Let me start by reiterating what tfloyd said: it’s a long season, and the regular season against the Dodgers is going to be done very early, but you don’t want to finish 0-6 against these guys, but 2-4 would be just fine at this point. We aren’t yet anywhere near midway through the season, but you can’t face Yoshinobu Yamamoto without thinking about Midway.

Sherlocks Holmes is never going to throw a complete game in his life — I like Grant Holmes, but that’s the way he and the game have gone. So when he strikes out Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman to lead off the game, you can take everything you’ve ever said about “pitch to contact to stay in the game for the long run” and stuff it. The top of the first was really fun.

The second time through the lineup was more problematic. After a second strikeout of Ohtani, Betts and Freeman reached on infield hits, Teoscar Hernandez walked and Will Smith delivered a sac fly for the first run. A Betts homer on a bad 0-2 pitch two innings later made it 2-0. Holmes went 6 inning+ and threw 96 pitches with 9 strikeouts. That’s excellent pitching.

Then there’s the other side.

When I was a young teenager I played a number of the Avalon Hill military recreation board games. My two favorites were Battle of the Bulge and Midway. In Midway, there was a clear advantage to being Admiral Yamamoto on the battleship Yamato, pictured above. We didn’t learn until some years later that there was a huge disadvantage to actually being Yamamoto in that the Americans had cracked the Japanese codes by the time of the battle in 1942. (I am astonished that the Battle of Midway happened less than 14 years before I was born. Things that happened me 14 years ago seem like yesterday, and when I was a kid the Battle of Midway seemed like something from the Middle Ages.) In the movie Tora, Tora, Tora (1970), Yamamoto is apocryphally quoted as saying after Pearl Harbor: “I fear that all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

That’s what the Braves now have: a terrible resolve. Like his namesake Isoruku Yamamoto, the Dodgers’ pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamato has a lot of material superiority. He, like Sherlocks, pitched 6 innings, but gave up only one hit and two walks in that time. He was then replaced by the one-man Pearl Harbor, Kirby Yates. Matt Olson promptly hit a surprise-attack homer off Yates to make it 2-1.

Dylan Lee and Daysbel Hernandez took care of the 7th and 8th, and shoulda-been-a-Brave Tanner Scott pitched the 8th for the Dodgers.

So the Dodgers have the best record in baseball and the Rockies have a near-historic worst record throught the first month of the season. But the last two games against these teams were both 2-1 heading to the 9th inning. But the 9th inning tonight began with a rain delay of about an hour and 15 minutes. Rafael Montero got the 9th and retired Freddie, Teoscar and Smith to give us last ups against Evan Phillips. Austin Riley struck out, as did Marcell Ozuna. Matt Olson walked to bring the winning run to the plate. But you can’t be the winning run when you hit a broken-bat dribbler back to the pitcher. Game over. Five hits in the past two games and two 2-1 losses. Time to get the bats back in gear.

Tomorrow on Fox with Sasaki against Schwellenbach.