At 3:30pm on Friday afternoon, the Los Angeles Dodgers ushered the media out of their clubhouse and closed the doors. After four losses in a row, all defeats marred by sloppiness, Manager Dave Roberts sought to reinforce the importance of the game’s fundamentals. He made the players laugh. He made the players cheer.
The doors opened a few minutes later.
And nothing changed.
A team meeting cannot be considered a cure-all, and the result of Friday’s 5-1 loss to San Diego served as proof. The offense was quieted by a career minor-leaguer, wasting a stellar outing by Alex Wood. The rickety bullpen ignited at the hand of Chris Hatcher, the group’s foremost arsonist this April. Hatcher decided the outcome when he surrendered a three-run homer to former Dodger Matt Kemp in the eighth.
With the loss, the Dodgers (12-12) faded back to a .500 record for the first time since opening day. They could not solve Padres starter Cesar Vargas, who debuted this season in double-A and had only pitched four times above that level, across 5 1/3 scoreless innings.
Wood matched Vargas with seven innings of one-run baseball. He struck out nine. A solo home run by Yasmani Grandal in the sixth removed Wood from the hook of a hard-luck loss. Instead, Hatcher inherited that mantle.
The Dodgers skidded into Friday. The group had just dropped four in a row to Miami. The offense managed eight runs across those 36 innings.
The team closed the clubhouse to the media at 3:30pm. Manager Dave Roberts held a meeting to reinforce the importance of fundamental baseball. The tone of the meeting appeared light-hearted: Laughter and applause could be heard emanating from the room as Roberts spoke.
The doors re-opened, and little changed. In the first four innings alone, the lineup stranded seven runners.
The hitters lacked patience. Ramos hit Justin Turner with two outs in the first. He walked Adrian Gonzalez. Then Yasiel Puig grounded out on the first pitch he saw.
The hitters failed to make productive outs. Corey Seager led off the third with a double. He did not advance another foot, as Turner struck out on a questionable call, Gonzalez swung through a slider and Puig popped up.
The hitters struggled to properly assess their limitations. Grandal thumped a ball off the wall to open the fourth. Trailing by a run after an RBI single by Melvin Upton, Jr., in the top of the inning, Grandal decided to test the right arm of Kemp. Kemp threw him out at second base.
Grandal figured out a way to atone for the mistake in his next at-bat. He hit the baseball over the fence. If only his teammates could do the same.