For the last week, theDodgers had been scufflingoffensively.
In the fourth inning on Saturday, they finally looked like themselves again.
With a six-run rally keyed by quality at-bats, timely hits and the kind of relentless approach the team wants to pride itself on this season, the Dodgers built perhaps their best –– and most important –– inning at the plate all season, turning an early deficit into a massive lead en route to a 12-4 win over the Chicago Cubs.
Entering Saturday, theDodgers had lost five of seven gamesthanks largely to a lack of production from the lineup.
During the skid, they’d scored more than four runs only twice. They were enduringslumps from Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Kyle Tucker and Teoscar Hernández. And things had gotten so frustrating, Freeman and Ohtani shared a light-hearted, but telling, moment in the players’ parking lot walking into the ballpark Saturday morning.
“Can we please get hits today?” Freeman joked.
The answer was yes. Salvation was discovered.
Down 2-0 early, the Dodgers initially got on the board whenMax Muncy belted a two-run homeroff Cubs starter Colin Rea in the third.
The real explosion, however, came an inning later, when the Dodgers erased a 3-2 deficit with a six-hit, two-walk, 11-batter onslaught.
Hyeseong Kim got things started with a one-out single. Alex Freeland lofted a fly ball past Ian Happ in the left field corner that bounced off the top of the short wall for an RBI double. An Ohtani walk was followed by a go-ahead RBI single from Freeman on an opposite-field line drive. And then, with Rea knocked out of the game, Hernández broke things open with a two-run, two-out single through the infield.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
