Dodgers: some off-day observations

In the manager’s office of an otherwise empty clubhouse, Joe Torre said today that he felt the Dodgers’ young relievers had the mentality to recover from their Game 4 collapse.

“The one thing they’re not going to be is afraid,” Torre said of the likes of Jonathan Broxton, Cory Wade and Clayton Kershaw.

Torre gave his team the day off, telling them to stay away from the ballpark.

“It was a very emotional game last night,” he said. “Guys were down. ... I just thought that just getting away from it would be better than just coming out here and taking batting practice.”

Matt Kemp, who was out of the lineup on Monday night, will start in center field on Game 5.

There will be no other changes in the lineup, as Torre said he didn’t consider starting Jeff Kent at second base in place of Blake DeWitt with left-hander Cole Hamels taking the mound for the Phillies.

“The defensive play is big for me,” Torre said. “We have all ground-ball pitchers, really.”

We ran an article in today’s Los Angeles Times about how Japanese reporters reacted to seeing Hiroki Kuroda throw at Shane Victorino’s head in what looked to be a retaliatory act for the pitches thrown at Russell Martin and Manny Ramirez earlier in the series.

Here are a couple of more observations/theories/stories that came out of my conversations with Takashi Yamakawa of the Kyodo News and Mamoru Shikama of Nikkan Sports News.

When a pitcher plunks a batter in Japan, he almost always tips his cap to him.

What surprised Yamakawa the most was how Kuroda walked off the mound toward Victorino after delivering the pitch that almost hit him. Yamakawa, who covered baseball in Japan for nine years and was assigned to follow Kuroda this season, said that in his country, he saw pitchers run away when they were charged the mound by hitters. “Sometimes, you’d see him chased into the outfield,” Yamakawa said. Because of the MLB’s growing influence in Japan, Yamakawa said pitchers have become more willing to fight in recent years.

Shikama, who covered baseball in Japan for 10 years and in the U.S. for nine, half-jokingly said that he thinks Americans are more aggressive because of their meat-based diets.

“In Japan, it’s not part of our culture to shoot animals and eat them,” he said.

-- Dylan Hernandez

Photo: Hiroki Kuroda hears about it from the Phillies' Shane Victorino after throwing a pitch behind the slugger's head in Game 3. Credit: Chris Carlson / Associated Press

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