The national anthem had been sung. A sold-out crowd was in its seats. The field was raked, chalked and ready for baseball.
More than three hours later, the first pitch was finally thrown.
What was scheduled as a 7:15 p.m. local start at Truist Park in Atlanta on Friday didn’t actually kick off until 10:21 p.m., with the Dodgers and Braves getting delayed by a thunderstorm that rolled in shortly after the game was supposed to begin.
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The three-plus hour delay could have been enough to force a cancellation, and trigger a doubleheader on Sunday. But the Braves and Dodgers instead were asked to “hunker down,” as manager Dave Roberts quipped before the game, and wait.
“For us, decisiveness is probably better,” Roberts said. “Versus waiting around all night and ultimately not playing.”
The Dodgers ultimately did play, and rolled to a 10-3 win, as well, looking unfazed by the weather, the conditions or a late night that stretched into the early hours of Sunday morning before their seventh straight victory was finally complete.
Despite the long delay, Roki Sasaki survived his latest big-league test, dancing in and out of danger in a five-inning, three-run start for his first MLB win.
Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman both hit home runs; Ohtani to break an early 1-1 tie in the third, Freeman to put the game out of reach in the eighth.
And a Dodgers team (23-10) that spent most of the opening month trying to get synced up on the mound and at the plate — despite still posting the best record in the majors — continued to round into increasingly dominant form, inching ever closer to hitting their tantalizing top gear.
Few sequences better exemplified the Dodgers’ recently improved play than the crooked numbers they posted in the third and fourth innings.
In the third, the Dodgers played both long-ball and small-ball to produce two runs. Ohtani led off with his eighth home run, launching a towering solo blast to straightaway center field. Then, Betts hit a single, took second base on a hit-and-run play that likely would’ve resulted in a double-play grounder otherwise, and scored when Teoscar Hernández snuck a ground ball through the infield — giving Hernández his 33rd RBI to tie Aaron Judge for the MLB lead.
In the fourth, their offense went station-to-station in a four-run rally, all of the runs coming with two outs. Ohtani roped a single to center to get the threat started. Betts followed with an RBI double down the left-field line, marking his fourth-straight multi-hit game. Freeman then chased Braves starter Spencer Schwellenbach (who entered with a sub-3.00 ERA) with an RBI single to left, Betts staying on his feet all the way home to score just ahead of a tag at the plate.
With the clock ticking toward midnight, Aaron Bummer entered the game for the Braves (14-18) and immediately turned into a pumpkin.
His first batter, Hernández, hit a dribbler up the first-base line that Bummer initially fielded, but then dropped while trying to transfer the ball to his throwing hand for a flip to first base. Bummer quickly retrieved the ball again, and turned toward home with Freeman taking a wide turn around third. But his throw there was off-line, sailing over catcher Sean Murphy’s head to allow Freeman to score with ease.
Hernández also took second on the play, setting up Will Smith for an RBI single in the next at-bat.
It was late Saturday night baseball, at its sloppily, messy finest.
Sasaki didn’t make life easy on himself in the seventh start of his rookie season.
He had to strand two runners in the first, the latter of which reached on a two-out walk. He hung a slider to Ozzie Albies for a leadoff single in the second, then gave up a run when Eli White hit a half-swing double the other way to right. Another two-out walk created more stress in the third. And despite taking the mound with a 7-1 lead in the fourth, he gave up a leadoff homer to Albies and a one-out RBI double to Nick Allen, prompting a mound meeting from pitching coach Mark Prior.
But, as he has made a habit of during his up-and-down campaign, the 23-year-old right-hander managed to limit damage. Despite hitting a batter in the fourth, he escaped without yielding another run. In the fifth, he finally posted a 1-2-3 inning, having just enough gas in a season-high 98-pitch outing to qualify for his first victory.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
