Ellis’ Three-Run Walk-Off Blast Boosts Dodgers at LinesMaker

Ellis’ Three-Run Walk-Off Blast Boosts Dodgers

“It was prob­a­bly the best feel­ing of my base­ball life,” said the 31-year-old Ellis. “It was pretty awe­some and pretty cool to run around the bases and hear the crowd and cheer­ing. I’ve got­ten to see Andre [Ethier] and Matt [Kemp] do that a lot and it was pretty cool to feel it myself.”

Also pretty cool is a 7 1/2-game lead the Dodgers now have over the Giants. With the win, the Dodgers avoided their first three-game los­ing streak of the season.

A big — and unex­pected — part of the best record in base­ball has been the play of Ellis on both sides of the plate. He’s hit­ting .317, but he’s also third on the club with 23 RBIs.

“It is a lit­tle sur­pris­ing,” said man­ager Don Mat­tingly. “The whole pack­age, he’s been great. I can’t say I expected five [homers] and 20 [RBIs], but we’ll take it. It’s just a credit to him. It’s good to see, it’s a good story, he’s one of the guys you root for, a guy that’s worked so hard you want him to have success.”

The sud­den power surge, Ellis said, should be cred­ited to the Triple-A hit­ting coach of the Seat­tle Mariners, Jeff Pent­land, who was dis­missed as the Dodgers hit­ting coach last summer.

“It’s 100 per­cent Jeff Pent­land and what he did with my swing path,” Ellis said. “This year Dave Hansen has worked with my lower body and the com­bi­na­tion turned me into a Major League hitter.”

Ellis’ game-winner capped what even Mat­tingly called “a weird game.” In the pre­lim pitch­ers duel, Chad Billings­ley was all-out to get through five innings in 99 pitches, but that was more effi­cient than Houston’s Bud Nor­ris, who racked up 116 pitches and didn’t fin­ish the fifth inning. Billings­ley struck out eight and retired the last seven bat­ters, pretty good con­sid­er­ing six of the first 10 he faced reached base.

“Both guys had about 85 pitches in the fourth inning,” said Mat­tingly. “The game seemed like a snail’s pace, then it was like nobody scored.”

Billings­ley spot­ted the Astros a 2–0 lead, the Dodgers halved it on Ethier’s RBI dou­ble in the third and took the lead on Tony Gwynn’s two-run sin­gle with two out in the fourth. Hous­ton tied the game in the eighth when Ronald Belis­ario issued a pair of two-out walks. Ken­ley Jansen, brought on for a four-out save, blew the chance before get­ting any outs as Jason Cas­tro dou­bled off the glove of third base­man Jerry Hairston.

The win­ning rally started when Ethier led off the inning get­ting hit on the shoul­der by an 0–2 fast­ball from for­mer Dodgers farm­hand Wes­ley Wright. Hous­ton man­ager Brad Mills brought Wilton Lopez in to face pinch-hitter Scott Van Slyke, who bunted Ethier to sec­ond. James Loney, who already had three hits, was walked inten­tion­ally to bring up Ellis.

“With [Lopez], how good he’s been all year espe­cially with right-handed hit­ters, I think that was it,” said Mills of his deci­sion. “We wanted to set up a dou­ble play. There’s every­thing right there. He just put a nice swing on it, there’s no doubt about it.”

Ellis launched his fifth home run into the left-field seats and now has a slug­ging per­cent­age of .517.

“The hours ‘Pent’ spent, nobody else would have believed in me,” said Ellis. “He redid my swing. The changes he made paid div­i­dends. To have some­body work like that, he deserves a ton of credit.”

Mat­tingly, while also cred­it­ing the work Pent­land and Hansen have done with Ellis, gave the catcher some credit too.

“He had been up and down and up and down, and last year he spoke up for him­self,” said Mat­tingly. “He finally said we were send­ing the wrong guy down [when the Dodgers kept Dioner Navarro over Ellis early in the sea­son]. I think that was huge. I kind of felt that way myself, but he had options. I couldn’t sit here and argue with him. I think he said the same thing to Ned [Col­letti, gen­eral man­ager]. There comes a point in your career when you say, ‘I can play and you guys don’t believe it.’”

BetLM's sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice. For more MLB news see: Ellis’ three-run walk-off blast boosts Dodgers.

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