Padres Prevail in Pitcher’s Duel at Petco

The Dodgers arrived at Petco Park on Monday night carrying the offensive equivalent of a summer thunderstorm. They had scored 40 runs over their previous five games, spent the weekend flattening the Angels, and generally looked like a lineup capable of ruining a pitcher’s ERA in under three innings.

Then they ran into Michael King.

For seven innings, the Padres right-hander dismantled one of baseball’s deepest lineups with the kind of outing that makes hitters walk back to the dugout muttering to themselves. Four-seamers at the top of the zone, sinkers running off the plate, sliders to both sides, the occasional changeup just to keep everyone uncomfortable — King struck out nine and never really allowed the Dodgers to settle into an at-bat.

“You know at sea level he has nothing but good things,” Dave Roberts said of King afterward. “And it’s always moving. There’s a four-seamer, there’s a sinker, there’s a slider, he throws it to both sides of the plate, there’s a changeup in there. So, we just really couldn’t put anything together.”

The frustrating part for the Dodgers is Yoshinobu Yamamoto was nearly every bit as good.

The entire game turned on one pitch in the first inning, a splitter that stayed up just long enough for Miguel Andújar to send it into the left-field seats. That was it. Seven innings, eight strikeouts, only three hits allowed, and one mistake too many in a 1-0 loss that felt like it was played inside a vice grip.

The home run also continued a mildly concerning trend for Yamamoto. He allowed only 14 homers all of last season. He already has surrendered nine this year, and while nobody inside the Dodgers clubhouse appears alarmed, opposing scouting departments are undoubtedly taking notice. Hanging splitters tend to make the front page of advance reports.

After the Andújar homer, Yamamoto settled in immediately and barely allowed San Diego another meaningful opportunity. The problem was King never blinked either.

“When they have the lead, they don’t really relinquish it too often,” Roberts said of the Padres bullpen machine. “When they’re ahead in the seventh inning, they don’t lose.”

That reality hovered over the late innings, especially the eighth, where the Dodgers’ best chance dissolved in a matter of seconds and immediately launched several thousand second-guesses.

Hyeseong Kim drew a two-out walk. Shohei Ohtani followed with a single to right, sending Kim racing around second toward third. Third-base coach Dino Ebel threw up the stop sign as Fernando Tatis Jr. approached the ball, opting against risking the final out at the plate.

Reasonable enough.

Except Tatis briefly bobbled the pickup.

For one split second, the opening was there. Had Kim been sent immediately, there is a decent chance he scores standing up and the game is tied. Instead, the Dodgers had runners at the corners with two outs before Mookie Betts grounded out softly on the first pitch he saw, ending the threat almost as quickly as it materialized.

Base-running hindsight, of course, is undefeated.

“It’s kind of the timing of it where Tatis came up with the ball,” Roberts said. “You don’t know that he’s not going to come up with it clean. Dino had the best view of the runner coming in and where they are on the field. So, it’s one of those things that I’m definitely not going to second guess.”

Ebel has long maintained there is no “yellow light” coaching third base. Either a runner goes or he doesn’t. On Monday night, the stop sign happened to collide with a rare defensive hiccup at exactly the wrong moment.

And that was the game.

The Dodgers still managed to bring the tying run to base again in the ninth against Mason Miller, but the Padres closer recovered from a shaky start to secure his 15th save and snap the Dodgers’ five-game winning streak.

Sometimes a rivalry game turns into chaos.

Sometimes it turns into 15-2 and Little League home runs.

And sometimes it’s just one hanging splitter and 27 outs of frustration.