The Los Angeles Dodgers turned to Justin Wrobleski on Tuesday night with Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernandez out of the lineup, another moving part in a series that already carried more weight after Monday night’s escape. The Dodgers were looking to finish off the Colorado Rockies and move closer to a 7-2 mark against them this season.
Wrobleski was set for his final start before the All-Star break, and the timing matched the shape of his season. He entered at 10-2 with a 2.80 ERA across 93.1 innings, and he already had one strong showing against Colorado in April, when he held the Rockies to one run over seven innings at Coors Field in April.
That is why his words about missing the All-Star team landed with more than routine irritation. “Yeah, obviously it’s upsetting,” Wrobleski said, adding that he felt he had done enough to be in the conversation and that the snub gave him fuel for the rest of the year. He said every outing from here would be a chance to prove he belonged among those pitchers moving forward.
The Dodgers’ path into Tuesday was not clean. They had won the opener on Monday night on Dalton Rushing’s walk-off single in the 11th inning, but not before surrendering a three-run ninth inning lead. Even with that wobble, they carried a 60-32 record and the kind of margin that makes each win against Colorado another step in a long season rather than just another box score.
Michael Lorenzen was scheduled to oppose Wrobleski for the Rockies, and his season had gone the other way. He came in at 3-9 with a 6.91 ERA over 86 innings and had allowed a league-worst 124 hits. For the Dodgers, the night was about whether their rotation could hold up, whether the lineup could keep producing without Betts and Hernandez, and whether Wrobleski could turn the break into something bigger than a pause.
If the Dodgers finished the job, they would keep pressing the Rockies and send Wrobleski into the break with another start that looked like proof, not promise. If they did not, the questions around a lineup missing two regular forces would hang over a team still trying to make a clean run out of a messy Monday.
