‘Came up a little short:' Dodgers drop seventh game in a row, longest streak since 2017

New York Times

12-07-2025

SAN FRANCISCO — For a week now, there has been no ritual of music for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Hushed, somber tones have been the soundtrack of the longest losing stretch that baseball's pillar of regular-season success has seen in recent memory. This time, at least, their bats showed signs of life.
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The tying run made it as far as 180 feet from home plate before Will Smith chopped the double-play ball that squelched the rally. The result remained the same by Friday night's end.
The Dodgers fell to the San Francisco Giants 8-7 for their seventh consecutive loss. There was no music in the visiting clubhouse at Oracle Park. No quick jokes or laughs. An L7 is only funny when followed by the word 'weenie.'
It's the team's longest losing streak since 2017. Their National League West lead has shrunk from nine games to four in a week. The sky is not falling. But facing an old rival does little to jolt what should already be there in the midst of the team's worst stretch in eight years.
'Had a chance to win again,' Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. 'And unfortunately, came up a little short.'
Some of the flaws in Friday's game were familiar. Dustin May has not missed a start after a star-crossed career full of injuries, but each start has resembled a ticking clock as to what inning the talented right-hander would lose command and get hit hard. He's struggled to dominate right-handed hitters like he has at his best, such as when he left a sinker out over the plate that Giants shortstop Willy Adames hit out of the deepest part of a cavernous Oracle Park.
May couldn't mitigate his issues against lefties much better, leaving a two-strike fastball over the plate that Jung Hoo Lee hammered over Teoscar Hernández's glove in right for a two-run triple. Maybe a healthier option than Hernández, who is not 100 percent and dealing with a bruised left foot on top of it, makes that catch and saves those runs. It had a 20 percent catch probability, according to Statcast. A better pitch makes it a non-issue.
An inning later, Dominic Smith launched a thigh-high fastball into the left field seats, threatening to turn the game into a rout.
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'Just got a little bit out of sync,' May said. He'd locked something in until he felt something off in his mechanics to start the fourth inning. He started the frame with two walks and six consecutive balls. 'Couldn't time things back up.'
Through a career-high 94 1/3 innings, May has a 4.96 ERA. That's the tenth-worst mark in baseball.
'Not to make an excuse for him,' Roberts said of May, who has hardly pitched as he's endured multiple elbow surgeries and a life-threatening torn esophagus. 'But it's part of his path back and trying to fine-tune some things. And at times it's elite, it's commanded, and then other times, it kind of goes awry a little bit. And you give up free passes or make a mistake (in the) middle of the plate to give up slug, and so that's sort of what happened today.'
The Dodgers can prioritize the long game. But winning now still matters for them. It arguably matters even more for May. If the Dodgers get healthy as they think they will, they'll have to have some tough conversations. May, a free agent at year's end, figures to be part of them.
By the end of the fifth, they looked up at a 7-2 deficit. The Dodgers have constructed a lineup that, for months, has still made nights like that surmountable. They have spent the better part of the week looking dormant. Their superstars have slumped. Their supporting pieces haven't come to life. Throughout the last six games, they'd topped two runs in a game only once.
The Dodgers still cracked to life against Logan Webb, who last month fed this lineup with a mouthful of cutters to great success. Hernández drove a fly ball towards the gap that Lee couldn't quite track down to bring home a couple of runs. Michael Conforto, amid his disastrous year, chased Webb when he smoked a sinker out over the center field fence to halve the Giants' lead.
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Smith brought them even closer an inning later, piercing All-Star reliever Randy Rodriguez's armor for a run on a single up the middle.
'We just strung some hits together, something we haven't done in a while,' Mookie Betts said. 'Obviously, I know it sucks, but you have to try to take some positive out of it. At least we battled back.'
There are no moral victories in cutting a deficit to a run, much less in a seven-game losing stretch. Betts fouled off a pair of wicked Camilo Doval sliders in the ninth before punching through a single to give his team a chance. Esteury Ruiz pinch-ran and swiped second. But after Freddie Freeman worked a four-pitch walk, Smith pounded a first-pitch sinker into the dirt. So went another loss, and another quiet scene that followed.
'Today we were able to string some hits together, put some innings together, but we just come up short,' Betts said.