Shohei and Mookie Took the Night Off. The Dodgers Offense Didn’t.

If you claimed before first pitch that Will Smith would hit a leadoff home run while serving as the designated hitter, you were probably stretching the truth just a little.

If you also said Jung Hoo Lee was going to circle the bases for an inside-the-park homer later in the evening, then congratulations — you officially wandered into fiction.

And yet both somehow happened Thursday night at Dodger Stadium, where baseball briefly decided normalcy was overrated before the Dodgers eventually settled things with a 5-2 win over the Giants that felt important for reasons beyond the standings.

Most notably, the Dodgers proved they could still function offensively without Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts carrying the lineup on their backs.

For the second straight night, Ohtani remained out of the lineup while the Dodgers continued their carefully managed balancing act between preserving his pitching dominance and eventually rediscovering his bat. Betts joined him as a spectator Thursday night, leaving the top two spots in the Dodgers’ usual batting order sitting quietly in the dugout.

And oddly enough, the offense finally relaxed.

Smith wasted no time introducing himself as the temporary leadoff hitter, launching the first leadoff homer of his career into the right-center field seats in the opening inning. Somewhere across Los Angeles, at least one fantasy baseball player immediately began pretending they absolutely saw this coming.

The Dodgers added another run in the second on Hyeseong Kim’s RBI single before spending much of the evening watching Emmet Sheehan quietly piece together the best start of his young career.

Pitching with an aggressiveness that matched the moment, Sheehan delivered six strong innings while allowing only two hits, striking out six and throwing 64 strikes across 97 pitches.

Outside of one bizarre fifth inning adventure involving geometry, English and an extremely unfortunate outfield bounce, Sheehan looked entirely in control.

Lee’s inside-the-park homer was less a baseball play and more a physics experiment gone sideways.

The Giants outfielder hooked a drive down the left-field line that picked up a vicious carom off the wall after Teoscar Hernández misplayed the angle. By the time the Dodgers untangled the chaos, Lee was flying around the bases looking less like a baseball player and more like someone trying to catch the last train out of Union Station.

Just like that, the Giants had tied the game.

Sheehan, however, never spiraled.

“Yeah, it’s just one of those where you just got to wipe it and go onto the next guy,” Sheehan said afterward.

Simple answer. Mature response. Exactly what the Dodgers needed.

“I think just mixing, keeping them off balance,” Sheehan said when asked about consistently getting ahead in counts. “Rushing called a great game and Mark put together a really good game plan.”

Dave Roberts afterward called it the best outing of Sheehan’s career.

“Every time he’s been going out there, he’s getting better,” Roberts said. “Today, in totality, I thought it was his best outing. The fastball was good, the life to it, the command of it.”

Perhaps most importantly for a bullpen that has looked increasingly overworked lately, Sheehan gave the Dodgers length.

“We needed it,” Roberts admitted. “Just some length and set this up in the pen for this next series.”

And unlike some recent nights, the Dodgers lineup actually rewarded the effort.

After Lee’s inside-the-park homer briefly shifted momentum, Teoscar Hernández immediately began making amends for the misplay in left field by doing what he tends to do best: hitting baseballs hard.

Teoscar finished 3-for-4 and helped ignite the decisive sixth inning rally when Alex Call delivered a two-run pinch-hit single before Miguel Rojas added another RBI knock moments later.

Roberts appreciated the response from both Hernández and the club overall.

“This is the sign of a team of character,” Roberts said. “Teo has been playing really well out there in left field. It was a play we’d love to have back. But Emmet didn’t let it faze him, and then Teo had a big night to kind of atone for that mishap.”

That word — atone — probably summed up the evening for the Dodgers as a whole.

After looking disjointed and exhausted for much of the past two weeks, this version of the Dodgers finally resembled something closer to the balanced club everyone expected to see all season.

The bats looked alive. The pitching looked composed. The bullpen finished cleanly. Even the lineup suddenly had depth again instead of feeling entirely dependent on whether Ohtani could rescue the offense with one swing.

And maybe that was the most encouraging part of the night.

The Dodgers gave both Ohtani and Betts a breather, and instead of collapsing without them, the rest of the roster quietly reminded everyone why this team was built to survive stretches exactly like this one.

Time to exhale.