Noah Syndergaard made his sixth start of the season for the Los Angeles Dodgers, which ended up being a somewhat average performance against the St. Louis Cardinals.
Syndergaard pitched 5.1 innings while allowing three runs on eight hits with no walks. It was enough to get him his first win of the season, with a record of 1-3 now, but the Dodgers are going to need more out of the right-hander.
“Yeah, it feels really nice to get the first one out of the way,” Syndergaard said. “All in all, it was a really good team win today. Really nice series to finish off a sweep.
“As far as for me, I think I was just doing a pretty good job of keeping them off balance, inducing some weak contact. Just trying to stay within myself and stay within my game. And then just commanding more of the curveball, kind of give them a different change of speed.”
Although Syndergaard pitched into the sixth inning, he didn’t get a strikeout and only induced three swings and misses on his 73 pitches. “It doesn’t really matter to me,” the right-hander said. “I’m just more focused on getting outs.”
Overall this season, Syndergaard has thrown 31.1 innings with just 21 strikeouts. The former power pitcher that dominated with high whiff numbers struggled last year to punch out hitters as well, totaling just 95 strikeouts in 134.2 innings.
Dave Roberts would like to see more from Noah Syndergaard
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts admitted his preference would be for more swing-and-miss ability out of his starting pitcher but also pointed out that some better defense would have helped Syndergaard have an even better day.
“You know, outs are not all created equal,” Roberts said. “You’d like some more swing and miss, but if we converted some balls in play that weren’t hit well, I thought he could have for sure finished the sixth.
“There was a double play ball even in that sixth inning that came up on [Max Muncy] that we got the force play, but couldn’t covert the double play. So I thought, yeah, we’d always like some more swing and miss, but I thought Noah did a really nice job today.”
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