For nine innings on Tuesday night, the Dodgers played with their food at Angel Stadium.
Only in extras, thanks to a four-run rally keyed by Mookie Betts’ three-run homer, did they finally assert their dominance over the last-place Angels.
In the first of this week’s two-game Freeway Series, the Dodgers won 6-2 in front of a sold-out crowd of 44,731 in Anaheim, one split between Angels fans and a rowdy contingent of visiting Dodgers fans all there to witness Shohei Ohtani’s return to his old home stadium.
“Most importantly, it’s about winning the game and I’m glad we won,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton afterward. “The biggest part of all this is really being able to play in this stadium and in front of these fans. That’s the part that was special for me.”
Ohtani provided some fireworks in the third inning, lining an RBI triple into the right-field corner and scoring on a Betts RBI single.
After that, however, the Dodgers went quiet, striking out 16 total times (including 10 against Reid Detmers, the Angels starter who entered with an ERA over 6.00) before finally breaking a 2-2 tie in the top of the 10th inning.
Miguel Rojas got the scoring started in extras, hammering a first-pitch sinker into left field for an RBI single.
Then, after Ohtani was intentionally walked with first base open, Betts provided the knockout blow, crushing a hanging first-pitch slider to left for his 15th home run of the season.
“I understand their perspective,” Betts said of Ohtani getting walked in front of him. “So I was just trying to get a good pitch to hit.”
It was only the third time in Betts’ career the batter before him had been walked. The other two? Free passes to David Ortiz in 2016, according to SportsNet LA, when Betts was with the Boston Red Sox.
“It’s a tough situation to walk a guy that got $700 [million] to get to the guy that got $350 [million],” starting pitcher Walker Buehler joked of Ohtani and Betts. “He’s pretty good at baseball too.”
The late scoring barrage erased the Dodgers’ barrage of empty swings earlier in the game, as their season-high 16 strikeouts extinguished a lineup that entered red-hot coming off last weekend’s series win in Arizona.
Detmers, making his first major league start since June 1 after being recalled from triple A, kept the Dodgers off-balance with an improved fastball that touched 95 mph — resurfacing concerns about the club’s at-times anemic ability to attack velocity this season.
The club didn’t do much better against the Angels bullpen, either, stranding a leadoff walk from Chris Taylor in the eighth before getting blown away by Angels closer Ben Joyce –– who hit a season-high 105.5 mph with his fastball — in the ninth.
In the end, however, it all mattered little, with the Dodgers’ 10th-inning rally stretching their National League West lead to 5 ½ games with just 23 games to go this season.
“You look back at the last couple weeks, we’ve played some intense baseball games,” manager Dave Roberts said, with his team 18-6 since Aug. 9. “So tonight against a team that’s trying to fight and play good baseball, some young players, it’s a game that you don’t want to let down.”
In his first regular-season game in Anaheim since signing with the Dodgers this winter, Ohtani attracted all of the early attention.
His first trip to the plate netted only a mild response from a still filing-in crowd — and from Ohtani himself, who didn’t so much as doff his helmet as a graphic listing his Angels’ accomplishments quickly flashed on the board.
After grounding out in that initial at-bat, Ohtani’s second at-bat drew a bigger reaction, as he collected his seventh triple of the year with a line drive to right.
“When you look back at today’s game there were moments when we didn’t come through,” Ohtani said. “But there were times when we were able to capitalize and that’s the way we try to win some games. I think it’s a really good thing for us as a team that we were able to do that tonight.”
As for Betts’ big blast in the 10th?
“I’m not really surprised that Mookie came through in that kind of fashion,” Ohtani said. “It’s the kind of way we like to finish the game.”
The other positive sign for the Dodgers on Tuesday: Buehler’s performance in a five-inning, two-run, six-strikeout start, the second in a row where the 30-year-old right-hander said he felt more like his old self coming back from a second-career Tommy John surgery.
Read more: Could Angels have kept Shohei Ohtani? Their non-offer lingers ahead of his Anaheim return
Like last week, Buehler was more efficient early in counts (12 of 21 first-pitch strikes) and was particularly effective with the curveball, which accounted for four of his six strikeouts in an 83-pitch outing.
“I think right now Walker’s in compete mode,” Roberts said. “I think that’s important, when you’re in September [and] you’ve got a few starts left until we get to the postseason, and him trying to find some traction and get to being the pitcher that he was.”
Buehler did give up two home runs. Logan O’Hoppe hammered a 2-and-2 cutter that caught too much of the plate in the second inning. Taylor Ward sliced a drive just inside the right-field foul pole the other way in the fifth.
But for a pitcher trying to make a case in the Dodgers’ postseason rotation plans, Buehler viewed the outing as another important step forward, lowering his ERA to 5.67 (the lowest its been since mid-June) in the process.
“I would’ve loved to have felt like this in April,” said Buehler, who has now made four starts since returning from a hip injury last month. “But at the end of the day, I have a month to kind of more so put the finishing touches on how I feel as a major league starter and how I can help us win in the playoffs.”
Where exactly the Dodgers’ pitching will stand once they get there remains uncertain. Yoshinobu Yamamoto only managed to throw two innings in a rehab start with triple-A Oklahoma City on Tuesday night (which likely means he will need one more rehab outing before returning to the majors). Tyler Glasnow and Clayton Kershaw both played catch pregame as they work to return from elbow and toe injuries, respectively.
The one thing that is becoming more certain, though, is the Dodgers’ place in the postseason picture.
For a while Tuesday, they appeared headed toward the letdown Roberts warned about.
But, as they’ve made a growing habit of lately, they nonetheless found a way to salvage an important win.
“It’s always important to keep the momentum going,” Betts said. “Sometimes momentum is not going to be your way. You’re going to have find ways to create it. But any time, you just keep grinding.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.