Shohei Starts It. Dodgers Finish It. Padres Left Searching Again

Shohei Ohtani needed exactly one pitch Wednesday night to put the Padres behind.

One swing into the Petco Park night, one familiar roar from the traveling Dodgers crowd, one more reminder that baseball’s most exhausting player to game-plan against remains baseball’s most exhausting player to game-plan against.

Ohtani launched Randy Vásquez’s first pitch 398 feet to center field, circled the bases, stripped off the batting armor, took a breath, and casually walked to the mound to begin the second half of his evening.

For most players, that would qualify as a productive night.

For Ohtani, it was merely sufficient.

The Dodgers star followed his leadoff homer with five scoreless innings in a 4-0 victory over the Padres, lowering his ERA to an absurd 0.73 while helping Los Angeles secure another series win over San Diego. The Dodgers left Petco with a 1.5-game lead in the division and the general appearance of a team entirely uninterested in making early-season declarations while simultaneously making them anyway.

“We’ve been playing some pretty good baseball,” Freddie Freeman said afterward. “We’re off to a 5-1 start. We get a nice off day tomorrow. I hope we can get another series on the road.”

That was the diplomatic version.

The less diplomatic version was visible throughout the final two games of the series, where the Padres managed five total runs and spent most of Wednesday night looking like a lineup trying to solve a math problem without showing its work.

To be fair, Ohtani admitted he did not particularly love his own performance.

“It’s just an overall feel,” Ohtani said through an interpreter. “I have a pretty high standard in terms of performance. So it really didn’t match.”

Which says something about the standards involved here.

By ordinary baseball definitions, Ohtani was dominant enough. He allowed three hits, walked two, struck out four and repeatedly escaped trouble by doing what elite pitchers tend to do in uncomfortable innings: throwing better pitches when the situation becomes inconvenient.

Dave Roberts could see Ohtani searching a bit.

“I thought it was a little bit of a grind,” Roberts said. “I don’t think he had his best stuff tonight, but found a way to get big outs when he needed to.”

The biggest came in the fifth.

After the Padres loaded the bases with one out, Fernando Tatis Jr. rolled into an inning-ending double play, prompting a rare emotional release from Ohtani as he walked off the mound barking “Let’s Go”.

Ohtani appreciated the result more than the process.

“I loved the results,” he said, “but I walked the guy before him and that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do there.”

That sequence probably summed up the evening best. Even when Ohtani dominates, he seems mildly annoyed it was not cleaner.

The Dodgers, meanwhile, are perfectly content accepting imperfect dominance.

Their bullpen took over from there and continued what is quietly becoming one of the club’s early strengths. In a loud environment against a lineup built around power, the relief corps delivered clean inning after clean inning without much drama at all.

“They stepped up,” Roberts said. “Guys are kind of in different roles and they responded really well. It’s a tough place to pitch in this environment, but they all responded well.”

The bullpen’s recent work has started to create a strange feeling around these Dodgers games: opponents can survive the first problem and still immediately encounter four more.

Teoscar Hernández added insurance with a homer in the ninth and drove in two runs overall. Freeman collected two doubles, giving him 560 for his career and tying Jeff Kent and Eddie Murray for 29th all-time.

Freeman, naturally, handled the milestone the way someone does when they’ve been excellent for so long that excellence starts sounding routine.

“It’s hard to put into words,” Freeman said. “I’ve been in this game a long time, so when you start getting your name in these categories it’s pretty cool. Sorry Jeff and Eddie, maybe I will pass you on Friday, huh?”

Freeman also claimed he felt healthier after battling flu symptoms earlier in the week, which led to perhaps the most concerning development for the rest of baseball.

“I feel better today,” Freeman chuckled. “That’s probably why I didn’t hit any home runs. I need to be sicker I guess.”

The Padres continue searching for the breakthrough series against Los Angeles that always seems one emotional inning away. Petco was loud. The crowds were invested. The atmosphere kept trying to turn a May series into something closer to September baseball.

And then the Dodgers won the series anyway.

Again.

The Padres played with the urgency of a team trying to prove something. The Dodgers played like a team that already had.