Dodgers’ offense goes silent against Tyler Anderson in loss to Rockies

LOS ANGELES — Their bullpen is undermanned and overburdened. Their rotation seems perpetually in a state of renovation or reconstruction with starting pitchers scattered from here to Rancho Cucamonga. But the Dodgers have their offense to prop it all up.

Not Friday night.

Left-hander Tyler Anderson retired the first 11 Dodgers in order and allowed only four hits in eight scoreless innings as the Colorado Rockies handed the Dodgers a 3-1 defeat.

Justin Turner did hit a home run with two outs in the ninth inning, the Dodgers’ 54th in June. That is a new franchise record for any calendar month (and four short of the major-league record for a month).

Chris Taylor came close to breaking the record right out of the gate. He sent Rockies right fielder Noel Cuevas to the wall with a long drive leading off the bottom of the first inning. That was as close to scoring as the Dodgers came against Anderson.

The 28-year-old left-hander fairly breezed through the Dodgers’ lineup. He struck out five of the first 11 Dodgers before allowing a soft single by Turner. The four hits he allowed were all singles, including a dribbler by Yasiel Puig that traveled no more than 20 feet. None of the baserunners advanced past first base.

“We’ve seen Anderson quite a bit,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “There’s some funk in there in the delivery. But tonight I think it was the cut fastball in on the righties. He kept us off balance with offspeed, the cutter, threw the fastball away, the slider.

“He has a three-, four-pitch mix we just really couldn’t get any swings off of.”

But the best thing Anderson did for the Rockies was pitch deep into the game, keeping the Dodgers away from the Rockies’ dreadful bullpen.

Anderson needed more than 12 pitches to retire the side in just two of his eight innings. He threw 96 pitches in all, completing eight innings for the first time in his 51 career starts.

In his past three starts away from pitcher-tormenting Coors Field, Anderson has allowed only three runs on 15 hits and two walks while striking out 19 in 22 innings.

Dodgers starter Rich Hill was only a step behind.

Hill allowed six hits and pitched into the seventh inning for the first time this season, striking out a season-high 10 along the way.

“The ball was coming out of my hand the way I wanted,” Hill said. “That’s what I was really pleased with today. The quality and consistency of my curveball was really what I wanted.”

In three starts since returning from his blister problem, Hill has allowed four earned runs on 14 hits, three walks and a jarring five hit batters while striking out 21 in 17-2/3 innings.

“He was really good,” Roberts said. “You look at the three starts he’s had since coming back. A really good one, just okay and another really good one.”

But he made one costly mistake.

Hill got No. 8 hitter Pat Valaika down 0-and-2 quickly in the fifth inning but couldn’t finish him off. Four pitches later, Hill left a 1-and-2 fastball up and over the plate. Even the .128-hitting Valaika knew what to do with that. He drove it over the wall in left-center for his first home run of the season.

Hill was done in the seventh inning. The Rockies were not.

They padded their lead with solo home runs by Nolan Arenado off Dodgers reliever Scott Alexander in the eighth inning and by Chris Iannetta off Yimi Garcia in the ninth.

5️⃣4️⃣! @redturn2’s solo shot sets a new #Dodgers franchise record for home runs in a single month. pic.twitter.com/zMdlvNjGoP

— SportsNet LA (@SportsNetLA) June 30, 2018

Dave Roberts reflects on Rich Hill’s night and what made getting to Tyler Anderson so tough for the #Dodgers offense tonight. pic.twitter.com/R5d2Hl57fM

— SportsNet LA (@SportsNetLA) June 30, 2018

Rich Hill talks with @alannarizzo about his solid 6-inning outing in which he struck out 10 and surrendered just one run. #Dodgers pic.twitter.com/eX69fds8sF

— SportsNet LA (@SportsNetLA) June 30, 2018

The Los Angeles Football Club is set to play seven matches in the next 27 days, culminating with the much-anticipated rematch against the L.A. Galaxy at the Banc of California Stadium on July 26.

Five of the games, including a U.S. Open Cup quarterfinal against Portland on July 18, will take place in South Los Angeles, where LAFC remains unbeaten through a half dozen matches.

A surging Philadelphia Union will have their shot at being the first club to take three points against LAFC on Saturday.

With three matches taking place over the next eight days, LAFC coach Bob Bradley spent time with his technical and player performance staffs to map out potential lineups.

“As we go into a busy stretch we’re going to count on everybody,” Bradley said. “Certainly it’s going to be great when Andre (Horta) is going to be able to join us on the field. Marco comes back. We start to have more options. That busy stretch pays off in big ways because you can keep everyone fresh.”

Midfielder Mark-Anthony Kaye has moved beyond lingering hamstring issues that bothered him ahead of the team’s 2-0 triumph over Columbus. However 21-year-old Uruguayan winger Diego Rossi is listed as questionable with his own hamstring irritation. Rossi has started each of LAFC’s 15 MLS games, and pushed hard in Open Cup play as well.

Otherwise, LAFC remains relatively healthy as it faces the Union (6-7-3, 21 points), which has won two straight: an Open Cup Round of 16 away match against the New York Red Bull and an emphatic 4-0 performance in MLS competition over the Vancouver Whitecaps on June 23.

“Of late, Philadelphia has played well,” Bradley said. “They’ve got a good way of keep going throughout a season and improve. What I see from recent games from them has been positive.”

Hoping for its second fast start in a row – LAFC (8-4-3, 27 points) jumped ahead of Columbus 2-0 within the game’s first 10 minutes, aided by the team’s earliest goal thus far when captain Laurent Ciman hit a bending free kick four minutes into the match – Zimmerman noted that despite the Black & Gold’s quick success they have not consistently jumped ahead against their opposition this season.

Philadelphia features a pair of homegrown 19-year-old defenders in the middle – Austin Trusty and Mark McKenzie – whom, Bradley noted, have played well together.

Czech Republic international Borek Dockal, 29, leads Philadelphia with six goals and five assists.

“In these critical summer months, as it creeps to July and August, you have to be a team that finds ways to grind out results on the road and that will start now going on a tough trip to LAFC,” Philadelphia coach Jim Curtin said.

While the Eastern Conference’s sixth-place team has been formidable at home, the Union is a mere 1-5-1 on the road, finishing three goals to the opposition’s 12.

“We are definitely in good spirits now but we know there’s a lot of points to be taken, especially in July,” LAFC defender Walker Zimmerman said.

A win on the last day of June would mark LAFC’s fourth straight victory.

LOS ANGELES FC vs. PHILADELPHIA UNION

Kickoff: Saturday, 5 p.m.; Banc of California Stadium

TV: YouTube TV, UniMas

Radio: 710 AM, 980 AM

Remember when the “Axis of Evil” was just Iran, Iraq and North Korea? Boy, those where the days!

Today the “Axis of Evil” is Donald Trump, FOX News and Jeff Sessions, or, if you prefer, the Lame-Stream Media, Crooked Hillary and over-paid America-hating football players.

Of course, your list of evil-doers is probably a lot longer than just three. Hate is all the rage today, more popular that mangotinis and truffle fries. So, don’t hold back! Feel free to empty your spleen in a good old-fashioned finger-pointing, scarlet letter branding, public enemy list compiling laundry list of evil doers.

“We have met the enemy and he is us”, said Walt Kelly’s Pogo in a famous 1971 comic strip. Today, we see enemies everywhere; in our government, our businesses, the pulpit on the ballfield, in our colleges and universities, our newsrooms and even across the table from us in our dining rooms.

We see evil everywhere — except in our mirrors.

America in the Age of Trump has become a circular firing squad of vitriol and hyperbolic accusations threatening to tear the country apart along every social seismic fault line; race, gender, class, religion, no religion, short, tall, thin or fat, and let me preemptively apologize for using the F word. Honestly, I need to lose a few myself.

The President has contributed mightily to this grotesque incivility. He did not, however, invent it. Donald Trump is simply the final destination of the hyperbole highway we’ve been traveling down for decades. Every president since LBJ has either been Hitler or worse. Yes, worse!

LBJ was a baby killer, Nixon was Satan incarnate, Gerry Ford a dumb jock. Ronald Reagan was a bigger dummy than Ford — an actor and a cowboy who was going to get us all blown up.

G.H.W. Bush was Hitler Lite while Bill Clinton was a closet communist.

George W Bush was a dumb Hitler and/or Dick Cheney’s puppet while Cheney is (literally) a heartless Darth Vader.

Barack Hussain Obama was not only a communist but a jihadist to boot and that brings us to Trump. What can be said about President Trump that hasn’t already been said by Robert DeNiro?

Donald Trump’s spokeswoman, Sara Huckabee Sanders, was famously/infamously bounced from a Virginia restaurant because she works for the president. Trump advisor Steve Miller was heckled out of a restaurant, as was Home Land Security Director, Kirstjen Nielsen. Pam Bondi, Florida’s Attorney General, required a police escort to escape a screening of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”, a documentary about Mr. Rogers, a man who spent his entire life encouraging civility and respect for differences.

The ancient political fissure of American politic s– more government vs less government — has degenerated into a national non-stop cyber-bulling attack tearing not only government apart, but friends and family as well. Today we start in the gutter.

When we believe our political opponents are actually evil, not simply wrong, “just like Hitler”, then no hold is barred.

It’s as if the dorm room stoner question, “If you could have killed Hitler would you have done it?” is now the national ethos. Otherwise good and rational people feel not only justified getting in the face of their perceived enemies but morally obligated to do so.

This is Exhibit A of the dangers of conflating politics and faith. Morality is not negotiable. For decades, radical anti-abortion activists have blocked the doors of clinics, screaming “murderer!” at frightened teen-aged girls and doctors were murdered — all in the name of God.

In the 60s, so-called “peace activists” like the Weather Underground turned violent. Animal Rights extremists and eco-terrorists have bombed research labs and spiked trees, killing loggers. We risk becoming a nation of John Browns where our own sense of moral outrage allows us to justify anything.

The announced retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy portends even more hysteria; with apocalyptic prophecies of the return of back-alley abortions, racial and sexual orientation oppression and every other societal ill including locusts and boils. And the plan is what? Civil War? Is that what we want?

Californians will vote this November on a ballot measure to split the Golden State into three nuggets, the Fool’s Golden States. There are separatist movements active in Hawaii, Texas, and an ecotopia breakaway plan known as “Cascadia” proposed for the Pacific Northwest. We’re pulling at the ties that bind us as a nation as if there are no consequences to undoing the American experience.

The dissolution of these United States would mark the greatest failure in the history of mankind.

These are turbulent times not the End Times. Donald Trump will not be president forever. He too shall pass. Both his supporters and detractors should keep this in mind if we’re ever to put down the shovel.

Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sundays. Hear him weekdays, 5-10, on AM 790 KABC. He can be reached at: Doug@KABC.com.

SACRAMENTO — During the 2012 election, this writer was appalled by the loutish behavior displayed by incumbent Joe Biden in his vice presidential debate against GOP challenger Paul Ryan, as Biden smirked and interrupted his way through the contest. In fact, my outraged column argued that Biden’s behavior was “an affront to civility” because of its bullying nature. Civility doesn’t meaning rolling over, but it does mean behaving with a little decorum.

I laughed out loud after coming across that long-forgotten diatribe. It brought to mind a term from the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York: “defining deviancy down.” Basically, the Democratic senator argued that as society becomes accustomed to deviancy, societal standards are lowered. What seemed outrageous yesterday is accepted today. Life begins to resemble a game of limbo. How low can you go?

I’m not the first one to use that phrase in the current environment, but that six-year-old debate wouldn’t even be noteworthy today, given the antics of the current president and his foes. It’s pretty clear from social media that the president’s crudity and personal attacks are not a flaw in his presidency, but one of its high points. Many conservatives are thrilled to have someone who isn’t playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules.

Many leftists — including folks who have shouted down conservative speakers on college campuses — now argue that Donald Trump’s administration is such a fundamental threat to our democratic order that it’s OK to harass members of his administration. “(I)f you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” said U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles.

Although some Democrats castigated Waters, most people on both sides instinctively point to the other side as an example why it’s OK that “our” side did something uncivil. It even has a term: “whataboutism.” And conservative backers of Trump routinely chide “Never Trumpers” for trying to hold the president up to traditional standards of decency.

For example, former Republican Education Secretary William J. Bennett argued in 2016 that conservative Trump critics “suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.” After hearing those comments on Fox News, I knew that the battle over civility was lost. Bennett, after all, is author of “The Book of Virtues,” which sought to instill in young people some timeless principles.

The conservative National Review quoted Bennett’s previous words to shame him for those comments about moral superiority: “Good people — people of character and moral literacy — can be conservative, and good people can be liberal. We must not permit our disputes over thorny political questions to obscure the obligation we have to offer instruction to all our young people in the area in which we have, as a society, reached a consensus: namely, on the importance of good character, and some of its pervasive particulars.”

Now, that’s a sentiment with which I agree, but one that is out of favor. Even some religious leaders have so thoroughly embraced the president that they’ve let their moral voices atrophy. The same folks who told us that character is what really matters, perhaps only believed that to be true when it comes to Bill Clinton and other politicians they don’t like. That’s not a virtue. It’s hypocrisy.

But what about Hillary and the left and the warriors of political correctness? So round and round we go. As I write this, by the way, I’m celebrating two major Supreme Court victories that came about largely because of Trump’s victory and his appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. Last week, on 5-4 votes, the court tossed aside the requirement that public-sector workers pay union dues and invalidated a noxious California law that forced pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to provide pro-abortion information to their clients.

Both decisions uphold freedom of speech, which is a foundation of a peaceful and civil society. But why can’t we still criticize the president’s assault on other aspects of civil society? Some of his supporters argue that “politics is binary.” In other words, there are only going to be two real choices on any presidential ballot. But if that’s the case, then we always need to pick a side rather than maintain a consistent standard lest we abet our political enemies.

It’s easy to see where that kind of endless grudge match might lead. A new poll from Rasmussen Reports found that 31 percent of Americans believe that another civil war is likely in the next five years. We all see the anger and viciousness that has infected all manner of American discourse. I don’t believe a war is by any means likely, but I’m fearful of the kind of discourse we might find acceptable by the start of the next presidential election.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. He was a Register editorial writer from 1998-2009. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

LOS ANGELES — Huh?

A series of head-scratching moves with their prized rookie pitcher culminated in right-hander Walker Buehler being optioned to Class-A Rancho Cucamonga just before game time Friday night. The move came without a corresponding addition to the roster, leaving the Dodgers with only 24 players on their active roster for Friday’s game against the Colorado Rockies – 23 when you accept that rookie left-hander Caleb Ferguson was unavailable after pitching two innings Thursday afternoon.

Right-hander J.T. Chargois will be added to the roster before Saturday’s game.

The move to Rancho Cucamonga for Buehler is essentially a rehab assignment – the one he flew to Oklahoma City for on Wednesday but didn’t get.

Instead, the Dodgers had Buehler on a 6 a.m. flight back from Oklahoma City on Thursday morning and activated him from the DL to pitch just a couple hours after landing back in LA.

That did not go well. Buehler was roughed up, allowing five runs in one inning when the Dodgers – their bullpen depleted by injuries and usage – had hoped he could pitch three. The outing made it clear that Buehler needed work before he would be ready to rejoin the Dodgers’ rotation.

“That’s the thing with Walker … he needs to be built up as a starter,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said before Friday’s game – and before the roster move was announced. “Obviously yesterday didn’t go as planned. So going forward the goal is to get him built up – what’s the best way to do that, what makes the most sense for him?”

What made the most sense was probably to leave Buehler in Oklahoma City and promote a reliever from the Triple-A roster to replace Josh Fields who went on the DL with a shoulder injury. Despite their desire to handle the young pitcher with care in every other aspect – carefully parceling out his innings, most obviously – the Dodgers chose to bring Buehler back and put him a difficult position against the Chicago Cubs on Thursday.

Ferguson, meanwhile, remains on the active roster – a sixth starter being used as a long man out of the bullpen. But not for a couple days.

“He’ll be down for two days, then you look at Sunday, Monday potentially being available out of the ’pen,” Roberts said of Ferguson.

“I don’t want to get too far ahead of it. … Right now, where we’re at with our ’pen – with guys hurt, with guys taxed – his length is huge for us.”

HOME RUN DERBY

No one has hit more home runs than the Dodgers in June (53, matching the franchise record for a calendar month) and no one in the National League has hit more this season (109).

But the team’s two leading sluggers – Max Muncy and Cody Bellinger – have heard nothing about participating in the Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game in Washington D.C.

“I haven’t heard a thing – so probably not,” Bellinger said of reprising his Derby role as a rookie last year.

Bellinger said his willingness to participate for a second consecutive year would likely hinge on whether he was already making the flight to Washington, D.C. for this year’s game. Bellinger (who has 16 home runs this season) is polling a distant fourth at first base in the most recent update of the fan voting for the All-Star starting lineup.

“If I was in the All-Star Game, probably yes,” he said. “If I’m not then probably not.

“But I haven’t heard anything.”

Muncy leads the Dodgers with 17 home runs, tied for fourth in the NL going into Friday’s games, in the midst of a breakout season. He said he has heard nothing about the Home Run Derby “so I’m not thinking about it.” Muncy is not on the All-Star ballot.

Like Bellinger, Muncy does have some experience as a derby participant – at the California League All-Star Game in 2013 and the Texas League All-Star Game in 2014.

Muncy recalled hitting just one home run in the Cal League derby but finished second to Texas Rangers outfielder Ryan Rua the next year.

ALSO

Left-hander Clayton Kershaw will make his next start on regular rest Tuesday against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Roberts said six innings or approximately 90 pitches is a likely cap for Kershaw’s third start since returning from a back strain.

Muncy was not in the starting lineup Friday. Roberts said it was time to give Muncy a break after 11 consecutive starts. But he also acknowledged that Muncy is dealing with “a little kind of hip thing that he’s managed.” Muncy is expected to be back in the lineup Saturday.

UP NEXT

Rockies (RHP German Marquez, 5-8, 5.53 ERA) at Dodgers (RHP Kenta Maeda, 5-4, 3.44 ERA), Saturday, 4:15 p.m., Fox/11

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