Los Angeles Dodgers at Colorado Rockies

Roki Sasaki (5-5, 4.46 ERA) gets the ball for Los Angeles against Kyle Freeland (4-10, 6.27 ERA) for Colorado, with first pitch at 6:40 PM MT. It's a matchup of a hard-throwing former phenom still hunting consistency against a Coors Field lifer who's seen every kind of ugly this ballpark can produce.

The bigger story for the Dodgers isn't the rotation, it's the bullpen. Closer Edwin Diaz landed on the 15-day IL with neck inflammation, and Los Angeles is already without Tyler Glasnow, Bobby Miller and Justin Wrobleski from the rotation depth chart. Colorado isn't much healthier — Hunter Goodman, Tyler Freeman and Kyle Karros are all out, thinning a lineup that was already scuffling to keep pace in a lost season.

None of that has stopped the scoreboard from lighting up in this series so far. Coors Field does what Coors Field does, and the price on the board reflects a Dodgers team that's supposed to win comfortably — the question is whether the margin and the total end up being separate bets.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	R	H	E
LAD	0	1	0	3	0	0	0	0	0	2	6	11	0
COL	0	0	0	2	0	0	2	0	0	0	4	9	0

Los Angeles has won 2 straight and taken the first two meetings of this series, riding a lineup that's deep enough to cover for a rotation held together with rehab starts and spot fill-ins. Colorado, playing out the string at 50-76, has lost 2 straight and dropped both meetings so far — but Freeland's last turn was his best of the year, and a Rockies club with nothing to play for except spoiling somebody's night at altitude is never fully out of a game here.

Sasaki's last outing wasn't clean — 5 walks over 6 innings against Milwaukee — and command lapses tend to get punished harder a mile above sea level. Whichever way this one breaks, it's shaping up as another high-scoring night at Coors, with a shorthanded Dodgers bullpen and a Rockies lineup that's shown it can still put crooked numbers on the board even in a lost year.

Sources