June 23 game where Russell Martin got tagged out at second, you'd think Larry Bowa would have smithed a branding iron that reads "Run Hard All the Way Home" and used it to stamp the backside of every runner rounding third base.

Or maybe he did make such a branding iron, but it rusted from lack of use.

Or maybe Dodger runners keep failing to score on third-out plays because they have to stop and ask directions to home plate.

It looks to me like the players have given up on this season. I know I won’t be spending any money to visit the Stadium unless I see a dramatic turnaround in the next few weeks.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Yeah, yeah, Clayton Kershaw went eight scoreless, threw a gem against the Mets, kept them from scoring for what amounts to almost two straight games. Yeah, yeah, Russell Martin drove in a run so the blogosphere can overlook the fact that the Dodgers haven’t exactly been mashing the ball. Yeah, yeah, Casey Blake made a nice defensive play.

All I want to talk about is Kenley Jansen. Kenly who? The guy who started the season in Single A. The guy who was converted from catcher less than a year ago. The guy who is so new he’s still wearing No. 74 on his uniform. And the guy who has retired the first six batters he’s faced, four by the K. We’re going to be seeing a lot of KKKKKenley signs at Dodger Stadium pretty soon.

It’s still too early to anoint Jansen the next setup man much less the closer who has more grit and manliness than Jonathan Broxton. It’s still too early to ink him to any postseason plans. But the addition of a stud pitcher to a bullpen that sorely needed some fresh arms would be a highlight on any day. On a day where the team won 1-0 and the kid gets his first big league save, it’s a day to remember.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

When players execute and produce proficiently, they make managers look like geniuses. Don Mattingly gets my props for leaving Chad Billingsley in to finish Wednesday night’s 2-0 shutout of the Giants. But there would be equal numbers of people jumping all over him had Billingsley not gotten the last three outs. Maybe not as many as there might have been three weeks ago, when Broxton was a little more reliable. But enough for there to be an argument.

Mattingly was also aided by the fact that it became a 2-0 game, rather than 1-0. In that situation, the textbook move is to call on your closer. From the sight of Hong-Chih Kuo warming up in the pen rather than Broxton, I have to assume that Big Jon was unavailable, which is odd, since he only threw 1/3 of an inning Tuesday, whereas Kuo threw 1.2 innings. Luckily, Billz got three easy outs and the entire pen got a night off in preparation for the series against the Mets.

We can only hope Joe Torre learned something from watching his protégé: Leave the guys in when they’re going great. With the way the bullpen looks right now, the best option is probably a slightly tired Kuroda, Kershaw, Padilla or Billingsley.

Big win for the Dodgers at a time when they really needed one. It was also good to see Casey Blake using a bat for something other than grounding out weakly. If the Dodgers are going to do anything this fall, they’ll need contributions from him and everyone else on the roster.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

What a difference a three-game winning streak makes. Playing back in their own age group, the Dodgers smoked the lowly Giants three times in a row, with good pitching performances all around.

Are the Dodgers good, or the Giants bad? A little of both perhaps. Matt Cain seems able to beat every other team in the National League, but the Dodgers give him fits. Jonathan Sanchez has no-hit stuff some nights, but in Wednesday’s matinee, a team of supersubs (no Ethier, no Manny, no Blake, no Dewitt) found him thoroughly hittable. Oh, and did I mention the Dodgers evaded Tim Lincecum?

Matt Kemp’s return from his Joe Torre-imposed timeout has to hearten everyone. Kemp worked the count to three balls three times before collecting a single, a home run and a walk. Yes, he struck out, but he showed the kind of discipline that will make him a much more dangerous hitter.

I’d still trade him straight up for Cliff Lee, but only if the Dodgers can sign Lee to a long-term deal. Given everything we’ve heard about the team’s finances, that’s not going to happen during Divorce McCourt.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Casey Blake talked his way into a Dodger victory Monday night. With the game tied at 4, thanks to a double error by Kelly Johnson that allowed two runs to score, Blake found his way to third base with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The bearded one who had called out Ted Lilly a few days earlier for not being on the rubber started pretending to steal home. His darting caused D’backs reliever Esmerling Vasquez to step off the rubber, but not before he apparently flinched his left leg.

The balk was so slight that it never should have been called. You hate to see a game decided on something as picayune as this. The point of the balk rule is to prevent the pitcher from deceiving the runnner. Vasquez was not trying to deceive Blake, so there was no reason to call the balk, even if his left leg did flinch a tiny bit as he was moving his right leg off the rubber.

Go back and look at the tape and you'll see Blake and and third base coach Larry Bowa flail their arms in hopes of persuading the umps to call a balk. It worked. The second base umpire didn’t call a balk until after he saw them going crazy, and the third base ump did an "I'm Brian and so's my wife" after he saw everybody else.

Just like you can’t argue balls and strikes, you can’t argue a balk, which is why Arizona manager A. J. Hinch didn’t. The way his team has been playing, it’s just one more way they’ve found to lose a game lately. He probably figured they were going to lose one way or another. At least the balk got everyone home early.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

I’ve been to two Dodger games this year, and the team has lost both of them. But Sunday’s was so much more satisfying than the April 17 9-0 loss to Lincecum and the dreaded Giants. In that game, Charlie Haeger pitched in and out of trouble all afternoon, surrendering 7 runs in 3 innings, and was emblematic of all that plagued the Dodgers’ pitching staff. The defense was lousy, and the Furcal-less, Manny-less, Blake-less offense was inept, mustering just seven singles and a double, and not getting a runner to third base until the ninth inning.

Sunday’s game, but contrast, was more of a near miss. The Tigers jumped out to a 3-0 lead, courtesy of a Miguel Cabrera rocket off starter Hiroki Kuroda. But the Tigers scored in the first inning of the two previous games, only to go silent for the next five or six innings thereafter. And Sunday was no exception. Kuroda shut down the potent Detroit offense through the sixth, and would have pitched into the seventh had his spot not come up with the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the sixth.

Manny Ramirez, hitting for Kuroda, grounded out weakly, though in his defense, his meager grounder was in the direction of Mannywood, even if it didn’t get out of the infield. In the tall tale of Manny being Manny, they’ll probably omit this deflating moment. That episode too was symbolic of this game. The Dodgers had many chances to win it, but kept coming up short. Mostly, they lost because they kept hitting the ball right at Tigers’ starter Rick Porcello, who will take his black and blue marks as long as they gave him the victory.

Porcello snared a Matt Kemp line drive in the first and turned it into a double play. An inch to the left or right and the ball goes through the middle for a run-scoring single. In the 4th, James Loney hit Porcello with another grounder, but the pitcher fielded it in time to get Kemp at second, and almost turned another double play. If that ball gets by Porcello, a run scores and there’s one out with men on firs and second instead of two gone and runners on the corners.

In the 8th, Ronnie Belliard hit into a double play subbing for Blake DeWitt, who made a nifty play in short right field, and Russell Martin hit into a tough ground out double play to end he game in the ninth. If the team had been scuffling all week, we’d point to this as another example of its ineptitude. But because they’ve been playing so well, I’m happy to chalk it up to the way the ball bounces over a long season.

The other constant in both games has been Garret Anderson starts in left field. Correlation with losing? You be the judge.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

With their second straight victory over the Tigers, and their 16th in the past 20 games, the Dodgers are finally playing the way we all thought they could. Maybe even better than they could. During their nine-game win streak May 9-18), starting pitchers took the victory eight times, the lone exception being Jeff Weaver’s opportune entrance into the May 14 game against San Diego right before Matt Kemp hit a two-run homer.

That masked a mediocre performance by Ramon Ortiz, the fifth starter and lone weak spot in the rotation now that John Ely has solidified his hold on the No. 4 spot. Ely was his usual self again Saturday, mixing pitches and speeds to baffle the Detroit lineup for six-plus innings. His streak of 89 batters without a walk ended in the first inning, when he gave up two runs. He scattered hits over the next five innings without giving up another walk or a run to keep the Dodgers in the game, and the offense was up to the task, scoring their usual six runs.

In Andre Ethier’s absence, the load has been shouldered by a variety of players. Saturday, it was Casey Blake with three hits and a standout defensive play to help Jonathan Broxton preserve the lead, James Loney with two hits, Matt Kemp with his first homer in over a week, and Blake Dewitt with a two-RBI triple. We don’t hear much about Ronnie Belliard taking over at 2B these days, as Dewitt has quietly done a good job. Still no homers, but a .359 OBP is impressive enough from a guy who still hasn’t celebrated his 25th birthday.

With an off day Monday, the Dodgers don’t have to worry about a fifth starter until Saturday, May 29 at Colorado. I’d love to see Carlos Monasterios get another shot. He might not give you six innings, the way the rest of the rotation has been doing of late. But if he can go four or even five, the bullpen has been getting plenty of rest, and should be able to carry things the rest of the way.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

No amount of Andre Ethier offense was going to make up for the Dodger pitching staff’s woes on Saturday. If Ethier had come to the plate 8 times, he probably couldn’t have hit enough homers to mask this ugly loss.

Charlie Haeger couldn’t throw his knuckleball for a strike, and the Giants waited on him to make a mistake, which he did plenty of. He was gone after three innings, trailing 7-0.

The Giants trailed 7-0 after two innings Friday, but managed to rally to come within 10-8 by the time it was all said and done. The Dodgers on Saturday mailed in the rest of the game.

Of course, Tim Lincecum was pitching, and he makes it easy to look like you’re not trying. But lazy and poor defense also came before, during and after the Giants’ offensive outburst. Even Joe Torre seemed to concede this one before it had even started. He rested not only Russell Martin for a day game after a night game, but also Casey Blake, Manny Ramirez and Rafael Furcal. I can’t blame him. Their replacements didn’t do much: Rafael Belliard missed an easy grounder in the first inning and Jamey Carroll, despite getting two hits, made an error in the fourth that opened the door to a big inning. Garret Anderson was involved in one of the weirder fielder’s choice plays I’ve ever seen (as a left fielder, no less), but whiffed twice in an 0-4 night.

Troubling signs the Dodgers have not held an opponent under 4 runs in over a week (Friday’s 7-3 win over Florida). They’ve gone 3-4 in that skein, thanks largely to timely hitting. I don’t hear any more talk about the Dodgers’ average with RISP. For them to win consistently, they’re going to have to pitch better, not hit better.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

In what Dodger fans hope isn’t a harbinger of a long summer, the team looked awful in its road opener against the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates. The offense couldn’t have dialed up a better first inning, scoring two quick runs on a Russell Martin walk, an Andre Ethier double and a Matt Kemp run-scoring single.

But the lead didn’t last long — the Pirates tied it in the bottom half on the first of Garrett Jones’s two home runs. Starter Vicente Padilla calmed down after Jones’s second homer, but lost it completely in the fifth. The bullpen wasn’t much better, as Ramon Ortiz gave up a bases-loaded double, and George Sherrill let the air out of the game after the Dodgers clawed back to 8-5.

As disconcerting as the pitching were some of the mistakes. Russell Martin double-clutched a simple sacrifice bunt and failed to get anybody out (the woeful Pirates did Los Angeles a favor by failing to score with the bases loaded and nobody out); Casey Blake made an unaccustomed error, and Martin made a baserunning mistake by getting doubled off second base on a grounder. None of these boners cost the team any runs, but they indicated a squad that didn’t look ready for the real games to start.

I’m not ready to throw in the towel after one awful game, but I hope it’s not a sign of things to come.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Manny Ramirez says this is his final season in LA.

Thanks for stating the obvious. Sure, you put up sick offensive numbers. Or you did before you were caught using female fertility drugs. We don’t really know what you’re good for in 2010. But even if you had a repeat of 2008, when you could do no wrong, it’s doubtful the Dodgers would sign you for 2011.

You’ll be 39 by that time, and even more in decline than you were in the second half of 2009. Your antics won’t seem that forgivable if you’re hitting like Juan Pierre, or even like Casey Blake. Your defense will become a bigger liability.

More to the point, you and your agent will be demanding the contract that you couldn’t get after the 2008 season. And the Dodgers just don’t spend that kind of money on old guys. They spend that kind of money on broken down pitchers instead.

Thanks for the memories, Manny, but come the end of 2010, we wish you well in your new career as the Yankees' DH.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL