Dodgers end first half with dud, playing sloppy again in sweep to Dbacks

Dave Roberts had only one real request for his team in their first-half finale on Sunday.Play.Clean.

Baseball.Once again, it was too tall an ask.In a 5-3 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks that sent the team into the All-Star break on an unsatisfying (and unsatisfactory) note, the Dodgers continued their puzzlingly poor run of play over the last week.Once again, there were errors on defense, with a dropped ball by Andy Pages in the fifth and a bad throw from Max Muncy in the sixth directly leading to unearned runs that helped Arizona erase an early 3-0 deficit.Also, again, there was sloppy pitching and opportunistic offense, with the Dodgers managing just three hits at the plate while watching their pitching staff succumb to walks, balks and poorly-timed mistakes.As a result, the club lost its fourth game out of the last five, dropped three in a row for the first time in exactly two months and suffered its first series sweep of the year.Most of it, in hindsight, felt so self-inflicted.All of it, undoubtedly, served as sources of frustration.Sunday started well enough for the Dodgers.Shohei Ohtani hit the first pitch of the day out to center for a leadoff home run, then sparked another rally in the third with a leadoff double that eventually set Tommy Edman up for a two-run single.After that, however, the Dodgers wouldn’t record another hit.And on the other side of the ball, they opened one door after another to let the Dbacks back into the game.Following back-to-back doubles off Emmet Sheehan in the fifth, Pages dropped a relatively routine fly ball that led to another score.

In the sixth, a leadoff walk from Sheehan and a passed ball from backup catcher Eliezer Alfonzo created another Dbacks threat.With runners on the corners later in the inning, Muncy got a ground ball at third but hit Geraldo Perdomo in the back while trying to throw home, allowing Perdomo to score the tying run and Ildemaro Vargas to give Arizona the lead with an RBI single in the following at...