LOS ANGELES — When Max Muncy lifted a sacrifice fly to deep center field in the 10th inning, walking off the D-backs to put a bow on Tuesday’s wild 4-3 victory, he finished the job that Yoshinobu Yamamoto started.
Yamamoto was the stopper his team needed and more on a dominant night on the mound in which he didn’t give up a hit through six innings and allowed only three baserunners. He threw an MLB career-high 110 pitches to complete seven scoreless frames.
Even though Yamamoto ended up with a no-decision after the D-backs rallied against Tanner Scott — ambushing him for two homers, a game-tying shot in the ninth and a go-ahead blast in the 10th — it was a statement outing against a team that had rocked him just two starts ago.
“I thought he was going to go the distance tonight,” Muncy said. “I thought he had the stuff to get the no-hitter. But he was really, really good, commanding all of his stuff. It really sucks we only gave him one run. Obviously, not a great job by us. But getting away with a win there, that’s obviously the biggest part.”
It was exactly the type of performance the Dodgers needed coming off a season-high four-game losing streak marked by a rough stretch of pitching.
Through the first seven games of the homestand, L.A. starters combined to post a 7.89 ERA that ranked 29th in the Majors in that span. During the losing streak, the team was outscored 32-20.
“Yoshi was fantastic,” manager Dave Roberts said. “We needed every bit of it. Certainly, we pushed him more than we have all year, and he earned that opportunity. … The split, the curveball, really came into play today. And that’s a very tough lineup to navigate, and he just competed his tail off.”
Yamamoto set the tone from the beginning with a clean first inning, breaking up a run of five straight games where opposing teams plated at least one run against the Dodgers in the opening frame. He retired the D-backs in order until Ketel Marte walked with one out in the fourth, and it was Marte who broke through with a long single off the right-field wall to end Yamamoto’s no-hit bid to lead off the seventh.
“Completing the full nine innings is really hard, and … my pitch count was going up,” Yamamoto said through interpreter Yoshihiro Sonoda. “So I wasn’t really thinking about [a no-hitter].”
The biggest moment may have been his final at-bat, when Roberts opted to let Yamamoto face Pavin Smith with runners on the corners and two outs in the seventh inning. Yamamoto had just walked Gabriel Moreno on his 104th pitch of the night, which was already one more than he had thrown all season.
When Yamamoto sent Smith down swinging, the crowd at Dodger Stadium erupted.
“I just felt right there in that moment, he was our best option,” Roberts said. “And it’s not about pitch count, it’s not about third time through. It’s about he’s our best option, and I felt with where our club is at right now, we need to give him the best chance to get out of that inning. And he proved all of us right.”
Tuesday marked Yamamoto’s second start of seven scoreless innings this season, and the third of his Major League career.
After dominating through his first seven starts, Yamamoto had his worst outing of the season two starts ago in Arizona, when the D-backs jumped on him for five runs on a pair of homers. The Dodgers right-hander bounced back with a quality start against the A’s last Wednesday, but he still lacked the sharpness he had in his season-opening run.
Even counting those two outings, Yamamoto has been a pillar of stability for the Dodgers’ rotation, which has already lost three members of its Opening Day starting five to injury. The team has received 12 starts of at least six innings this season, and Yamamoto is responsible for six of them.
Yamamoto has stepped up as the Dodgers’ ace, and his team is beginning to expect that caliber of outing when he takes the mound.
“There might have been a little pressure on him, but he didn’t show it. He was just himself out there,” Muncy said. “To me, that’s how he’s been all year, going all the way back to Spring Training. … It didn’t surprise me at all that he gave us the performance that he did.”
