Tawa's 429-Foot Bomb Breaks LAD's Back in 9-3 Rout
Tim Tawa went 3-for-4 with a home run, 4 RBI, and a run scored as Arizona dismantled Los Angeles 9-3 on Saturday. The Diamondbacks scored in five different innings and never trailed after the first pitch.
The game looked like it might be a fight after the first inning. Arizona jumped out 2-0 when Moreno singled to right, Marte scored on an error, and Carroll scored on a throwing error by right fielder Tucker — two runs Arizona didn't even have to earn cleanly. Los Angeles answered immediately: Ohtani homered to left center at 381 feet to cut it to 2-1, then Pages followed with a 419-foot shot of his own to tie it at 2-2. For a moment, it felt like the Dodgers had absorbed the early chaos and steadied themselves.
They hadn't. The fourth inning is where this game was decided. Tawa launched a 429-foot home run to left center, scoring Arenado ahead of him, and the win probability swung from 59% in LAD's favor to just 34% on a single swing. That two-run shot made it 4-2, and Arizona never looked back. The fifth inning turned ugly for Los Angeles in a different way — Henriquez threw two wild pitches in the same frame, each one letting a Carroll run score, pushing the lead to 6-2. That's the kind of inning that doesn't just change a score; it appears to change a dugout's entire posture.
Eduardo Rodriguez did his job cleanly for Arizona, going 6.0 innings, allowing 7 hits and 2 earned runs while striking out 5. He didn't need to be dominant — he just needed to be steady while his offense kept piling on. Tawa added an RBI single in the sixth to make it 7-2, Perdomo's groundout plated another to push it to 8-2, and a third Tawa single in the eighth scored Barrosa to cap the Arizona scoring at 9. Rojas doubled home Edman in the ninth for a cosmetic LAD run, but the story of the night was Arizona's ability to manufacture runs in multiple ways — errors, wild pitches, a mammoth home run, and clutch contact — while Rodriguez and the bullpen (Brandyn Garcia and Jonathan Loaisiga each threw a scoreless inning with two strikeouts apiece) kept Los Angeles from mounting anything real. Ohtani and Pages each homered, but 1-for-4 and 3-for-4 with one big swing apiece wasn't enough when the other side had Tawa doing damage every time he came to the plate.