Dave Roberts has a high bar for his $400 million baseball team.
Sure, the Dodgers entered Friday winners of 13 of their last 17, tied for the best overall record in baseball and leading the National League West by six games.
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Sure, they already have one guaranteed All-Star in Shohei Ohtani, and seven other finalists who advanced to the second stage of fan voting that will begin next week.
But, in the eyes of their manager, “I still just don’t believe we’re playing our best baseball,” Roberts said Friday afternoon. “I don’t think we’ve played complete baseball for a stretch.”
On Friday night, that remained the case. Dustin May managed just four innings in a four-run start. The lineup produced only four total hits. Kiké Hernández and Teoscar Hernández made run-scoring defensive blunders in the outfield. And the bullpen danced in and out of trouble down the stretch.
Read more: Why Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman have struggled at the plate lately for the Dodgers
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But amid this soft portion of the team’s schedule, flawed performances have often still been enough.
And in Friday’s 5-4 win over the badly slumping Kansas City Royals, that once again proved to be the case.
May gave up a run in the first after Kiké Hernández airmailed a throw to the plate with two outs, negating Ohtani’s leadoff blast (his 29th home run of the season, and eighth to lead off a game).
The Royals added three more in the third after Teoscar Hernández let a hard-hit, but very much catchable, line drive get over his head in right to score one run, and Bobby Witt Jr. added a two-run homer with two outs in the inning.
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“Obviously, tonight Dustin wasn’t sharp,” Roberts said. “And we certainly didn’t help him out defensively.”
And yet, the Dodgers (52-31) still wound up with the lead entering the latter innings. Max Muncy continued his two-month-long tear with a two-run homer in the second, giving him 12 long balls and 46 RBIs in his last 42 games.
Shohei Ohtani hits a home run in the first inning against the Royals on Friday. (Charlie Riedel / Associated Press)
Ohtani tied the score with an RBI triple in the fifth, before being driven home on a Mookie Betts single in the next at-bat.
In the fourth, fifth and seventh innings, the Royals (38-44) stranded a runner in scoring position — frustrating missed chances for a team trying to end a 10-game home losing streak.
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Then, in the bottom of the ninth, the game came…