ATLANTA — Roki Sasaki left the game early. Then, the Dodgers gave it away late.
So things went in an excruciating 6-5 defeat to the Atlanta Braves on Wednesday night –– in which the Dodgers first lost Sasaki to a middle finger blister, then lost an early lead on a costly Teoscar Hernández fielding blunder, before ultimately losing the game on Ha-Seong Kim’s walk-off single against Tanner Scott in the bottom of the ninth.
“The base hit by Kim ended the game, but it’s not what cost us the game,” manager Dave Roberts said. “There’s a lot of plays that lead up to circumstances, whether it be defensively, offensively, that sort of come to pass when you don’t execute. So, yeah, I mean, there’s just a lot of things that we got to keep getting better at.”
Indeed, after seemingly ending a second-half slump with back-to-back series sweeps last week, the Dodgers have frustratingly lost whatever momentum they were beginning to build, too.
Wednesday’s loss clinched a series defeat to the Braves, who have suddenly trimmed the gap for a top-two National League playoff seed down to just two games ahead of Thursday’s series finale.
It also marked a fifth-straight series loss against an opponent with a winning record –– a concerning trend even for the two-time defending champions.
“This,” Roberts said, “was a tough one.”
Wednesday’s game epitomized such struggles, with a domino effect of missed chances and unforeseen setbacks setting the Dodgers up for a fatal, final punch.
The team had been in a good spot early, leading 3-1 after Tommy Edman doubled and scored in the second on a Hunter Feduccia RBI single, then hit a two-run homer in the third (making him one of four Dodgers with two hits, along with Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and Hernández).
But in the bottom of the fourth, everything began to go sideways — starting with Sasaki’s blister, and culminating in Hernández’s consequential defensive gaffe.
At the start of the inning, the skin on Sasaki’s right middle finger ripped open. He lost his command on a leadoff walk, then gave up a run on a single, sacrifice fly and double before finally making it clear something was physically wrong.
“It was a pretty good blister,” Roberts said, while announcing postgame that Sasaki would go on the injured list. “It just came out of nowhere.”
With Sasaki gone, the Dodgers summoned Edgardo Henriquez from the bullpen, handing him an unenviable two-on, one-out jam with the top of the Braves order due up.
Despite that, the hard-throwing right-hander initially appeared to get a key out against his first hitter, Drake Baldwin, inducing a high fly ball into the left-field corner.
As Hernández tried to track it, however, he misjudged its flight and overran it as it dropped.
The resulting two-run double gave the Braves a 4-3 lead. A Dodgers team that has been living on the margins lately –– 14 of their last 19 have now been decided by two runs or less –– found itself grinding through another close game again.
“Balls typically that go into the corner … will go back to the field,” Roberts said of the play, after Hernández declined to speak with reporters after the game. “He got in the corner and just overran it … Would’ve given up one run [even if he caught it]. But ultimately, it ended up being two.”
Such differences would matter, especially after Sean Murphy made it a 5-3 game with a solo home run off Eric Lauer in the sixth.
The Dodgers evened the score in the seventh, scoring twice on three hits (including a leadoff double from Ohtani that was aided by a curious decision from right fielder Ronald Acuña Jr. to bluff a throw even with Ohtani caught out on the base paths) and two walks (the latter of which was a bases-loaded free pass from Edman for his third RBI) before recording an out.
But from there, with a chance to blow the game open with the bases still loaded, they instead came up empty, after Kyle Tucker flied out and Alek Thomas bounced into a double-play (part of 0-for-5 nights from each).
“Creating traffic, getting guys on base is one part of the equation,” Roberts said. “But you got to finish the inning.”
That rang true again in the eighth, when the bases were again full for Max Muncy with two outs.
Though he worked a nine-pitch at-bat against Braves reliever Didier Fuentes –– which included seven-straight fastballs after a first-pitch splitter –– he couldn’t stop his swing on a full-count splitter that started on the edge of the plate before darting helplessly away.
“We haven’t cashed in,” Muncy said after the Dodgers left 11 men on base. “We’ve had a lot of opportunities but we haven’t cashed in on it … If we do our job on any of those opportunities, it’s a different outcome.”
Instead, the game remained tied until the ninth, when Scott took the loss for a second-straight night.
It started with a two-out double to Lane Thomas. Then an intentional walk to Riley prompted the Braves to pinch-hit Kim.
Despite coming up to the plate with an historically bad .066 batting average this year, Kim got a notably steady diet of fastballs from Scott, who threw seven in a row while working a 3-0 count back to full.
Scott said afterward he was playing to his strengths and felt his heater was good. But, he also acknowledged he probably leaned on the pitch too much.
Thus, when he missed low and over the plate with his eighth-straight fastball, Kim was on time to shoot a line drive to left, sending the still-scufflling Dodgers to a painful loss that hurt in more ways than one.
“I thought we had a really good chance to win this game,” Roberts said. “I just think that it’s a tough loss.”
