4 Takeaways From The Dodgers’ Series Win In San Diego

Save for some playful facial expressions, the typically stoic Shohei Ohtani rarely reveals his emotions on a baseball field. But in the fifth inning Wednesday night in San Diego, in the most pivotal moment of the Dodgers’ series win against their greatest division challengers, he let them loose. With one out and the bases loaded, Ohtani extinguished the Padres’ best opportunity to strike by getting Fernando Tatis Jr. to ground into an inning-ending double play. The Cy Young hopeful then walked off the mound roaring, “Let’s go!” “As a pitcher, you know when it’s a crucial moment,” Ohtani explained through his interpreter. The scoreless frame lowered Ohtani’s ERA on the year to 0.73 — the lowest mark for a starting pitcher through the first eight appearances of a season since Jacob deGrom in 2021 (0.71) — and helped the Dodgers finish off a 4-0 win to stay alone atop the NL West. Here are my takeaways. 1. For The First Time In Nearly A Month, Shohei Ohtani Does It All Entering this week, Ohtani had just one hit all year in games in which he started on the mound. He hadn’t been in the lineup at all in four of his last five pitching starts as the Dodgers attempted to manage the four-time MVP’s workload and give him a breather as he slumped at the plate. But with Ohtani swinging a hotter bat lately, manager Dave Roberts let the two-way star both hit and pitch Wednesday night for the first time since April 22. Immediately, that decision paid off. Ohtani went deep on the first pitch of the day from Padres starter Randy Vasquez, sending a four-seamer at the top of the zone out for a 405-foot home run. That hit alone would have been enough to earn him the win. He then took the mound in the bottom of the first and set the Padres down in order. Ohtani didn’t have his best command, as evidenced by the 88 pitches he needed to get through five innings, yet he still was perfect the first time through the Padres’ lineup and extended his scoreless innings streak to 16. His ERA (0.73) is now considerably lower than his OPS as a hitter (.885), a testament both to his sensational work on the mound and his improvements at the plate. He has reached base multiple times in each of his seven games and is 11-for-23 with six extra-base hits since being given back-to-back days off as a hitter on May 13-14. 2. The Padres’ Top Bats Are Still Struggling — And Now Hurting The biggest moment of Wednesday’s game was an example of both Ohtani’s ability to work around traffic and Tatis’ continued power outage. Tatis entered his fifth-inning at-bat hitting .465 with four grand slams in his career with the bases loaded. This year, though, he’s still looking for his first home run of any kind. He ranks in the 97th percentile in hard-hit rate, but he’s pounding baseball into the dirt with the highest ground-ball rate of his career and has the seventh-lowest slugging percentage (.278) among all qualified MLB hitters. And he’s not the only Padres star struggling mightily to start the season. Tatis, Jackson Merrill and Manny Machado — who homered Tuesday for his lone hit of the series —all rank in the bottom 15 among qualified MLB hitters in OPS. To make matters worse, Merrill left Wednesday’s game early after tweaking his back trying to make a play on Ohtani’s home run. As a team, the Padres’ offense ranks last in batting average and 29th in on-base percentage. 3. The Padres’ Lone Win Of The Series Showed How They Got To This Point A 1-0 Padres victory Friday, during which Michael King spun seven shutout innings to outduel World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto, was a quintessential example of how they’ve jumped out to their 29-20 record despite the underperformance of their offensive stars. In that win, all it took was a solo shot from Miguel Andujar to make them victorious. Jason Adam threw a scoreless inning in the eighth, and Mason Miller closed the door in the ninth to secure his 15th save of the season. The Padres have the fourth-best winning percentage in the National League despite scoring just three more runs this year than they’ve allowed, primarily because they don’t blow leads and they win close games. Miller still has not blown a save this season, though on Tuesday he suffered his first defeat in more than a year. He had gone 65 games — 67 including the playoffs — without suffering a loss until a walk, an error on a pickoff attempt and a sacrifice fly from Andy Pages ended that streak. It was the first time all season that the Padres have lost a game when tied after the eighth inning. It’s a credit to the supporting cast members of the Padres’ lineup, the team’s clutch hitting, the steady work of King (2.31 ERA) and Vasquez (2.91) in a shorthanded rotation and, most obviously, Miller and the team’s shutdown bullpen that San Diego has gotten out to this start. 4. Against The League’s Most Feared Bullpen, It Was The Dodgers Relievers Who Shined Entering this series, the Padres’ bullpen received far more acclaim, led by the most dominant closer in the sport. But this week, it was the Dodgers’ relievers who continued piling up zeroes. The Dodgers bullpen, which has the lowest ERA in the National League, has not allowed a run in its last eight games. Since losing Edwin Díaz to an elbow issue on April 19, Dodgers relievers have the lowest ERA in the sport. On Tuesday, Edgardo Henriquez, Alex Vesia, Blake Treinen, Tanner Scott and Will Klein combined to throw five scoreless innings of relief to finish off a 5-4 win. One day later, three of those pitchers — Henriquez, Treinen and Klein — were back on the mound helping blank the Padres to finish off the series win. Rowan Kavner is an MLB writer for FOX Sports. He previously covered the L.A. Dodgers, LA Clippers and Dallas Cowboys. An LSU grad, Rowan was born in California, grew up in Texas, then moved back to the West Coast in 2014. Follow him on X at @RowanKavner.