Jesús Luzardo takes his best recent stretch of the season into Saturday night’s start for the Philadelphia Phillies against the Los Angeles Dodgers, a matchup that asks almost immediately whether his recovery can hold against one of baseball’s hottest lineups. The left-hander is set to pitch in the middle game of a three-game road series in Los Angeles after six scoreless innings in Monday’s 3-0 win over the San Diego Padres.
That outing extended a run in which Luzardo has not allowed a home run over his past three starts and has put together a combined 1.00 ERA against the Boston Red Sox, Cincinnati Reds and Padres. For a pitcher who has allowed five home runs in 11 starts this season, the recent line is a meaningful turn, and it is the reason his name lands on the page now.
The timing is rough for Philadelphia. The Phillies lost 4-2 in Friday’s opener, managed only three hits, and got their first hit on Kyle Schwarber’s sixth-inning home run. Luzardo will follow a game in which Steward Berroa made his Phillies debut and drove in a run, while the club also shuffled its roster by optioning Otto Kemp to Triple-A Lehigh Valley and adding right-hander Nolan Hoffman to the bullpen.
What he is walking into is harder to ignore. The Dodgers have won six straight and have hit 12 home runs in their past three games, with Freddie Freeman, Max Muncy, Shohei Ohtani and Will Smith all going deep Friday. Los Angeles is 13-2 since May 13, a burst built in large part on power, even with Enrique Hernandez and Teoscar Hernandez sidelined by injuries.
Luzardo has called several of his outings this season “pretty grindy,” and that is the part of his start that will be tested first: not whether he can throw quality innings, but whether he can keep the ball in the park when the Dodgers are punishing mistakes. He had earlier starts in which he allowed six runs twice, five runs once and nine runs once, which makes the recent stretch feel more like repair work than a full-season answer.
On the other side, the Dodgers were scheduled to start right-hander Roki Sasaki, who is 3-3 with a 4.93 ERA and has back-to-back wins for the first time this season. Sasaki gave up three runs, two earned, over five innings at Milwaukee on Saturday and had worked one run over four innings against Philadelphia last season, including three scoreless innings in Game 4 of the National League Division Series. Luzardo’s best three-start stretch is real. The question in Los Angeles is whether it still looks that way once the game starts to move fast.
