LOS ANGELES >> We don’t know who the Nationals will throw at the Dodgers Tuesday.
We do know it won’t be Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or George H.W. Bush. Nor Bill Gates, Julianna Margulies nor Jerry Seinfeld.
All are left-handers, and it would take only a quick tutorial for any of them to frustrate the Dodgers in Game 4.
Instead Washington will throw a right-hander, either Joe Ross or Reynaldo Lopez, in what manager Dusty Baker hopes is the Division Series clincher.
On Monday, former 21-game winner Gio Gonzalez went to the mound seeking the confidence he’d lost in a dreary 11-11, 4.57 ERA season. The uniforms he saw were as soothing as blueberry cobbler.
The first 27 Dodgers faced left-handers — starter Gonzalez, relievers Sammy Solis and Oliver Perez — and got two runs, two walks and six hits. Their leadoff hitters were 0 for 9. “It wasn’t a matter of hitting in scoring position,” Adrian Gonzalez said, “because we really didn’t have many people out there.”
They hit one home run, a two-run rocket off the bat of Carlos Ruiz, and hit 10 harmless fly balls. Their outs didn’t advance anyone.
And when closer Kenley Jansen was asked to pitch from behind in the ninth and predictably imploded, the Dodgers lost 8-3, challenging their fans to sit through four hours and 12 minutes.
The intelligent ones preferred to duck into traffic instead, and perhaps search for a tune by that renowned Liverpool port-sider, Paul McCartney.
“If I knew why we struggled so much against left-handers we would have fixed it by now,” Gonzalez said.
The Dodgers hit .213 against lefty pitching, by far the worst in major league baseball, and nobody seems to know why. They did hit .235 against lefty starters, and they did beat Madison Bumgarner twice. But Justin Turner, a right-hand hitter, hit .209 against lefties with only 14 RBIs this year, as opposed to .247 for his career.
Aside from Yasiel Puig, no regular Dodgers had a better average vs. lefties than Corey Seager’s .250. Seager bounced off a double off the right-field wall in the first inning Monday, scoring Turner and giving the Dodgers the lead. But Kenta Maeda answered the Dodgers’ cries for a decent start by dissolving in a four-run third inning that included a two-run moonshot by Anthony Rendon. Dodger starters have thrown 12 1/3 of the 27 innings so far in the series.
Meanwhile, Washington’s three southpaw relievers have pitched 6 1/3 innings, giving the Dodgers three hits and no runs. And Gonzalez, against whom the current Dodgers were hitting .160, was fine until Ruiz’s home run. Ruiz was the only man on the Dodgers roster who had taken Gonzalez deep before.
“There’s a little bit of pitching backwards with them,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, referring to the art of throwing breaking balls in fastball counts and vice versa. “But I thought we had some good at-bats in there. We squared up some baseballs, right at those guys.“
“Relief pitchers are always going to go back and forth,” Gonzalez said. “I thought they did a good job today of getting the ball down. We had two runs score from first base. It’s difficult when you don’t have much going.”
The Dodgers are 2 for 18 with men in scoring position for the series.
Now comes Game 4 and the annual question: Do you pitch Clayton Kershaw on three days’ rest when it’s win-or-die? The Dodgers always say yes, and most of the time he does fine, including last year’s Game 4 in New York.
But he has only pitched six times since late June. He threw five laborious innings Friday with 101 pitches. And, as Roberts said, the Dodgers still have to win two games.
Would you rather use 20-year-old lefty Julio Urias in Washington for Game 5, against a rested-and-ready Max Scherzer, in a red sea of pent-up fandom?
Or would you rather use Urias in these friendly confines against either Ross (23) or Lopez (22) today, figuring the game will be usurped by the bullpens anyway, and then confront Scherzer with Kershaw in Game 5?
Since we’re in such an impatient age, when we demand that football coaches always go for fourth-and-8, the Dodgers will face enormous pressure to pitch Kershaw Tuesday and will face stinging backlash if he doesn’t pitch and they lose.
But Roberts hasn’t given in to the noise this season, ignoring perfect games, sending down Puig, making decisions and sleeping peacefully.
Besides, if Roberts was prone to night terrors, he’d have nightmares about the Dodgers trembling at the sight of Kershaw.
