PHOENIX -- A month and change into the season, there's only one division in baseball where four teams have winning records, all with 20 or more victories apiece.
Welcome to the wild, wild NL West.
After the Dodgers won the previous World Series and kept the good times rolling with a bustling offseason, they were widely viewed as favorites to not only win the division, but repeat as champions -- something that has not been done in more than two decades.
Not so fast. As Thursday night's 5-3 loss to the D-backs at Chase Field showed, there's a reason they play 162 games -- and some of the Dodgers' steepest competition in their title defense could come from within their own division.
"I think that we all knew going into the season that the teams in our division were prepared to have good seasons, and they're talented," manager Dave Roberts said. "We haven't seen these guys, so it's good to get in front of them. And you just want to go out there and play good baseball, but it's gonna be a fun season."
Through Thursday's action, the Dodgers (25-13) are leading the pack, followed by the Padres (23-13), Giants (24-14) and D-backs (20-18).
Remarkably, this series in Arizona marks only the second time the Dodgers have faced an NL West opponent this season. They swept the Rockies -- who, at 6-31, are already out of the picture -- in three games at Dodger Stadium last month.
And in Los Angeles' first game against a fellow NL West contender, one of the team's most reliable performers, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, had his worst start yet. He allowed a season-high five runs, all earned, across five innings on a pair of homers.
The first was a fourth-inning grand slam from Gabriel Moreno that doubled the number of earned runs Yamamoto had allowed on the season on one swing. The second was a solo shot from Ketel Marte in the fifth. It was the first time both had left the yard this year.
Thursday marked the first time this season that Yamamoto had pitched on five days' rest, rather than six, although Roberts did not believe that the change in routine affected his performance.
Leading up to Moreno's grand slam in the fourth, Pavin Smith drew a leadoff walk. Then Josh Naylor hit a hard grounder at shortstop Mookie Betts, who dove to keep it in the infield but didn't make a clean throw to second base for an out. Yamamoto got to 0-2 on his next batter, Eugenio Suárez, but hit him with a slider to load the bases for Moreno.
"I just don't think that it was any type of fatigue," Roberts said. "I thought the stuff was still good. The fastball had life. Fastball had just missed a little bit tonight, just off the plate, a handful of times."
“Overall, my stuff wasn’t too bad," Yamamoto said through interpreter Yoshihiro Sonoda. "But the grand slam, that cost the game.”
On the flip side, the Dodgers had 10 hard-hit balls (95 mph or higher exit velocity) against D-backs starter Brandon Pfaadt, of which seven went for outs. L.A. rallied for two runs in the eighth, and brought up the tying run in Michael Conforto with one out -- but he hit a grounder to Marte, who made a stellar play to turn two.
Conforto has struggled greatly at the plate to open the season, but he made quality contact on Thursday, even though he had nothing to show for it.
"I’m definitely trying to focus on what I can control," Conforto said. "Hitting the ball hard is definitely one of those things. Try to build off of that. … I’m just frustrated to not come through in the eighth."
Even when the Dodgers were down to their last out in the top of the ninth, Shohei Ohtani went deep, his 11th homer of the year. The fight was there, but it was just too late.
The Dodgers were aware of how their divisional rivals were performing through the first month-plus, but they tried not to focus on their opponents. Now, facing a competitive NL West team for the first time, they got a taste of how intense the season could be.
"I think the records show there’s a lot of great teams in this division," Conforto said. "It’s going to be competitive right down to the end. There’s just a lot of great players in this division. We’ve got to bring our A-game and take advantage of every opportunity."