CHICAGO — It snowed briefly Saturday morning at Wrigley Field, the flurries floating down at an angle thanks to the usual blustery conditions there. By game time, the temperature sat at a classic April-in-Chicago 41 degrees.
Fortunately for the Dodgers, they had the heat coming off James Outman to warm them.
The rookie outfielder continued his hot start, hitting two home runs and driving in another run with a single, and Max Muncy had his third two-homer game in the past two weeks as the Dodgers rebounded from Friday’s near-perfect game to beat the Chicago Cubs, 9-4.
Outman had four hits in the game — his seventh multi-hit game this season and first four-hit game — and is 6 for 13 with four home runs and nine RBIs in the first three games of his first visit to Wrigley Field.
“It’s remarkable,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said of Outman’s start. “It’s just fun watching him, continuing to make adjustments and the league still trying to learn them. Earning pitches, earning counts and when they make a mistake out over, he’s making them pay and that’s sort of the plan that we’re all trying to do.”
For the season, Outman is batting .314, first among MLB rookies with more than four at-bats. The home runs were his sixth and seventh, most among rookies, most in any calendar month by a Dodgers rookie since Will Smith hit eight in August 2019, and the most by a Dodgers rookie in the opening month of the season. Outman leads major-league rookies in RBIs (19), runs scored (14), slugging percentage (.714) and OPS (1.121).
“I didn’t even think about it, to be honest. I just wanted to play how I play normally,” Outman said when asked if he exceeded his own expectations over the first month of the season.
“I think just learning from these guys, to be honest. They’re all professional. A lot of them are vets so I’m just trying to do what they do.”
He’s done more than most of them. In a lineup that has produced uneven results for the first 22 games of the season, Muncy is the other standout. His two home runs Saturday tie him with Pete Alonso for the major league lead. Nine of them have come in the past two weeks since returning to a “step-back” move to trigger his swing, six in three two-homer games.
“Clearing my head,” Muncy said of the trigger to this power surge. “That was the main reason for me going back to the step-back, being able to clear my head in the box and allow my swing and my path, which I worked really hard on this offseason, to just be able to do what it needs to do. It’s hard to do that when you’re thinking about a bunch of stuff in the box and you’re tying yourself up and you’re becoming tight. So for me, it’s just being free and easy in the box and being mentally clear.”
Outman has certainly played free and easy as a major leaguer. The Dodgers did everything they could to have him start the season in Triple-A. They signed four veteran left-handed hitting outfielders during the offseason — Jason Heyward, David Peralta, Steven Duggar and Bradley Zimmer. Outman was probably not going to make the season-opening roster until Gavin Lux sustained a season-ending knee injury during spring training, opening up a bench spot.
Instead of tearing up the Pacific Coast League for a second time, Outman has been possibly the Dodgers’ most valuable player to this point.
“It’s remarkable,” Roberts said. “James has carried us a lot. He’s gotten some big hits, obviously. So it’s just an opportunity that presented itself, essentially the last couple of days of spring training, and he’s taking advantage of it and earning more opportunities.”
Outman’s third home run in the series at Wrigley Field put the Dodgers on top 2-1 in the second inning. Two innings later, J.D. Martinez led off with a double and scored two batters later when Outman fought off an inside fastball and parachuted an RBI single into shallow right field to make it 3-1.
Coming off a start against the New York Mets last week in which he let two leads slip away, Dodgers starter Dustin May didn’t look to be in form to make this one stand up either when he loaded the bases before retiring a batter in the first inning.
He escaped with just one run scoring on a fielder’s choice and pitched into the sixth inning, giving up one more run but leaving with the tying run at the plate and one out.
Alex Vesia came in and walked Cody Bellinger to put the tying runs on base in a 4-2 game. To that point, Vesia had allowed 21 of the first 37 batters he faced this season to reach base (17 hits, four walks).
But Vesia got Patrick Wisdom to pop out and struck out Nick Madrigal to end the Cubs’ rally.
Muncy outhomered the Dodgers’ bullpen from there. He put a 412-foot drive into the right-field seats for a two-run home run in the seventh inning and added a solo home run in the ninth. In between, Yency Almonte served up a two-run home run to Nico Hoerner, driving Almonte’s ERA to 7.56.
Outman added his second home run of the game in the ninth inning off Cubs reliever Brad Boxberger.
“He works hard. He’s smart and he’s always talking about what a pitcher is doing, what we think, what we feel about certain guys,” Muncy said of Outman. “For a guy that doesn’t have a lot of experience with a lot of these pitchers, it’s really impressive for him to be so open to what we talk to him about.
“It’s just been fun watching him. He has the right head space and the right mentality to keep it going for sure. He’s gonna be really good.”
