The Dodgers arrived in Anaheim on Friday with a 26-18 record, a split fresh in hand from a rough homestand, and then lost the pitcher they had planned to start. Blake Snell was scratched a few hours before the game, and Will Klein got the ball instead for the first start of his career in the Angels Vs Dodgers matchup.
Klein, who had topped out at 37 pitches this season before Friday, was asked to carry a game that had already turned on short notice. The Dodgers had won 4-0 on Wednesday and 5-2 last night to salvage the final two games against the Giants before heading to Anaheim, but this one began with a different challenge: getting through a lineup without the left-hander they expected to use. The Angels entered at 16-28, having lost 11 of their previous 12 games since beating the Padres on April 17 to improve to 11-10, a slide that has left little room for error in a season already drifting away from them.
The numbers behind the Angels' collapse have been blunt. Their 25.8 percent team strikeout rate was the worst in baseball, their 4.60 team ERA the sixth-worst, and their 5.27 bullpen ERA the third-worst. That is why the club had planned to lean on Jose Soriano, who was scheduled to start tomorrow with a 1.66 ERA, while Jack Kochanowicz took the mound Friday for his ninth start of the season. The Dodgers, meanwhile, were forced to improvise after Snell's scratch, even though their relief corps had covered the previous two nights with Alex Vesia and Edgardo Henriquez each throwing scoreless innings last night and Tanner Scott closing it out on nine pitches after using 14 on Wednesday.
Kochanowicz came in with a steadier recent run than his season line suggested, having allowed nine runs in 37 1/3 innings over his previous six starts and pitched into the sixth inning in each of those outings before his worst start of the season in Toronto. In that Toronto game, he loaded the bases to begin the fourth inning, allowed a sac fly in the fourth, then gave up two more singles for two runs in the fifth. The contrast on Friday was part of the same story that has dogged both clubs in different ways: one team trying to protect pitching depth, the other trying to survive without much of it.
The Dodgers' decision to hand the ball to Klein also underscored how thin the margin can be even for a club with a winning record. They had just pieced together a split against San Francisco and were moving on to a three-game weekend series, but the unexpected absence of Snell turned the opener into a survival game before the first inning was over. For the Angels, a season that briefly looked changed in mid-April has settled back into the kind of stretch that demands answers fast, and Friday was one more test they could not afford to waste.
