Scott Van Slyke douses Alex Guerrero after Guerrero hit a walk-off single to win their game against the Mariners, 6-5 in 10 innings Monday. (Hans Gutknecht/Staff photographer)
There were two games tonight at Dodger Stadium.
The first couple paragraphs of my game story quickly reflect that. The story for the early editions focuses on the ball flying out of Dodger Stadium — four home runs for the Mariners, one for the Dodgers — and the fact that this has been happening since Opening Day.
ESPN.com’s Park Factors for 2014 rated Dodger Stadium as the 27th-most hitter friendly park in baseball. In a handful of games this season, it’s one of the five most hitter-friendly parks in MLB. Oh, and all of tonight’s home runs came in the first five innings. Go figure.
This narrative arc didn’t really change into the 10th inning, but by then the game meant more than a few stats drawn from a painfully small sample size (even if the stats are really interesting).
The Dodgers (4-3) rallied to load the bases and score the winning run in extra innings, the kind of win that escaped them all too often in 2014. Remember how the Dodgers had a .460 OPS with the bases loaded last year? Or their 6-12 record in extra-inning games? Those aren’t the type of stats usually associated with championship-caliber teams. If you want to reduce the need to rebuild a 94-win team down to two stats, those are the first two stats that come to mind. This wasn’t lost on at least one player who I spoke to after the game.
Alex Guerrero, Andre Ethier, Yimi Garcia (who got his first major-league win), Joel Peralta, Paco Rodriguez and Pedro Baez were the key contributors, and I wrote about them in my game story.
The box score is here. The photo gallery is here. Watch Guerrero’s game-winning single here.
One thing that didn’t make my story: Yasiel Puig was limping enough that Don Mattingly and a few reporters noticed it. He wasn’t removed from the game, and Mattingly said that “Stan (Conte) checked with (Puig) and he said he was good to go.” Full disclosure: I didn’t notice the limp, at least not enough to stick around and ask Puig what was up after the game. Several reporters did stick around, and Puig did not speak to them with the exception of the Dodgers’ team website.
Puig also felt well enough after the game to run out of the dugout with a bucket full of ice and juice, and dump it on Alex Guerrero. So there’s that.
