Tarik Skubal didn’t just beat the Reds on Monday - he overpowered them.
In a game where runs were hard to find and hits were even scarcer, the Dodgers came away with a 4-1 win by doing what Cincinnati couldn’t: cashing in on the few mistakes that mattered. Skubal delivered his sharpest outing as a Dodger, blanking the Reds over seven innings while the offense backed him with two home runs and just enough support to keep control of the game.
The tone was set almost immediately against Elly De La Cruz. After Skubal fell behind 3-0, with De La Cruz already having taken him deep last week, the left-hander flipped the at-bat on its head.
He fought back, punched out Cincinnati’s most dangerous hitter, and did it by simply taking over the moment. Skubal fired three straight fastballs - two up, one down - and made it clear early that the Reds were going to have to deal with his terms.
That was the pattern all night. Skubal leaned on the four-seamer far more than usual, using it 44 percent of the time across seven scoreless innings and getting through the outing on just 90 pitches. Whether it was a lack of feel for the secondary stuff or a read on how Cincinnati was attacking the heater, he kept returning to the pitch and kept winning with it.
The Reds barely got anything going. Their only real traffic came in the fifth, when Juan Brito singled and J.J.
Bleday walked before both advanced on a wild pitch. Even then, Skubal shut the door, getting Hector Rodríguez to go down on a four-seam fastball up and well outside the zone in a nine-pitch battle.
By the end of the night, his first seven strikeouts had all come on fastballs.
Nick Lodolo was far better than the final line suggests, but the Dodgers made his mistakes hurt. He allowed just three hits in seven innings, yet two of them left the yard.
Kyle Tucker opened the scoring with a solo homer in the second, and Teoscar Hernández added a two-run blast a couple innings later. That was the difference.
Tucker and Hernández also fit the broader shape of this Dodgers lineup: plenty of talent, plenty of room for those bats to catch fire at the wrong time for an opponent. The club added its fourth RBI on a Kiké Hernández single in the seventh after Lodolo had begun to fade. Josue De Paula started against a left-hander and reached base once in three trips, drawing a walk and stealing a base as part of a three-steal night for Los Angeles.
There was also a strange moment in the ninth when Hernández forgot the batting order and tried to jump ahead of Tucker to lead off the inning. Since he had already homered, he gets a pass.
De La Cruz did get the Reds on the board in the bottom of the ninth, crushing a solo homer off Evan Phillips. It was a reminder of just how loud his bat can be, and of how impressive Skubal’s earlier work had been to keep him quiet. But by then, the game was already out of reach.
The win clinched a return to the postseason for the Dodgers as they continue chasing a third straight title. They still have plenty left to sort out before the regular season ends.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto will face the Reds again Tuesday after back-to-back seven-inning starts, with Rhett Lowder set to oppose him at 3:40 p.m. PT on SportsNet LA. Lowder is coming off a rough outing against Los Angeles last week, when he gave up seven runs in a 14-1 loss.
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