MVN - Most Valuable Network

Billingsley Gives Dodgers Strong Outing to Win Series

Hellllo Andruw Jones. That’s right, with his seventh-inning go-ahead homerun today against the Brewers, Jones has extended his hitting streak to two games. It was his second long ball of the year in the Dodgers 7-2 win over the Brew Crew.

In all seriousness though, it was really good to see Jones hit that no-doubter to left. For all the time I spend bashing him for his awful hitting, I know he has been working very hard to try to fix it. Hopefully the homer means he’s got his mechanics and his mental problems worked out.

The offense came alive today but the real story was Chad Billingsley, who improved to 3-5 on the year. He had his best stuff of the season and didn’t allow a hit until Ben Sheets singled with two outs in the fifth inning. Bills went seven strong while allowing just one run on three hits with five strikeouts and four walks.

This was exactly the kind of performance we needed to get the starting pitching back on track. Hopefully the rest of the staff will not only rally around the fact that Billingsley threw a great game, but also that he went seven innings on the day. It was only the second time this year that he has made it that far in a game, but he’s not the only one who hasn’t carried his weight (insert clever Andruw Jones joke).

Unfortunately, short outings from our starters have become a common occurrence of late. The bullpen has been awesome picking up the starters’ slack, but if we hope to even get to the playoffs (and I know we all hope to do more than just that) we’re going to need the starters to go a lot longer.

Besides breaking out of a rotation-wide pitching slump, the offense came alive today also. Well, at least it did for one inning in the seventh when it broke a 0-0 tie with a six-run rally that, along with Jones’ homerun, featured a James Loney triple and homers from Jeff Kent and Gary Bennett.

The Kent bomb could be huge also. He’s been having a lot of trouble lately and is definitely a guy we need to get going. He had been playing well and was batting .298 as recently as May 3, but is now at .244 so maybe the homerun will get him back on track.

Bennett was actually the offensive star of the game. Along with his first homer of the year he also doubled and had four RBI on the game.

The only reason Bennett was in the lineup was because Blake DeWitt, who hit his third homer of the year yesterday, was out with back pain. That meant the third start of the season at third base for Russell Martin. Coincidentally both DeWitt and Furcal have injured backs, but supposedly DeWitt won’t be out long. He was actually supposed to play today before being scratched about five minutes before the game started. I pray that the injury is not worse than they think.

Tomorrow we begin what I believe to be one of the worst inventions in the history of baseball- interleague play. The Angels have been battling the A’s for first place in the AL West and have put together a very good season behind some great pitching.

In the absence of John Lackey, who recently returned from injury, Ervin Santana (6-0, 2.63) and tomorrow’s starter Joe Saunders (6-1, 2.48) have been lights out. Saunders will go up against Hiroki Kuroda (1-2, 3.59), who was great in his last outing before Jonathan Broxton gave the game away with six earned runs. Then on Saturday Torre will give Chan Ho Park (1-0, 2.16) his first start of the season to see if he can fix the Dodgers’ fifth starters woes.

Either way, someone in LA will be happy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Hiroki Kuroda, James Loney, Gary Bennett, Blake DeWitt, nate edelstein, nathaniel edelstein, Jonathon Broxton, Russell Martin, Jeff Kent, Joe Torre, Chan Ho Park, Rafael Furcal, Dodger Wins, Andruw Jones, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.