For the third straight year, I was in Los Angeles in early July to see the Dodgers with Sean, Pete, and Lorenzo. Two years ago was a low point in their season. Last year, I went to the game the night before Clayton Kershaw’s 3,000th strikeout. This year I was there to see some interesting Dodger history.
We all knew Shohei Ohtani was one home run away from 300. What I did not know until after the fact was that this was the Dodgers’ 11,110th game as the Los Angeles Dodgers (between the regular season and the postseason). That is noteworthy because the Brooklyn Dodgers played 11,109 games between the regular season and the postseason. The seasons are longer now and there are more postseason games so they still haven’t spent as much time in Los Angeles as they did in Brooklyn, but they have now played more games as the Los Angeles Dodgers than they did as the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Before the game, Sean and I stopped at Philippe’s for French dip sandwiches. Philippe’s is pretty close to the stadium so it is always a good option before a Dodger game. They should have Philippe’s inside the stadium. There are a decent number of food options, but they could use something local like this in the stadium. But I’m not too concerned about the food inside the stadium because if I’m only going to get there for one game a year, I’m getting Dodger Dogs and not worrying about the other options.
As for the game, it was Justin Wrobleski for the Dodgers against Michael Lorenzen for the Rockies. I had just seen the Rockies get pounded a week earlier. I hoped to see that again, but it was not to be. Justin Wrobleski probably doesn’t get enough credit for his performance in the World Series last year. He pitched five scoreless innings in four games (including four scoreless innings in the Dodgers’ last three wins). He did that after not pitching at all in the playoffs before that. This year, he’s been excellent as a starter. He’s 7th in the NL in ERA, tied for 4th in wins, and tied for 3rd in WHIP. He was not originally selected as an all star (he would have been if not for the fact that every team gets an all star and the Dodgers already had five). I figured he would get added as a replacement and that’s what happened. As for this game, he was really good. He allowed one run on six hits and two walks with nine strikeouts in seven innings. He left in position to win. Unfortunately he didn’t get the win.
Shohei Ohtani got rid of any possible suspense by hitting his 300th career home run leading off the bottom of the first. He’s going to break Mookie Betts’s record for most career leadoff home runs (Betts has 32, but Ohtani is now at 27). Only two Dodgers have ever hit 300 home runs with the Dodgers (Duke Snider and Gil Hodges), but Ohtani was the eighth player to hit his 300th career home run with the Dodgers (Snider, Hodges, Gary Sheffield, Adrian Gonzalez, Freddie Freeman, JD Martinez, Mookie Betts, and Ohtani).
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| Shohei Ohtani is about to hit his 300th home run. |
The Dodgers made it 2-0 on a bases loaded walk by Andy Pages in the fifth, but they missed an opportunity to add more that inning. The Rockies scored on a groundout in the sixth, but the Dodgers answered with an RBI single by Alex Freeland in the bottom of the sixth to make it 3-1. The Dodgers brought in World Series hero Will Klein in the eighth inning. He was the most random World Series hero for the Dodgers last year after pitching 15 ⅓ regular season innings and just one inning in the postseason (a very low leverage inning when the Dodgers lost Game 1 by a score of 11-4) before pitching four scoreless innings in Game 3 (he was the only Dodger other than Yamamoto to get a win in the series). He’s been very good for the Dodgers in a bigger role this year, but he was not good on this night. He only got one out and three runs on one hit and one walk (all of the runs were unearned because of an error, but Klein wasn’t good). The first run scored on Miguel Rojas’s error fielding a possible double play ball that could have ended the inning. The worst case scenario should have been runners on the corners with two outs. Instead it was runners on the corners with one out and a run scoring. Although Klein wasn’t good, he could have gotten out of it without any runs scoring if the Dodgers had gotten the double play there. But they didn’t and the Dodgers brought in Jack Dreyer. Jake McCarthy put down a bunt to Max Muncy and Muncy threw to Alex Freeland covering first base on the bunt for the second out. The tying run scored on the bunt and with Muncy fielding the bunt, nobody was covering third so the runner from first just kept going. Alex Freeland made a poor decision to throw it and try to hit Miguel Rojas on the run covering third. Even if Rojas caught it, they probably weren’t getting the out. But Rojas didn’t catch it, the ball went into the dugout and the run scored. So the tying run scored from third and the go ahead run scored from first on a bunt. Miguel Rojas had the biggest hit of the World Series with his game-tying home run in the top of the ninth inning in Game 7. But this wasn’t a good inning for him. It was a really stupid inning. But Will Klein and Miguel Rojas are definitely allowed to have a bad game after what they did for the Dodgers in the World Series last year.
The Dodgers were only down by a run against a bad team so I was hoping they would come back. They didn’t do anything in the eighth. In the ninth inning, they had 8, 9, and 1 coming up. I figured we would get pinch hitters since Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernandez weren’t playing. Dave Roberts let Alex Freeland hit and that worked as he got a single. Then Roberts went to Teoscar Hernandez to pinch hit for Miguel Rojas and Hernandez walked. So it was looking pretty good for the Dodgers with the tying run on second and the go ahead run on first with nobody out and the top of the order coming up. But Shohei Ohtani popped up on the infield and Andy Pages hit a fly ball to right. That brought up Freddie Freeman. The first pitch was called a ball. The Rockies challenged and the call was overturned. The second pitch was called a ball. The Rockies challenged and the call was overturned. Freeman ended up striking out on the sixth pitch of the at bat to end the game. The game didn’t end on a challenge, but it made me think of how lame it would be if a playoff game ended on a challenge or if you thought a playoff game ended and then it didn’t because of a challenge. I have my issues with the ABS strike zone and I would just get rid of it, but that’s not going to happen so I would be fine if they just used it instead of having challenges. Or if they just used it for the ninth inning and extra innings and got rid of challenges after eight innings, that would be better also.
This was my 17th game at Dodger Stadium. The first games I went to there were before the blog in 2011. The Dodgers are 9-8 in the games I’ve been to at Dodger Stadium. So that’s a .529 winning percentage. Apparently their overall winning percentage at Dodger Stadium since the start of 2011 is .635. So they’ve been bad by their standards with me in attendance. But it’s a small sample size and also it’s correlation not causation so I’m definitely not going to conclude that I shouldn’t go to games at Dodger Stadium. The only stadiums where I’ve seen more baseball games are Shea Stadium (my estimate is that I attended around 50 games at Shea Stadium) and Citi Field (I’ve been to 34 games at Citi Field), and maybe the old Yankee Stadium (I’ve been to eight baseball games and four football games at the new stadium and my estimate is that I went to like 13-20 games at the old stadium). I wish I could get to more games at Dodger Stadium. I used to try to get to two games when I would visit, but ticket prices are so crazy now. I had a couple of Dodger Dogs that were very good, but the lack of real mustard was disappointing. To drink I had a 310 Blonde from Santa Monica Brew Works (which Pete and I visited many years ago). Dodger has a couple of areas with a decent craft beer selection. A lot of it is from California, but more like San Diego or northern California. I wanted a more local beer (I can’t be drinking beer from Padres or Giants territory at Dodger Stadium) and the 310 Blonde was very good.
It was a disappointing result, but the Dodgers have won the last two World Series, so whatever. I always like being at Dodger Stadium and it was good seeing Pete and Lorenzo there again. It was 76°, attendance was 47,806 (probably the biggest crowd for a baseball game that I’ll get to this year), and the game took two hours and 30 minutes. Major League Baseball just released their 2027 schedule. Hopefully I’ll get back to Dodger Stadium to see a win next year, but that schedule is very much tentative at this point with a lockout possibly coming. Hopefully Major League Baseball won’t be stupid enough to have a work stoppage, but Rob Manfred is the commissioner so I’m definitely worried. If he has his way, Major League Baseball might come up with a collective bargaining agreement as stupid as the NBA’s. I wonder what the position of the Dodgers’ ownership group is. If I was them, I’d pretty much be on the players’ side. So we’ll see what happens. I hope we get a full 162 game season next year. There’s a chance that this was my last baseball game of the year as I don’t have any solid plans to go to anymore games. But there’s still a lot of summer left so I hope I’ll get to at least a couple more games before school starts.
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