The Los Angeles Dodgers overcame two separate deficits to defeat the Seattle Mariners, 11-9, to extend their season-best winning streak to six games.
While the offense continued to roll, Ross Stripling struggled for a second consecutive start, allowing seven runs (six earned) on eight hits in just three innings of work.
“Have a short memory, watch it, learn from it and then get with the pitching coaches and come up with a plan moving forward,” he said. “At the end of the day I feel like I’m throwing the ball well. My velocity is up. If you’re into analytics and all that stuff, my numbers are up. I’m throwing the ball maybe as good as I ever have, but the results aren’t necessarily on the mound.
“So it’s how do we get those to transfer over to zeros on the scoreboard? Just keep fine-tuning stuff. At the end of the day, curveball is my best pitch. I might go back to just throwing curveballs until they hit them. I obviously need to change a little something.”
Stripling credited the Mariners lineup for laying off his curveballs and putting themselves in hitter’s counts. “My curveball wasn’t great. It was good, competitive, but not as good as normal,” he said.
“I feel like they took some good breaking balls that put me in some fastball counts. I was doing good with the fastball, moving it in and out, but the ones they ended up hitting were kind of midline. They weren’t really up, they weren’t down, they were kind of right there in the path of most peoples’ swing.
“Tip your cap to them for being able to hit it hard, get it up in the air and over the fence. Really just some tough fastballs that were too much in the middle of the zone.”
As Stripling noted, he had difficulties locating his fastball. It led to yielding three home runs in the third inning. “Nothing in particular. Just maybe not as sharp with command,” Stripling said of the heater.
“These guys are good fastball hitters, so I felt I was going to get them out with offspeed through the night. The fastballs that I threw were just too much of a strike.
“When I know I’m going to try to get them out with offspeed, to give them fastballs to hit and do damage on, isn’t the right call. I feel like I threw the ball OK. It’s just the mistakes that I made, they hammered them.”
Dave Roberts confident Stripling will bounce back
In what has been a trying month for Stripling, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts believes he will eventually break out of his funk. “Performance matters,” Roberts acknowledged when asked about the outlook for Stripling.
“You still trust Ross, the work, the preparation, the ability with his pitch mix to continue to make pitches. It’s been a little bit of rough few starts. Ross is going to find his way out of it.”
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