Rays 1 Dodgers 3: I thought it would be worse

The Dodgers have the best record in baseball.

The Rays are treading water and, for good measure, had a last minute scratch of their starter today.

So I thought the Rays would be uncompetitive in this series and this game. But they weren’t!

With Shane Baz suffering from the flu, the Rays called up Jacob Lopez to make a spot start against the Dodgers today. Lopez has pitched a few major league innings with mixed results. Even his work in Durham, where he has a 4.08 ERA, hasn’t been dominant. So throwing him into a packed Dodger stadium to face Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts seemed more like the setup for a disaster movie than for a competitive major league baseball game.

But Lopez was not the reason the Rays lost this game. He pitched an impressive five innings, giving up just two hits. One of those hits, unfortunately, was a solo home run from the bat Enrique Hernandez. It was reliever Richard Lovelady who gave up the home run that would cost them the game, a two-run shot by Mookie Betts in the eighth inning.

The Rays had the same five hits as the Dodgers, but scored just once, when Johnny De Luca homered.

DeLuca also had an outfield assist to turn a double play that would have been especially significant had the Rays managed to win the game.

Junior Caminero continued to hit the ball hard; his double was, at 113.9 mph, the hardest hit ball of the game, and it just missed clearing the fence.