Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman show signs of life at the plate

LOS ANGELES — What, you thought Mookie, Shohei and Freddie forgot how to hit? Just fell off the bike and wouldn’t ever be able to get back on? Went and forgot the lyrics to their favorite songs?

It’s OK. You can admit it: Before Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman jump-started the Dodgers with first-inning home runs in Sunday’s 4-0 victory to take the second of three games from this week’s set against the Colorado Rockies (21-37), you were wondering when those guys and Shohei Ohtani were going to start cooking at the plate again? Or, maybe, whether they were cooked?

’Fess up, have you been sweating about those guys, with their 11 Silver Slugger awards between them, and whether they were going to go quietly for the rest of the regular season?

Stressing about Betts, with his batting title. Freeman, with his .301 career batting average. Ohtani, the two-time American League MVP with the Angels who hit better than .300 each of the past two seasons (while holding opposing hitters to averages of .203 and .184)?

I get it. The three-week slump was jarring. Watching the Dodgers score two runs or fewer five, six, seven times in one dreary span tested your faith. The five-game losing streak – the longest in five years – stressed you out, because between those three Grade-A alpha hitters at the top of the Dodgers’ order, you were banking on day-in, day-out dominance. Maybe there would be blips, you told yourself, but those would come one game at a time.

Expensive doesn’t mean invincible, it turns out.

So you’ve been fretting the notion that Freeman, after spoiling you the past couple seasons, was bound to fall back to Earth, even if flat for him – .293 – is better than all but 19 other big-league batters.

That Dave Roberts was right: Ohtani’s hammy – hurt when he was hit by a pickoff attempt against the Cincinnati Reds on May 16 – could really slow him down because, as his skipper said, “he’s a finely tuned machine and sometimes, in the context of a sports car, when he’s not firing on all cylinders, it just doesn’t run.” That would explain why, in 13 games late in May, Ohtani went 10 for 51 at the plate.

You’ve been concerned, haven’t you, that Betts is working too hard? That his hours of pregame preparation at shortstop – necessary, Roberts pointed out, because plays like Sunday’s incomplete double-play attempt show how much there’s still to learn there – is taking too much out of him.

Roberts wouldn’t say that’s the case, “I don’t think so. I think that if he’s not going to hit, that’s certainly what people are going to point to … he’s been miss hitting some balls, but I don’t think it’s a result of, you know, the work pregame.”

By the same token, in the next breath, Roberts did say: “I think the work is going to be curtailed at some point.”

And, at some point, the trio is going to catch fire. So in September, the cold snap in May will probably feel like a distant memory. Maybe even in October, it will feel like that? But you can worry about that later.

We saw signs of a thaw Sunday, starting with Betts depositing the third pitch he saw 354 feet into the left field seats. And then after Ohtani flew out, Freeman battling for nine pitches before cracking a 396-foot home run over the center field wall and outstretched webbing of Brenton Doyle’s glove to spot winning pitcher Gavin Stone a 2-0 first-inning lead. More than enough support, it turned out.

Betts’ leadoff home run – the 52nd of his career, fourth this season and the first time since May 17 one of the Dodgers’ top-billed trio scored in the first inning – was cause for a long-awaited exhale.

“We needed it, Mookie has been really relieved to hit a ball out of the ballpark,” said Roberts, well aware that Betts was 0 for his last 14. “And Freddie obviously has been kind of in it for a while and so for him to go deep today was really good for him.”