LOS ANGELES — This was not part of the plan.
Over the next two days, the Dodgers will host a “bullpen game” one day and start a pitcher called up from Triple-A the other day, leading to the very real possibility of back-to-back bullpen games.
But they got Tyler Glasnow starting Monday night, after seven scoreless innings and 14 strikeouts in Minnesota last week.
This was not this Glasgow. The right-hander got off to his worst start of his fledgling 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 .
After their series loss to the San Diego Padres this weekend, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts lamented that “there are more problems in our club than good ones” so far in the season. But “we always win more than we lose”.
Not recently.
Monday’s loss was the Dodgers’ fourth in their last five games and sixth in their last 10 games.
And most of what went wrong involved the pitching staff, where the Dodgers’ careful management of their starters — only once in the first 19 games saw a starting pitcher take four days rest – was not rewarded in the short term.
Before Monday’s games, Dodgers starting pitchers had thrown 83⅓ innings, which was the 19th most in MLB. Take away their two-game lead in South Korea (where Glasnow had five and Yoshinobu Yamamoto just one) and their ranking drops to 26th.
As a result, a bullpen with a revolving door of reinforcements threw the most innings in MLB (Seoul Series included) and showed cracks from overexposure to the elements.
In Minnesota, Glasnow overwhelmed the Twins lineup with his fastball. They missed 12 times in 25 swings against him and took 12 more 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 double by CJ Abrams that drove in a run and a 404-foot solo home run by Abrams in the third inning. Glasnow has only gotten 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.
Nationals starter Mitchell Parker made his first major league start Monday and three former league MVPs were lined up to greet him. After Mookie Betts struck out, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman delivered 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 Chris Taylor sacrifice fly (his first RBI of the season). But Parker calmed down and retired 12 of the last 13 batters he faced.
The Dodgers attacked the Nationals bullpen. Ohtani scored an unearned run in the sixth after reaching base on catcher’s interference. Teoscar Hernandez doubled with two outs in the eighth and scored on an RBI single by Muncy.
But Kyle Finnegan closed out the game for the Nationals in the ninth.
More to come on this story.
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