In baseball, your favorite team will almost assuredly lose upwards of 50 games a season, no matter how talented the roster is. Yesterday was one of what will be plenty of losses for the Dodgers this season, and the dream of going 162-0 is now over. The Phillies (6-1) held the Dodgers (8-1) scoreless until the ninth inning, where the slugging Tommy Edman added his fifth home run of the season. The team managed to play sloppier than they did in the final game against Atlanta, and this time they weren’t able to squeeze a win out of it. Best to get the annoying losses out of the way early in the year. Chad recapped the entirety of the ugly loss last night. Hopefully today goes differently, with Roki Sasaki looking to bounce back in his third start of the season, against the veteran Aaron Nola.
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| 1:05 P.M. | Philadelphia | ||
| DH | Ohtani (L) | DH | Schwarber (L) |
| SS | Betts | SS | Turner |
| RF | T. Hernández | 1B | Harper (L) |
| LF | Conforto (L) | 3B | Bohm |
| 2B | Edman (S) | LF | Kepler (L) |
| 3B | Muncy (L) | RF | Castellanos |
| CF | Pages | C | Realmuto |
| 1B | K. Hernández | 2B | Stott (L) |
| C | Barnes | CF | Marsh (L) |
| P | Sasaki (R) | P | Nola (R) |
Austin Barnes will get his second start of the year tonight, as Will Smith is available off the bench. Max Muncy is back in the lineup today with the right-handed Nola on the mound. It’s unclear early in the year if they plan on platooning Muncy in a significant way this year, but he’ll have plenty of runway to get going. Andy Pages remains in center field with Edman sticking at second base until Freddie Freeman returns. Pages made yet another baserunning error last night, getting picked off in front of Mookie Betts. He wasn’t the only guilty one last night, but he now has a history of being a terrible baserunner, in addition to the glove being below average in center field and the bat starting slow. Leash might be getting quite short with Pages currently. Kiké Hernández hasn’t been hitting well, but his defense at first base has been excellent in the absence of Freddie.
The Phillies will run out an identical lineup as last night, their “A” lineup as they don’t have to platoon any of their starters against right-handed pitching.
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Nola took the loss in his first outing of the year, allowing five runs on six hits and no walks with eight strikeouts over 5.1 innings against the Washington Nationals. He was cruising early but allowed two game changing homers in the fifth and sixth innings. He’s struggled with the long ball the last two years, giving up over thirty in both 2023 and 2024. His 62 homers surrendered since 2023 is the highest mark in baseball.
He faced the Dodgers twice last season, with a decisive result in both games. He won his first start against them, going six innings allowing just one run with nine strikeouts, and lost his second start allowing four runs over six innings with four strikeouts.
After a high traffic but decent start in his season debut in Tokyo, Sasaki had a very poor outing in his Dodger Stadium debut. He recorded just five outs, allowing two runs on three hits and four walks with two strikeouts. His pitch count ballooned early with his inability to land any of his pitches for strikes with any consistency. He threw 61 pitches recording those five outs, and only 32 of them were strikes. He’s currently sitting with nine walks in 4.2 innings thus far, although he never had a walk rate above 7.1% (2.59 BB/9) in the NPB. He’ll look to bounce back against a very strong offense in a very difficult environment. His stuff is clearly good enough to record outs, but he has to prove he can throw strikes. He’ll figure it out at some point, and hopefully it’s today.
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Great news for the update on Shohei Ohtani‘s throwing progression. He’s still a couple months out, but it’s nice to see that his progression has started back up again and seems to be going well.
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First pitch is at 1:05 PT on SNLA and nationally on FS1.
