LOS ANGELES — This was not part of the plan.
Over the next two days, the Dodgers will go with a ‘bullpen game’ one day and start a pitcher called up from Triple-A on the other – bringing with it the very real possibility of back-to-back bullpen games.
But they had Tyler Glasnow starting on Monday night, coming off his seven scoreless innings and 14 strikeouts in Minnesota last week.
This was not that Glasnow. The right-hander had his worst start of his nascent Dodgers career, allowing six runs on eight hits in five innings as the Washington Nationals beat the Dodgers, 6-4, in the opener of a three-game series.
“Just not a lot of execution,” Glasnow said. “I don’t think any of the pitches were really working, not hitting my spots and falling behind early. If I’m normally throwing kind of one pitch for a strike, I think you’re able to sit on something and stay on the heater, and I think it’s just easier to sell out for one pitch.
“Everything kind of just felt off tonight.”
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts offered one explanation that Glasnow didn’t. Roberts said Glasnow was “under the weather” with a cold/flu bug that seems to have been making the rounds of the Dodgers’ roster since their last days in Arizona this spring.
“But as far as the performance, it just wasn’t there,” Roberts said. “I think that the fastball command wasn’t there. The breaking ball – curveball specifically – (he) didn’t have the feel for it. And then you look at the slider, and the slider was sort of just rolling and it just didn’t have the teeth to it.”
The Dodgers have been fairly toothless as a team over the past week.
After their series loss to the San Diego Padres over the weekend, Roberts bemoaned the fact that “there’s more that’s gone wrong with our club than has gone right” to this point in the season. But “we’re still winning more than we’re losing,” he said.
Not lately.
Monday’s loss was the Dodgers’ fourth in their past five games and sixth in the past 10.
And most of what’s gone wrong has involved the pitching staff, where the Dodgers’ cautious handling of their starters – only once in the first 19 games has a starting pitcher gone on four days of rest – has not been rewarded in the short term.
Going into Monday’s games, the Dodgers starting pitchers had thrown 83⅓ innings, just the 19th most in MLB. Take away their two-game head start in South Korea (where Glasnow went five and Yoshinobu Yamamoto only one) and their ranking drops to 26th.
As a consequence, a bullpen that has had a revolving door of reinforcements has thrown the most innings in MLB (Seoul Series included) and shown cracks from overexposure to the elements.
“I would say kind of overall probably not,” Roberts said when asked after Monday’s loss if the Dodgers were getting enough from their starting pitchers. “Being mindful of early on in the season, building them up and managing the workload is one part of it. But also you’ve got to still be efficient to give me the opportunity to run you out there into the sixth or into the seventh inning.
“They’re going to be better. I think we’re doing a good job of managing the health, managing the workload. But it’s a two-way street too. Absolutely.”
In Minnesota, Glasnow overwhelmed the Twins’ lineup with his fastball. They missed 12 times in 25 swings against it and took another 12 for called strikes.
The Nationals were less impressed. They had five hits, all for extra bases, in the first three innings Monday. Four of those hits came off Glasnow’s fastball, including a leadoff double by C.J. Abrams that led to a run and a 404-foot solo home run by Abrams in the third inning. Glasnow only got three swings-and-misses on his fastball this start.
His slider was more effective, getting seven swings-and-misses. But Luis Garcia Jr. hit one for a two-out, three-run home run in the fifth inning that sealed Glasnow’s fate.
“It was just a bad slider, left it up, not executed,” Glasnow said. “It was just a super hittable pitch.”
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Nationals starter Mitchell Parker was making his first major-league start Monday and had three former league MVPs lined up to greet him. After Mookie Betts struck out, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman had back-to-back singles to set up a run.
In the second inning, Max Muncy led off with a double and eventually scored on a sacrifice fly by Chris Taylor (his first RBI of the season). But Parker settled down and retired 12 of the last 13 batters he faced.
“I mean, he was dotting pretty good,” Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernandez. “Obviously nobody knows what he’s got so it was a little more surprising. But he was making a lot of good pitches and we weren’t able to make adjustments. He had a good game today.”
The Dodgers chipped away against the Nationals’ bullpen. Ohtani scored an unearned run in the sixth after reaching base on catcher’s interference. He came up as the tying run in the seventh inning and lined out to center field, leaving him 1 for 16 with runners in scoring position as a Dodger.
Hernandez doubled with two outs in the eighth and scored on an RBI single by Muncy. But Kyle Finnegan closed it out for the Nationals in the ninth.
“Nobody likes to lose,” Hernandez said in Spanish. “But you can’t panic. It’s just what happens in baseball. They played better than us tonight so we just have to show up tomorrow with the same enthusiasm and try to win.”
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