LOS ANGELES -- After the way the Rockies refused to go away late in games, the Dodgers must have been glad to see them depart Dodger Stadium with all of their bags in tow at the conclusion of this week's three-game series.
Colorado continued to make things interesting in Wednesday night's finale, but L.A. held onto a 4-3 win courtesy of Mookie Betts' go-ahead RBI single in the eighth inning to take two out of three from its NL West foes.
Early shakiness from both starters -- Roki Sasaki for the Dodgers and Gabriel Hughes for the Rockies -- turned into somewhat of a pitchers' duel by the third inning, when the game was in a 3-3 deadlock that lasted until Betts' tiebreaking hit in the eighth.
The Dodgers struck first against Hughes, who was making his first big league start, bringing one run home on a bases-loaded wild pitch and another pair in on a Kyle Tucker single in the first inning.
With two outs and runners on first and second, Alex Call had a chance to extend the inning. He took a ball, then challenged back-to-back called strikes, losing both of the Dodgers' ABS challenges. On the eighth pitch of the at-bat, he struck out swinging.
It took until the sixth inning for another Dodger to reach base. Starting with Call's strikeout, Hughes retired 15 straight L.A. batters, giving the Rockies time to get back in the game.
Coming off a rough outing in which he allowed six runs across three innings to the Padres, Sasaki was shaky early on in his start against the Rockies. He served up solo homers to Kyle Karros and Edouard Julien that sliced L.A.'s lead to 3-2 in the second inning, then gave up the tying run when a leadoff walk came around to score on a sacrifice fly in the third.
The Rockies seemed poised to take the lead in the fourth, when Sasaki gave up a single and a double to put a pair of runners in scoring position with nobody out. But Sasaki bore down, working a quick three-pitch strikeout of Troy Johnston on a foul tip. A longer battle with Julien ended in a called strike three on the eighth pitch. Sasaki got out of the jam by getting Ezequiel Tovar to fly out to right field.
After escaping the fourth inning unscathed, Sasaki retired all six of the batters he faced in the fifth and sixth, ending up with a quality start in spite of the early stress.