The Day August Died: Teoscar Walks Off Cardinals, Dodgers Finally Turn The Page

It was the third of September, a day Dodgers fans may always remember, because that was the day the month of August finally died.

It did not go quietly.

It took nine innings, a handful of missed opportunities, an off day for Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers staring at the possibility of watching the Cardinals celebrate a sweep at Dodger Stadium. Then Teoscar Hernández stepped to the plate in the bottom of the ninth and sent a 3-2 pitch from Riley O'Brien screaming into the left-center field gap.

Tommy Edman was already on second. Mookie Betts was aboard after a walk.

Both came around to score.

Game over.

Dodgers 3, Cardinals 2.

And just like that, the weight that had been hanging over the Dodgers for much of the past month seemed to lift off the shoulders of an entire city.

Well, well, well, well.

Hernández's two-run double gave the Dodgers their eighth walk-off victory of the season and, perhaps more importantly, prevented St. Louis from leaving Los Angeles with a sweep. After losing six of their previous eight games and spending the better part of a month looking as though they had misplaced the team that dominated much of the season, the Dodgers finally found a moment that felt less like survival and more like baseball.

“Just trying to help this team win,” Hernández said.

It was a remarkably understated response to a remarkably important hit.

The Dodgers had been 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position before Hernández finally broke through. For a team that had spent Wednesday night leaving 13 men on base in an extra-inning loss, Thursday offered another opportunity to demonstrate that sometimes the best cure for an offensive slump is simply getting one hit at the right time.

Edman supplied plenty of the groundwork.

Batting leadoff in place of Ohtani, who was given the night off to rest his neck, biceps and knee issues, Edman went 4-for-5 and started the winning rally with a one-out single to left. He then stole second, giving the Dodgers a runner in scoring position before Betts drew a walk.

Hernández handled the rest.

“It was huge to finally get that big hit,” Edman said.

That it came from Hernández made it all the more fitting. The Dodgers had spent the previous two nights generating enough traffic on the bases to require an air-traffic controller, only to repeatedly fail to bring anyone home.

This time, they needed only one swing.

Tarik Skubal had an unusual night by his standards. He allowed two runs and a career-high-tying 10 hits while striking out six, but somehow managed to keep the Cardinals from doing much damage. St. Louis scored RBI singles from Joshua Báez in the first and Ramón Urías in the third, and then spent the rest of the evening failing to put the Dodgers away.

The Dodgers, meanwhile, struggled to put the Cardinals away themselves.

That finally changed in the ninth.

O'Brien, who had blown only five saves entering the night, surrendered his sixth when Hernández found the gap and sent Edman and Betts sprinting home.

“It was fun to watch those guys run around those bases,” Skubal said.

It was probably more fun for Skubal than watching them try to score while he was still on the mound.

The victory also provided an important footnote to the ongoing conversation surrounding Ohtani. Roberts had already acknowledged that the two-way star could use some rest, and Thursday's lineup offered the first tangible evidence that the Dodgers were willing to act on it.

For one night, at least, Ohtani watched.

The Dodgers won anyway.

That might have been the most encouraging development of the evening.

They still have problems. Nobody should mistake one walk-off victory for a magic eraser. The offense remains inconsistent, the bullpen remains capable of turning a comfortable evening into a cardiac event, and the Dodgers still have plenty of work to do if they want to enter October looking anything like the two-time defending champions everyone expected to see.

But Thursday was different.

For the first time in a while, the Dodgers didn't spend the night trying to explain what was wrong.

They simply won.

And perhaps that is how August finally met its end.

Not with a dramatic announcement. Not with a calendar being ripped from the wall.

Just Teoscar Hernández standing in the batter's box, watching a baseball disappear into the gap while two teammates raced home.

August is dead.

Long live September.