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ATLANTA — Dustin May knew how key his sweeper would be this season.
“It’s going to be huge,” the Dodgers right-hander said earlier this spring. “Being able to land that is probably going to be my biggest thing for the whole year.”
Lately, however, he’s learning there’s a flip side to that coin, as well.
For as good as May’s Frisbee-esque breaking ball looked, when he returned from a nearly two-year absence by giving up just two earned runs in his first three starts, the pitch has been more inconsistent in the three outings since, dragging May’s overall performance down with it.
In a 4-3 loss to the Atlanta Braves on Sunday at Truist Park, it was two bad sweepers — both to Braves slugger Austin Riley — that sank May on a night the Dodgers saw their seven-game winning streak stopped.
Teoscar Hernández and Andy Pages talk almost daily in their shared corner of the clubhouse. They’ll watch one another during batting practice, and coordinate in outfielders’ meetings.
In the first inning, May had two strikes against Riley before throwing a sweeper up and over the plate. Riley launched it to left for a two-run homer.
In the third, May tried his sweeper again against Riley, throwing it over the outer edge of the plate in a 1-and-1 count. But Riley was on it once more, belting another two-run blast that gave the Braves an early 4-0 lead.
“It’s pretty frustrating,” May said. “Giving up two homers to him on kind of the same pitch, not really how I drew it up.”
Outside of those pitches, May was largely effective. He got through 5 ⅔ innings. He struck out six batters. He didn’t give up any other runs.
“I thought the execution was a little better tonight,” May said. “Being able to put the ball on the inner-half and outer-half of the plate.”
But for this new version of May — who, in search of better health after two major elbow surgeries, has dialed back on his fastball velocity and drastically dropped the arm angle of his already somewhat side-arm delivery — even a couple of misplaced mistakes can spell trouble.
“I mean, ideally, the first one [should have been] more off the plate, definitely not up,” May said. “The second one was OK, just too much plate.”
The Dodgers (23-11) still made it interesting at the end.
Max Muncy trimmed the deficit in half on a fourth-inning RBI double and a sixth-inning run-scoring groundout.
Miguel Rojas came off the bench in the sixth inning as a pinch-hitter for ice-cold outfielder Michael Conforto — who struck out twice and is six for 73 going back to early April — and hit a home run off left-handed reliever Dylan Lee to cut the score to 4-3.
But in the ninth, the Dodgers couldn’t complete the comeback, stranding pinch-runner Hyeseong Kim at third base after he stole second off Braves closer Raisel Iglesias and boldly dashed to third when a dropped third strike was thrown to first base.
“That was great. That was exciting,” Roberts said of Kim’s aggressive baserunning, one of the tools that attracted the club to the South Korean utilityman in free agency. “Those are things that, as he plays more and we start to learn more [about him], just shows that he’s got really good instincts.”
Still, for a banged-up Dodgers rotation looking for someone else to step up alongside staff ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto, May’s recent regression has been the bigger disappointment.
In his last three outings, the 27-year-old has yielded 14 runs in 16 innings.
And each time, an inability to consistently land his sweeper has served as a source of frustration.
Two weeks ago, when an overall lack of command led to May getting knocked around at Wrigley Field by the Chicago Cubs, he was asked how difficult it is to be successful when that pitch isn’t working.
“I think you can see how important it is,” he said that night.
May remained dissatisfied after giving up three runs to the Miami Marlins last Monday.
“I still wasn’t executing very well at all,” he said then. “I just got away with some stuff.”
On Sunday against the Braves, it was a similar story — May looking frustrated with himself after two poorly executed sweepers, both of which were followed by Riley trotting around the bases.
“Ups and downs,” May said of his opening month, in which he has a 4.36 earned-run average in six outings. “Couple good moments. Couple really bad ones. Definitely need to be more consistent.”
Especially when it comes to executing his sweeper, and using it as a weapon to put hitters away.
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