LOS ANGELES — The Arizona Diamondbacks have played the Los Angeles Dodgers tightly through seven games this season, but Wednesday’s 3-1 loss at Dodger Stadium represented another winnable game in which they just could not put away their division foes.
The D-backs let a very good Corbin Burnes start go to waste, dropping a series they had ample opportunities to win and falling to 3-4 against Los Angeles.
After an extra-innings defeat on Tuesday, the Diamondbacks did not have much juice offensively, while one pitch cost Burnes three runs. A Teoscar Hernandez three-run, two-strike home run with two outs in the sixth inning was the difference.
Five of the seven games Arizona and Los Angeles have played were decided by three runs or fewer, with each squad earning a one-sided victory. They won’t see each other again until Aug. 29 at Dodger Stadium.
“Every time we play against them, it’s a good game,” D-backs third baseman Eugenio Suarez said. “We should have had that series in here, but it is what it is. We just gotta keep going.
“We came here to tell them that it’s not gonna be easy for them. They gotta play good baseball against us and we gotta play good baseball against them.”
Corbin Burnes’ near-dominant performance
Burnes sat down the first 11 hitters he faced and allowed only two baserunners through five innings.
He appeared to be on the same track as his previous two starts, when he tossed a combined 13 shutout innings, including seven against the Dodgers at Chase Field on May 10.
The Dodgers finally built an inning in the sixth with a pair of ground-ball singles not hit particularly sharply.
Miguel Rojas tapped one up the middle that shortstop Geraldo Perdomo stopped on a dive.
Mookie Betts bounced a single to the left side that skipped under the glove of Suarez moving to his left, a possible double play ball that could have ended the inning if fielded.
“Today the field was fast, I thought I got him,” Suarez said. “That last hop that hit the ground was jumping from the ground.”
The D-backs quickly suffered from having given the Dodgers an inch. Burnes struck out Freddie Freeman for the second out, but Hernandez timed up a slider that caught too much of the plate and shot it over the center-field wall.
Instead of a 1-0 lead, the D-backs trailed 3-1 on a night in which the offensive production lacked.
“There were a few bad pitches there in the sixth inning,” Burnes said. “So it was a combination of mistakes there that eventually led to probably the best of those misses to Teoscar. Wasn’t a bad slider down and away, just didn’t finish with two strikes.”
Burnes delivered seven innings with three earned runs and eight strikeouts. He extended his scoreless innings streak to 21 before the Hernandez home run.
His curveball was dominant, drawing nine whiffs on 11 swings, and he used it to finish six of his punch outs.
“The ball’s been coming outta the hand really well the last couple weeks,” Burnes said. “Obviously, it’s never fun to lose, but the one swing of the bat really changed the course of that game. If not, then it was another really good outing.”
Diamondbacks struggle with runners in scoring position
The Diamondbacks struggled to get anything going against Los Angeles’ starter for a second straight game after Yoshinobu Yamamoto shut them out for seven innings in Tuesday’s 4-3 loss.
Dustin May was sharp, holding Arizona to one run through six innings with eight strikeouts. He’s thrown 12.2 innings with three earned runs against the D-backs this season.
“I think he was cutting the ball a little bit,” manager Torey Lovullo said of May. “That was a 5% pitch, and I think some of our left-handed hitters were a little surprised by the success he was having with it. He had good command and was working both sides of the plate.”
Ketel Marte hit a solo shot in the fourth inning off May, but other than that, the right-hander allowed only four singles and one walk. Arizona had its chance with runners on the corners and one out in the sixth but failed to execute.
The D-backs had runners on the corners with two outs again in the seventh, as Perdomo and Corbin Carroll singled. Marte, however, bounced out to second.
Arizona entered Wednesday hitting .191 with runners in scoring position and two outs, the fifth-worst average in MLB. Last year, the D-backs hit .260 in such situations, which was second behind L.A.
Overall, Arizona out-hit the Dodgers 7-5 but left seven men on base on Wednesday. It lost a game in which Shohei Ohtani went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts.
“We want to win every series,” Lovullo said. “We were close last night, got beat. We were close today and got beat. We gotta figure out a way to close up that gap and finish these games off.”
A missed opportunity dropped the Diamondbacks to 26-24 at the 50-game mark. It’s better than their 24-26 record last year but still underwhelming in the sense that they’ve played so many competitive games in which they just could not quite put it all together.
“We definitely haven’t played our best baseball,” Burnes said.
Diamondbacks’ next game
The D-backs get Thursday off before starting a three-game series in St. Louis on Friday.
The Cardinals are 27-23, sitting in second place in the NL Central. They rattled off a nine-game winning streak earlier this month.
Arizona’s Zac Gallen and St. Louis right-hander Miles Mikolas will start the opener on Apple TV+.
The game will also air on 98.7 and the Arizona Sports app.
