Betts Breaks Tie in 8th as Dodgers Survive Colorado's Comeback
Mookie Betts singled to center in the eighth inning to score Tommy Edman, snapping a 3-3 tie and lifting the Dodgers to a 4-3 win over Colorado on July 9. The hit swung LAD's win probability from 82% to 92% — a tidy summary of how close the Rockies came to stealing this one.
Gabriel Hughes handed Los Angeles a gift in the first inning, uncorking a wild pitch that scored Edman and advanced Betts and Freeman. Kyle Tucker then singled to left, plating both Betts and Freeman to make it 3-0 before Colorado had even recorded an out in the scoring column. It looked like a blowout in the making. It wasn't. Kyle Karros answered immediately in the second, launching a 417-foot home run to left center to cut the deficit to 3-1. Edouard Julien followed with a 423-foot shot to right center, and just like that it was 3-2. Colorado completed the comeback in the third when a sacrifice fly from Moniak scored Sullivan to tie the game at 3. In roughly two innings, the Rockies had erased a three-run hole entirely.
From there, both starters settled in and neither team could separate. Hughes finished with 6.0 innings pitched, allowing 4 hits and 3 earned runs against 7 strikeouts — a line that looks respectable given the first-inning chaos. Roki Sasaki matched him almost pitch for pitch: 6.0 innings, 4 hits, 3 earned runs, 1 walk, 5 strikeouts. The game was, for all practical purposes, a coin flip heading into the late innings. Then Tanner Scott threw a perfect seventh — 0 hits, 0 runs, 2 strikeouts — and Jack Dreyer followed with a clean eighth of his own before Betts ended the drama.
The story of the night was how thoroughly Colorado's middle-of-the-order rewrote what looked like a foregone conclusion. Karros went 2-for-4 with the home run and an RBI; Julien's 423-foot blast was the longer of the two and arguably the louder statement. But the Rockies couldn't find that one extra hit when it mattered most, and Betts — who finished 1-for-3 with an RBI and a run — made sure Los Angeles didn't need to sweat it any further. Tucker's 2-RBI single in the first and Edman's two runs scored were the foundation LAD needed to hold on. The Dodgers bullpen did the rest, combining for 2.0 scoreless innings to close it out. Colorado appears to have the offensive pieces to compete on any given night; whether they can sustain that over a full game remains the open question.