LOS ANGELES — For the first time in three years, it’s been hard for the Los Angeles Dodgers to find separation. For the better part of a decade, the Dodgers have allowed themselves the luxury of treating the stretch run as a trial period, with only a Game 163 in 2018 and an NL West race with the Giants that went down to the wire in 2021 representing anything like true stakes in September. Advertisement Cruise control has its benefits, though it is hard not to wonder how a month of relatively meaningless baseball undid the last two Dodgers clubs that combined to win 211 games in the regular season and just one in the postseason.
“(Last) September felt like you didn’t have anything to play for,” Miguel Rojas said over the weekend of the Dodgers club that reached a double-digit division lead on August 16 last year and spent its September trying to line up their patchwork pitching. Then they got swept in the NLDS. They won’t have the luxury of waiting for this year’s group to figure it out.
The Dodgers entered Tuesday with the most wins in the major leagues (74). They also happened to have two of the hottest clubs in the sport, the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks , in the same division and hot on their tails. The Dodgers have chosen to spin this as a positive.
It’ll be good, they’ve said, to have stakes to keep themselves going rather than trying to force it themselves before the postseason. Those stakes came into play Tuesday night. The Dodgers hung a.