WASHINGTON -- The defending champion Dodgers are still a machine, as they proved in their dominant 8-0 run to open the season. But as they've entered the loss column, they haven't managed to reliably outhit some early season sloppiness.
Shohei Ohtani notched his second three-hit game of the season and finished a double shy of the cycle, but the Dodgers dropped Monday's series opener against the Nationals, 6-4, at Nationals Park.
Ohtani had two chances to get the two-bagger he was looking for in the late innings, but he went down on strikes in the eighth and drew a walk in the ninth.
"My approach really doesn't change," Ohtani said, through interpreter Will Ireton, of hitting with a cycle on the line. "It's to really try to get on base. That fourth at-bat, I should have at least taken a hack and see what happened."
After Ohtani struck out looking in the eighth, his team continued to rally within two runs, prompting the Nationals to call on their closer, Kyle Finnegan, for the final five outs of the ballgame. Finnegan was pitching for the third straight day, and despite allowing an inherited runner to score in the eighth, managed to convert the save and seal the Dodgers' third loss of the season.
Finnegan also denied Ohtani's second Major League cycle.
¡°He¡¯s a pro and he worked his at-bat," Finnegan said. "I was able to sneak back in there, 3-2. At that point, my mindset didn¡¯t change. If I was going to get him out, it was because he was going to chase something out of the zone, and he did his job and took ball four.¡±
Ohtani had been in the midst of what only he could consider a somewhat pedestrian start to the season. Entering Monday, he was hitting 11-for-41 (.268), albeit with a .912 OPS.
"It's hard to kind of say he was struggling, but tonight he was locked in," manager Dave Roberts said. "MacKenzie Gore is one of the really good young left-handed pitchers in the game, and the at-bats Shohei took were pretty exceptional. Even that last at-bat to earn a walk vs. Finnegan and not try to chase a cycle speaks to being a team player and passing the baton."
It was Ohtani who tied the game with a two-run homer, his fourth of the season, in the top of the third. In the previous half-inning, Los Angeles had gotten errors on back-to-back plays by Mookie Betts and Miguel Rojas that allowed Washington to stack a pair of unearned runs against Dustin May.
The error on Betts came when he missed a ball on an in-between hop, and it had initially been ruled a single. Roberts called it a "tough error," but he otherwise didn't deny that his team has not been playing its cleanest baseball of late.
"It just seems like each night, there's some things fundamentally that we're just not playing clean baseball," Roberts said. "Giving teams extra outs or giving up outs on the bases, or whatever it might be. But still, the fight, as we saw tonight, is still there ¡ and it called for their closer to pitch three in a row, do an up-down."
Because L.A.'s three losses have come in the span of the past four games, the miscues have stood out. There has been poor baserunning and sloppy defense, without the big hit to make up for the imperfections.
Even while the Dodgers were still off to an undefeated start to their title defense, Roberts maintained that they still had plenty of room for improvement. The team wasn't necessarily playing that much better at that point in time, but Los Angeles was able to find more ways to win on a night-to-night basis in those early games.
¡°I think we¡¯ve been a little sloppier on defense these past couple games," third baseman Max Muncy said. "I really don¡¯t think we¡¯ve even gotten close to putting it all together. Even with the start that we had, we still weren¡¯t clicking on all cylinders. It¡¯s April. Sometimes, it¡¯s tough to do right out of the gate. That¡¯s why it¡¯s a long season."