The Los Angeles Dodgers went into the 2018 regular season with plenty of optimism and excitement, and lofty expectations. That’s yet to translate to the field, however, as they’ve suffered consecutive 1-0 losses to the San Francisco Giants.
In both games the difference bas been a Joe Panik home run. On Opening Day he took Clayton Kershaw deep, and on Friday did the same against Kenley Jansen. Panik’s second homer of the season offset what was an impressive debut for Alex Wood.
He was masterful in the start, allowing just one hit over eight shutout innings. Wood had a perfect game broken up by a Logan Forsythe error in the fourth inning. It was one of three errors Forsythe committed on the night.
While being shutout twice is obviously not what the Dodgers could have envisioned, Wood said that they are not concerned by the early struggles, via SportsNet LA:
“I’m sure everybody is freaking out because we lost our first two, but we know it’s one of those things we have a great ballclub. We have to keep the big picture in mind, top to bottom, offensively, defensively, pitching, really just an unbelievable team so we’ll come back out tomorrow ready to fight and hopefully get on the board.”
Wood is correct in that the results from the past two games are most likely not indicative of the team the Dodgers will be this season.
They returned their core nucleus for last year’s team that led the Majors with 104 regular-season wins and came just short of winning the World Series. But if they aren’t able to solve the Giants, it could make for a long first month of the season.
