BALTIMORE -- Yoshinobu Yamamoto came within one out of a no-hitter, pitching 8 2/3 masterful innings on Saturday night at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
Somehow, the Dodgers lost, 4-3, to the Orioles.
After Jackson Holliday’s solo home run broke up Yamamoto’s no-hit bid, Blake Treinen came in and allowed a double, hit a batter, uncorked a wild pitch and walked two -- the latter forcing across the second run.
Tanner Scott then entered with the bases loaded and gave up Emmanuel Rivera’s walk-off single, sending the Dodgers to an unfathomable defeat and perhaps tempting a club that still leads the NL West to start feeling sorry for itself.
Manager Dave Roberts was having none of it.
“Blake had a bad night,” Roberts said. “When you walk two guys and you can't put guys away, it’s hard to say you’re snakebit. You make your own breaks. … He wasn’t good tonight. Very uncharacteristic, but it happened.”
Despite a fifth straight loss and their seventh out of eight, the Dodgers will enter Sunday’s series finale a game up in the division on the Padres, who snapped their own five-game slide on Saturday night.
And maybe there’s an element of the absurdity of Saturday’s defeat that will help the club move on.
How absurd? For starters, 20 of 30 MLB parks would have held Holliday’s long fly ball, including the one where the Dodgers play 81 games a season.
Then there was Treinen, who put three batters aboard via walk or hit-by-pitch for the first time since a rare sixth-inning outing on June 15, 2024 in a home loss to the Royals. He had allowed zero runs -- earned or otherwise -- and only six hits over his last eight outings, spanning 6 1/3 innings.
“Blake Treinen has been in some of the toughest spots that any relief pitcher can imagine,” Roberts said. “So I have a hard time believing that any spot or moment is too big for him. It just came down to Blake had a bad night.”
When it was all over, it was only the ninth time since 1961 that a big league club had carried a lead in a no-hitter through 8 2/3 innings and failed to win. The Dodgers have oddly been involved in four of those, and are the only franchise in that span to lose that way twice.
“There’s really no words,” Treinen said. “You’re paid to be a professional and at least throw strikes, and I didn’t do that, and cost one of the better outings I’ve ever seen in my career with Yama. He deserved better than that.”
Despite his longest outing in pitches and innings since his arrival from Japan, Yamamoto showed absolutely no signs of slowing, arguably even executing the pitch he wanted on his 112th offering, a 2-1 cutter that caught the inside of the plate.
“He called cutter, and I thought it was a good pitch,” said catcher Ben Rortvedt. “He has conviction in it. I think he hit his spot, too. Didn’t get all of it, but got enough of it to poke it out.”
Yamamoto struck out a career-high-tying 10 batters and walked two. He required only 36 pitches to record his last 11 outs.
“Yamamoto is so good,” O’s interim manager Tony Mansolino said of the 27-year-old right-hander who joined the Dodgers on a 12-year, $325 million deal before the 2024 season. “I think pitch 101 was 98 [mph]. … The split was filthy, the curveball, the cutter -- the whole thing that he had was no-hit-type stuff tonight.”
Mookie Betts had an RBI single and an RBI triple for the Dodgers, who had 10 hits as a team but still scored three runs or fewer for the sixth time in eight games.
Shohei Ohtani’s third-inning groundout drove in the game’s first run. Miguel Rojas doubled twice and scored twice.
“It’s the closest we’ve seen in a while,” Roberts said of the offense. “I thought the at-bat quality was good, even with some guys obviously in our lineup that are struggling.”