Kyle Tucker’s grand slam offers reason for hope as Dodgers extend win streak

MIAMI –– Time will tell if Kyle Tucker is truly heating up.

But for now, at the very least, it finally seems like he is starting to thaw out.

After being stuck in a deep freeze at the plate for much of the last month, Tucker produced a second-straight offensive outburst in the Dodgers’ 6-2 win over the Miami Marlins on Friday night, finishing a double shy of the cycle in a three-hit display highlighted by a grand slam at loanDepot Park.

It started with a single in the first inning, allowing Tucker to pick up where he left off after a three-hit performance on Wednesday. He then opened the scoring with a sacrifice fly in the third, giving Blake Snell a lead he wouldn’t relinquish in a 5 ⅔-inning, one-run start.

In the top of the sixth, Tucker took another confident hack, squaring up a hanging first-pitch slider for a triple off the wall in right. He would later score on a bloop single from Will Smith.

And for a finale, his breakout night culminated with the bases loaded an inning later, setting up Tucker for a grand-slam swing –– on a 395-foot drive that landed in the right-field bullpen –– that punctuated perhaps a season-best performance.

“Felt good in the box, put the barrel to the ball, put up competitive at-bats,” Tucker said afterward. “Wherever the ball goes, it goes. Just trying to hit it hard.”

Up until the last few days, hitting the ball hard had not been a common occurrence for the team’s $240 million flop of an offseason signing.

He had gone from bad to worse during a slump through much of August and September, taking an already disappointing debut season to even more confounding lows by batting .116 over his previous 26 games.

But then came Wednesday, when Tucker had three hits, two runs scored, a double and, technically, a home run, albeit off a position player.

“It still counts,” he joked that night. “I’ll take it.”

Now, following Friday’s 3-for-3, five-RBI performance, Tucker has collected three hits in back-to-back games for the first time all year.

To manager Dave Roberts, the resurgence is not a coincidence. He said that Tucker and the team’s hitting coaches found a fix to his swing recently that has “cleaned up his bat path” and kept his barrel square through the zone.

“I know the hitting coaches kind of unlocked something with Kyle, and it’s just good to see it translate that quickly,” Roberts said.

Added Tucker, who was vague about the specifics of his breakthrough: “There’s a lot more room for error hitting the ball because you can hit it deep and go the other way or catch it out in front and pull it a little bit more. Just trying to be consistent with that and be as long through the zone as possible.”

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There’s little saving Tucker’s season-long stats at this point, of course. At the end of play Friday, he was still hitting just .230 on the year (a career-worst for a full-length campaign) with a .701 OPS (the 36th-lowest mark of MLB’s 139 qualified hitters).

However, the Dodgers’ main impetus for signing the four-time All-Star was to bolster their chances of a World Series three-peat. Despite his struggles, they remain in prime October position. And while all might not be forgiven if he has a big playoff moment, it would certainly help erase the sting of his regular-season frustrations.

“The numbers [for the season] probably are what they are,” Tucker said. “But we’ve got a lot of important games coming next month. Just trying to finish out the season strong, get to that point and just try to win games. That’s the most important thing.”

Granted, there’s a long way to go before any of that. Two games, against two sub-.500 opponents, offer little more than a simple seed of hope that Tucker can eventually turn things around.

Then again, that’s more than the Dodgers have had to cling to for most of this year, while waiting on something from the 29-year-old superstar.

Now, at long last, Tucker has real confidence. He’s not quite hot yet, but he’s no longer ice cold either.