Mookie Betts swears he didn’t mean to look at the scoreboard Sunday afternoon.
But when he did, it crystalized the urgent situation the Dodgers found themselves in.
Late in Sunday’s game against the lowly Colorado Rockies, the Dodgers were trailing and in danger of dropping two of three to the National League West’s worst team.
Meanwhile, the NL West’s second-place team, the San Diego Padres, were in the process of completing a series sweep over the historically bad Chicago White Sox, a result that caught Betts’ eye on the out-of-town scoreboard along the right-field wall.
“I didn’t mean to look at it,” Betts said. “But they won. And we needed to win a game there.”
So, win a game Betts and the Dodgers did.
After trailing by four runs entering the seventh, and one run entering the ninth, the Dodgers side-stepped disaster and inched closer to an NL West division title, with Shohei Ohtani and Betts hitting back-to-back home runs in the ninth inning for a walk-off 6-5 win at Dodger Stadium.
Had the Dodgers lost, their division lead would have been in peril, trimmed to two games with the Padres coming to town for a monumental three-game set at Chavez Ravine this week.
Now, however, the Dodgers have some breathing room. They are still three games up on the Padres in the standings. Their magic number to clinch the division is down to four. And unless they get swept this week, a division title — and, even more importantly, a likely first-round bye in the playoffs — appears to be within their grasp.
“That,” manager Dave Roberts said, “felt like two wins,”
For most of the afternoon, Sunday was shaping up to feel like two losses for the Dodgers.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto struggled through a four-run, three-inning start, failing to command the ball (three walks) or limit contact (four hits) in a start that fell well short of the six-inning target Roberts had set pregame.
“It’s all about my mechanics,” Yamamoto said through interpreter Yoshihiru Sonoda. “My mechanics were off and the speed of my motion were a little off. That’s something that I have to make some adjustments to.”
The Dodgers’…