Tyler Glasnow weathers cold, leads Dodgers to win at Colorado

DENVER — The hottest team in baseball, the coldest game in franchise history.

And a California kid on the mound, battling inclement elements, this time beating the 35-degree chill.

“No one likes playing in this type of weather,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said before the game, predicting it would be “testing your soul a little bit.”

Last April, a deluge in Philadelphia derailed the Dodgers and Tyler Glasnow failed one such test in a frustrating defeat against the Phillies.

On Friday, in his first visit to Coors Field, the Dodgers’ towering right-hander pitched with heart and soul, discipline and professionalism. With marked efficiency. Glasnow (2-0) got the win, going seven innings and allowing just one run and two hits, striking out seven and walking two on 92 pitches.

And his Dodgers teammates put runs on the board as if they were logs on the fire, scoring at least one run every inning through the inning en route to a breezy 7-1 victory.

“Just kind of where [Glasnow is] at right now — physically, mentally, emotionally, all that stuff. He just wasn’t distracted,” Roberts said. “Nothing was going to affect his performance tonight. He didn’t have his best stuff tonight, maybe because of the cold. Still to be efficient, put us in position to win, go seven innings.”

Glasnow concurred, saying he had no trouble staying warm between innings, and moreover, he now feels comfortable with changes he made last year.

“I definitely feel different this year compared to last year…” said Glasnow, a former Hart High standout. “When you pitch a certain way for so long, and then you switch up so many things, you just kind of feel in unfamiliar territory.

“I think just being able to go back to what I was doing throughout my career, changing it from last year to this year, I’m a little bit freer, or more athletic. I can focus on what I need to focus on, as opposed to trying to feel normal.”

As the grounds crew works to clear snow while Dodgers third baseman Santiago Espinal tosses a snowball at a coach before the team played the Rockies Friday in Denver.

(David Zalubowski / Associated Press)

The Dodgers operated like normal Friday too, despite the conditions: It’s clear that it’s going to take more than some ice on the field to cool off this club, which collected 13 hits, nine of them off Colorado starter Tomoyuki Sugano.

Coming into Friday, the right-hander had allowed just four runs across 16 2/3 innings in his first three starts. But Sugano (1-1) took the loss against the Dodgers after they forced him from the game after the fourth inning with his Rockies trailing 5-0, having thrown 91 pitches (just 51 of them for strikes).

“Just you have to play it,” said Max Muncy, whose leadoff home runs in the second and fifth innings helped the hot hitters up and down the Dodgers’ lineup sap all the suspense from the first of a four-game wraparound series.

“Something that was kind of huge was we were told right from the start, the game was going to start on time. And, you know, when you know you have to go out there and play, obviously, the weather sucks, but if there’s no question of you may not play, you may get delayed, you may play a doubleheader?

“When there’s no question of that, it’s easier to just kind of block out the noise and go out there and get ready … so we prepared like we were supposed to.”

Most of the crowd of 28,783 loved to see it. Thousands of dutifully bundled Dodgers supporters chanted and cheered as their team notched its fourth consecutive victory and its 15th victory in 19 games this season, maintaining momentum in the first game of a 13-consecutive-game stretch.

Glasnow held the Rockies (7-13) at bay until the fourth inning, when Troy Johnston’s groundout pushed across Mickey Moniak to make it 5-1.

The Dodgers’ first runs came much more quickly. Will Smith’s one-out sacrifice fly in the first inning brought home Shohei Ohtani, who’d led off the game with a double — he went two for three off Sugano on Friday, making the Dodgers’ superstar six for seven all-time against his countryman.

Muncy’s 434-foot home run in the second made it 2-0 and his double down the line in the third drove in Smith, who’d reached on a broken-bat single that sent Roberts scurrying in the dugout, to make it 3-0.

No harm, no foul: “It almost got me,” Roberts said. “That was a slow-motion situation. I didn’t know which way to go … usually I’m pretty in tune and have an exit strategy but I didn’t have one tonight.”

Before the inning was over, Andy Pages’ sacrifice brought home Freddie Freeman to make it 4-0.

The Dodgers pushed it to 5-0 in the fourth inning when Smith singled to left to score Kyle Tucker, who’d doubled off the center field wall.

And then Muncy led off the fifth with his second solo shot, giving him his 21st career multi-homer game, and his fourth at Coors Field. After Alex Freeland hit a sacrifice fly to left to bring home Pages, the Dodgers led 7-1.

Hyeseong Kim was one of only three Dodgers who didn’t score, but the speedy South Korean reached on a single and a walk and twice stole second.

For all the contributors keeping warm up and down the Dodgers’ lineup, the members of the Rockies’ ground crew were the heroes of Friday’s game. They plowed the outfield and shoveled away the couple inches of snow that piled up between 11 a.m. and 2:30 to prepare a playable field by gametime at 6:40 p.m.

From his perch on the top step of the dugout, Roberts said: “You would’ve never known there was snow.”

Etc.

In the second game of the four-game series Saturday, Dodgers right-hander Emmet Sheehan (2-0, 6.60) is expected to face the Rockies’ right-hander Ryan Feltner (1-1, 7.30).