Over three nights in Pittsburgh this week, the Dodgers didn’t win a game, despite playing a last-place Pirates club.
They didn’t grow their division lead, despite the second-place San Diego Padres suffering their own three-game sweep.
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And, as veteran infielder Miguel Rojas stressed Thursday night, they simply didn’t look like a team capable of sharing in any joy, despite their constant insistence that better play will materialize.
“I feel like ever since we started playing poorly a couple months ago, the pressure and frustration has been building up on the team,” Rojas said.
“We know what we’re capable of. We’re playing under the threshold, the goal that we have. But at the end of the day, we gotta put all that aside … and we have to find some joy and some motivation to come to the ballpark. Not just, ‘I gotta do my job.’ We have to come here and enjoy ourselves around the clubhouse, regardless of the situation.”
The situation, of course, looks bleak, with Thursday’s 5-3 loss to the Pirates sealing a confounding three-game sweep.
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Read more: ‘We need to start playing better.’ Slumping Dodgers lose again to the lowly Pirates
“It’s frustrating. It’s embarrassing,” Rojas said. “But we have to be able to turn the page and come tomorrow with a better attitude. … We have to find a way to enjoy the game a little bit more.”
This loss, granted, was the easiest to explain.
In six scoreless innings, Cy Young frontrunner Paul Skenes was his typically dominant self. Already the major-league ERA leader, the second-year right-hander stuck out eight batters, gave up just two hits, escaped his only real threat by stranding a pair of two-out baserunners in the third inning, and otherwise overpowered the Dodgers with a seven-pitch repertoire headlined by his upper-90s mph sidearm fastball.
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His counterpart, two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell, was nowhere near top form, giving up five runs in five innings despite largely limiting much hard contact.
The Dodgers (78-62) did finally show some life offensively in the top of the ninth, scoring three times (their first runs since the eighth inning of Tuesday’s game) and putting the tying run on base. But by then, it was too little, too late — with the game ending on a three-pitch strikeout by newly called-up catcher Ben Rortvedt, the latest hair-pulling moment in a season of deflation.
“We’re just not playing good baseball, that’s really it,”…