This thing started off horribly. Walk (picked off), single, single, homer. Boom, down 3-0. But Max Fried righted the ship, threw down 4 more innings scoreless, and more importantly, the pen held the fort. Anthony Swarzak, Chris Martin, Shane Greene, and Mark Melancon all contributed a scoreless inning apiece to shut the down. So after the three-run homer, the mighty Dodgers never scored again. 9 scoreless innings.

But if you watched the game, the story was our prized superstar getting pulled from the game. The issue in question was Ronald watching a hard-hit opposite field home run that ended up bouncing off the wall. So instead of potentially a triple, he had to settle for a single because he watched it. For a long time.

There are plenty of opinions all over the internet, and this is one man’s:

If I want to know how Brian Snitker feels about Ronald Acuna, and whether or not there should be a relationship of trust where Brian Snitker should pull Ronald, I need to look no further than here:

That was Snitker’s post-game comments after Acuna was plunked by Jose Urena. As far as I’m concerned, Brian Snitker has absolutely earned the right to reprimand Ronald Acuna how he sits fit in this situation. The thing about Snitker is that he’s not a disciplinarian, and you can tell with how the team plays. They play with fire and fun and craziness, and we all love it as fans. But Acuna went too far. You can’t watch a ball that, at best, would have barely left the yard for that long.

So when Snitker does something to reprimand a player, you know it’s because the player crossed a very hard-to-cross line. Not every manager should pull a player from the game for what Acuna did. It hurt the team, absolutely, and it wasn’t that egregious of an offense, and some managers would be criticized for doing that too often. But Snitker likes his guys to play fast and loose, but they can’t take it too far. Acuna took it too far. But because there’s no question whatsoever whether Snitker loves his players and whether his players love him, then he can drop the hammer when he feels like he needs to.

Like I said, just one man’s opinion.

The other big event in the game was Rafael Ortega‘s grand slam in the bottom of the 6th. It’s easy to cheer for the player in that situation. Ortega’s 28th, and he’s a sub-replacement level player for his career. But he’s got 3 hits in 10 at-bats, one of which was today’s big home run, so he’s filling in admirably while almost half of our starting lineup is on the IL.

And more importantly, we took 2 of 3 from Los Angeles while we didn’t have our best team. That’s going to give you some confidence going forward. Off-day tomorrow, then the Marlins come to town for 3.