LOS ANGELES -- Dodgers manager Dave Roberts likes to look at All-Star third baseman Justin Turner as the "glue" that holds the clubhouse together.
Turner, who hit two homers on Sunday, showed why in the Dodgers' series-clinching 6-4 win against the Padres at Dodger Stadium. Turner, who entered Sunday's game leading the National League in batting average, has started to come out of a slump that riddled him in the beginning of August.
The 32-year-old was batting .188 with one homer through the first five games of August, but he has started to look like his normal self of late, clubbing six homers in his past eight games.
"There was a little kind of lull a couple of weeks ago when he wasn't getting hits," Roberts said. "Which I think was the only lull he's had the entire season. His at-bat quality has been consistent, and it always is. He's the glue to our ballclub."
On a day when the Dodgers' offense struggled through three innings to get a hit, Turner was able to erase a 2-0 deficit in the fourth inning with an opposite-field three-run homer. Later on in the fourth, Yasmani Grandal would join Turner with a two-run homer.
"We started rolling," Grandal said. "That was when we started attacking a little bit more and more."
Turner wasn't done.
He tacked on an insurance run in the eighth with a solo shot to left field to give the Dodgers a 6-4 lead they wouldn't relinquish, recording his second multi-homer game of the week and seventh multi-homer game of his career.
"What he does in the clubhouse," Roberts said, "and in the batter's box and on the field, and he's been squaring the ball up and hitting balls to the track. But to go to the other way and take it to the opposite gap and then to hit a homer late and have insurance. That was a big run. Both big runs."