LOS ANGELES — Last weekend’s series at Yankee Stadium featured a playoff atmosphere, and the Dodgers responded with playoff intensity and won two out of three from the team with baseball’s best record.
And I’m sure, Dodger fans, that plenty of you watched that series and asked yourselves, “Where was that the last couple of Octobers?”
That is the irritant among the fan base, and that discomfort will remain until it’s eradicated by a full-season championship. And so Manager Dave Roberts was asked Tuesday if those type of performances – and, not incidentally, that type of mental edge – could be sustainable beyond one weekend in the Bronx.
“You know, I think you can,” Roberts said. “But it’s just not going to show every night. Baseball is so difficult and so up and down. So the hope is that you can. But looking at however many more games we have, there’s going to be some duds in there. And that’s just inevitable for any ballclub.”
The trick is to keep the duds to a minimum. Even so, I’m not sure that’s the answer the public wants to hear, as truthful and logical as it is. Baseball people understand that it’s a long season, and the object is to handle the grind, put themselves in position for the postseason and reach a crescendo when they get there.
The fan, more often than not, lives day to day. Slumps such as the couple the Dodgers have already faced this year – seven losses in nine games in April, when they averaged just under four runs per game, and a five-game losing streak in late May when they scored 2.2 runs per game – lead to near-panic among those who care, along with shouts of “Do something!”
It’s a baseball truism. When a team isn’t hitting, it looks like it lacks energy.
“I know, it’s like kind of cliché, but it’s ebbs and flows of the season,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said Tuesday night after the Dodgers had pummeled the defending World Series champion Texas Rangers, 15-2, hitting four homers and…
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