Jack Flaherty has been good for the Dodgers since arriving in a deadline trade last month. He has three wins in five starts. He has a 3.49 earned run average and 34 strikeouts. And, at a time when the club has been without aces Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, he has provided stability by working into the sixth inning in all but one outing.
“What Jack has done,” manager Dave Roberts said, “has been everything we hoped for.”
As the Dodgers enter the home stretch, however, Flaherty may have to do even more.
Yamamoto is weeks away from recovering from his shoulder injury. Glasnow’s timeline is even more worrying as his elbow injury, which was initially minor, continues to linger.
If the postseason started tomorrow, Flaherty would likely be the Dodgers’ Game 1 starter.
That’s why, as solid as he looked in a six-inning, three-run outing against the powerful Baltimore Orioles on Tuesday night, it wasn’t enough to meet his own high standards, nor the needs of an undermanned Dodgers team.
Once again, the right-hander was fine. But in a 3-2 loss at a packed Dodger Stadium, he wasn’t good enough to save his new team from defeat.
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“Overall, just two pitches I’d really like to get back,” Flaherty said. “I just keep looking for ways to get outs. I’ve got to get further.”
Flaherty avoided the worst-case scenario, staying in the game after being hit by a Colton Cowser fly ball in the fifth inning that hit his right wrist. Both Flaherty and Roberts believed the pitcher would be OK after the game.
In the previous at-bat, however, Flaherty made one of his two big errors, allowing a go-ahead, two-run homer to Baltimore’s ninth hitter, Ramon Urias, on a slider that stayed high just long enough to reach the bottom of the strike zone.
“I’m not trying to throw it there,” said Flaherty, who knelt in frustration as Urias’ ball sailed into left field. “I just need to get it more toward the outer half and get it down. That’s where he can control it and he got a good swing at it. It doesn’t always happen. The hitting is tough. But … you want to make a better pitch there.”
This has been a common theme during Flaherty’s first month as a Dodger, in which he has regressed slightly from the stellar 2.95 ERA he posted during his first four months with the Detroit Tigers.
None of his starts have been bad, allowing him to log a team-high 28⅓ innings in August. But aside from six scoreless innings against the lowly Oakland Athletics in his debut on Aug. 3, nearly all of them have been a pitch or two away from true dominance.
Flaherty’s other mistake Tuesday: a 3-and-1 center-cut fastball to Ryan O’Hearn in the second inning, which the Orioles slugger crushed for a solo homer.
“Yeah, there have been some outings where you think, ‘Man, I wish we could get that pitch back,’” Roberts acknowledged. “But he’s throwing the ball really well for us.”
In fact, Flaherty’s performance would have been enough to win the game, if only the Dodgers’ lineup, missing Freddie Freeman so he could rest his broken finger, hadn’t wasted so much time with runners in scoring position.
After briefly erasing their 1-0 deficit on Miguel Rojas’ sacrifice fly in the bottom of the second and Teoscar Hernandez’s RBI single with two outs in the third, the Dodgers squandered three key opportunities late in the game.
Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Hernandez each failed to score with two on and no outs in the fifth inning. Betts then got stranded at second after a single and steal in the eighth inning, with Hernandez and Will Smith striking out. Then, with two on and two out in the ninth inning, Chris Taylor hit a drive to left field but watched it die short of the track to end the game.
“We had some opportunities to score some runs, but we didn’t,” Hernandez said. “That happens.”
In October, explosive offensive outbursts are no guarantee, especially for a Dodgers team that has been woeful with clutch hits over the past two postseasons. That’s what makes Flaherty so important and why, if he’s truly going to be treated as a potential playoff ace, simply being good might not be enough.
And through the first month of his tenure with the Dodgers, consistent greatness remains elusive.
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Freeman rests his finger
For the second time in the past two weeks, Freeman was not in the starting lineup and had a day off to rest the right middle finger he broke a couple weeks ago when a ground ball crushed his finger.
After initially being injured on Aug. 17 and then sitting out the next game while awaiting tests to diagnose the injury, Freeman started each of the Dodgers’ final six games, resuming his everyday role at first base as doctors said the fracture, which he noted was not displaced, could not hurt any more.
In that time, however, Freeman’s numbers have plummeted. The slugger went just 3-for-23 in his final six games. As a result, his batting average has dropped from .292 to .284, which would be a lower mark than he’s had in any season since 2015.
Roberts said the Dodgers have not considered placing Freeman on the injured list. However, the manager said there is a “possibility” Freeman could be out for another day or two, though he could be available as a backup.
“I don’t want this to drag on,” Roberts said. “If we can calm it down, we’ll be in a better position.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.