Ten games into the 2019 season, last year’s National League West tiebreaker — in which the Rockies were nine innings from undoing Los Angeles’ vice grip on the division — feels like a long time ago.
The Dodgers underscored that gap between then and now again Sunday, embarrassing Colorado on national television with a 12-6 win to top the Rockies for the eighth straight time dating back to last season.
“This series, they beat us,” manager Bud Black acknowledged. “They came in hot, swinging the bats really well, and we couldn’t cool them down … We couldn’t stop them because we couldn’t make pitches over the three-game series, and we couldn’t mount anything consistently (offensively) to stay up with them.”
Adding insult to the sweep was an oblique tweak to outfielder David Dahl, who was lifted from the game in the third inning after noticeably grimacing following a strikeout.
Dahl entered Sunday as Colorado’s best hitter (.353) on a mightily underperforming offense, and his exit epitomized Colorado’s sour start to the season on a night where Chad Bettis got blasted for six runs and Charlie Blackmon made two ugly errors in right field that directly led to the Dodgers scoring.
Los Angeles got things going in the second behind Cody Bellinger, the hottest of its red-hot hitters, as the outfielder mashed a leadoff double. That was followed by Austin Barnes’ two-out walk and Julio Urias’ seeing-eye single, which scored Bellinger and then Barnes, too, after Urias’ groundball got by Blackmon in right.
“He made a bad pitch to the pitcher,” Black said. “The (fastball) was a little bit up, and got too much of the middle part of the plate where he could pull it … Chad couldn’t regroup and get anything going after that.”
The wheels then fell fully off for Bettis in the third. David Freese and Kiki Hernandez both had RBI doubles before Barnes’ single scored another, and suddenly Los Angeles was up 6-0 and Coors Field got really quiet minus the “Let’s go Dodgers” chants breaking out from pockets of blue.
“I hoped tonight was going to be the night we turned our (early slide) around,” Bettis said. “Unfortunately, I didn’t do my part on the mound.”
Blackmon did his part to help bring some spark to the doom-and-gloom of the series, leading off the third with a double. Trevor Story, Nolan Arenado and Ian Desmond followed with RBI knocks to cut the score to 6-3; Desmond’s grounder was likely going to be an inning-ending double play, but Hernandez lost track of outs and neglected to make the turn from second.
But after that miscue, the Dodgers kept piling on.
First it was Bellinger’s moon-high pop-up that Blackmon misplayed to gift a run right back with two outs in the fourth. Then, two more runs in the fifth by the hand of Yency Almonte preceded Max Muncy’s two-run homer off Carlos Estevez in the sixth to make it 11-3.
After Urias pitched 3⅔ innings, and the Rockies managed four more runs off the bullpen. Bellinger put a cap on the rout with a 428-foot bomb to right off Bryan Shaw in the eighth, his MLB-leading seventh homer.
The teams meet 16 more times this season. Meanwhile, Dahl will be re-evaluated Monday and will likely miss at least a few games; an MRI may be necessary as the Rockies continue to look to role players in the wake of other recent injuries to Daniel Murphy, Ryan McMahon, Tyler Anderson and Jake McGee.
“We’re going to need something from somebody,” Black said.
