Dodgers Keep Saying All The Right Things — The Results Keep Saying Something Else

Somewhere between Dave Roberts saying he liked what he had seen from his team's at-bats over the last two games and the Dodgers leaving 13 men on base Wednesday night, there was a rather large elephant sitting in Dodger Stadium.

It was wearing a Cardinals uniform.

St. Louis beat the Dodgers 8-6 in 10 innings, secured the series and sent Los Angeles stumbling toward the final stretch of the season with six losses in its last eight games. The Dodgers led 3-0, 5-2 and 5-4 before eventually running out of answers, runners, outs or some combination thereof.

They also managed to lose a game in which Yoshinobu Yamamoto carried a no-hitter into the sixth inning and pitched seven innings with eight strikeouts.

Baseball can be remarkably efficient at making a good pitching performance feel like a footnote.

“We have the players to turn this around,” Roberts said.

Freddie Freeman offered a similar assessment.

“Great teams go through it and we'll be alright.”

Yamamoto was equally confident.

“We have great players. I think we will be able to get over this hump.”

There is nothing particularly wrong with any of those statements. In fact, they're exactly what you would expect from a veteran clubhouse that still believes it has enough talent to fix whatever has gone wrong.

The problem is that baseball has an inconvenient habit of eventually grading teams on what they do rather than what they say.

And right now, the Dodgers are doing a lot of losing.

Thomas Saggese delivered the decisive blow Wednesday, lining a two-strike infield single in the 10th inning to score José Fermín and give St. Louis its first lead of the night. Joshua Báez then doubled home two more runs, turning what had been another uncomfortable Dodgers evening into a Cardinals victory lap.

For most of the night, Los Angeles looked capable of escaping.

Freeman provided the early fireworks with a three-run homer in the first inning, his first home run since July 4 and the end of a 47-game drought. The 416-foot drive to center scored Shohei Ohtani, who had walked, and Tommy Edman, who had been hit by a pitch.

Mookie Betts added a two-run homer in the sixth, pushing the Dodgers ahead 5-2.

And then, as has become increasingly familiar, the game began to leak.

Leo Bernal hit his first major league home run in the seventh, a two-run shot that pulled St. Louis within 5-4. The Cardinals tied it in the eighth when Báez doubled off Tanner Scott and scored on Alec Burleson's sacrifice fly.

The Dodgers had one more opportunity to win it in the ninth.

Teoscar Hernández doubled. A wild pitch moved him to third. The winning run was 90 feet away.

Kiké Hernández struck out.

Will Smith flew out.

Opportunity declined.

Then came the 10th.

Saggese finished the job.

The loss was particularly notable for Ohtani, who struck out four consecutive times for the first time this season, including the 10th inning with the potential winning run standing on third.

Even Roberts now acknowledges what everyone else has been seeing.

Ohtani may need a break.

That possibility would have sounded almost absurd a few weeks ago. Now, with the calendar moving toward September and the Dodgers trying to rediscover the team that spent much of the season looking almost unfairly talented, rest is becoming part of the conversation.

The Dodgers are still in first place in the NL West. That fact remains as comforting as it is deceptive.

They are still good.

They are also becoming increasingly difficult to recognize.

Another loss dropped them further behind Atlanta in the National League race for the second-best record and another step closer to the possibility nobody in Los Angeles wants to discuss: an October appointment with a Wild Card series.

Nobody in the clubhouse appears particularly worried.

That may be reassuring.

Or it may simply be what baseball players are trained to say while the standings quietly keep score.

For now, the Dodgers remain firmly stuck in August.

The calendar will eventually get them out.

The Dodgers will have to do the rest themselves.