Dodgers manager Joe Torre said before Tuesday night's game at Houston that he sees a completely different personality from his team than he saw a year ago, long before Manny Ramirez came along and presumably long before the club's core of young players started believing the team could win.
"Right from spring training on, it just seems like they have been keeping it fun and being more comfortable with where they are right now," Torre said. There also has been a discernible confidence about the club that might have been missing before, and that has manifested itself in the form of at least a couple of wins in games where the Dodgers might have crumbled before. Even in Tuesday night's lackluster loss to Houston, the Dodgers battled to the end, ultimately leaving the bases loaded and the tying run on base when the last out was recorded.
Torre said the first sign of a metamorphosis came before the middle game of a critical three-game series at Arizona last August. With veterans Jeff Kent and Nomar Garciaparra having both been injured in a loss during the series opener, the Dodgers' eighth defeat in a row, Torre and the coaching staff told the core of young players that the team was now theirs and that the fate of the season was in their hands.
That night, the Dodgers began an eight-game winning streak that would include five victories against the Diamondbacks, the team the Dodgers were chasing, and four against Arizona aces Dan Haren and Brandon Webb.
ASTROS 8, DODGERS 5: Clayton Kershaw was staked to a three-run lead before he ever took the mound, but he never seemed to get comfortable and wound up getting tagged for six runs on eight hits over 4 1/3 innings. The Dodgers stranded 10 baserunners and left the bases loaded in the ninth. They wasted a one-out triple by Matt Kemp in the fourth. Manny Ramirez hit his third home run, a two-run shot in the seventh.
