ARCADIA — The Arcadia baseball team captured its sixth consecutive Pacific League title Tuesday as Gus Cooper pitched a shutout for the Apaches in a 3-0 win over Crescenta Valley.

“It’s special,” Arcadia coach Nick Lemas said about winning his ninth league title with the program. “It’s not easy. We’ve had some good clubs over the years, but even if you’re good doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to win. It’s been a grind, it’s been a testament to our program.”

Arcadia is 23-2 overall and 13-0 in league. Crescenta Valley falls to 19-6 overall and 10-3 in league.

Cooper, the reigning SGV boys athlete of the week, was bursting with confidence coming into the start after throwing a no-hitter in his last outing against Burroughs.

“I was just really confident in my team to back me up (and) get some runs behind me,” Cooper said. “I was just doing my part. I try not to think too much and just play my game.”

Cooper allowed only five hits over seven innings, shutting down a red-hot Crescenta Valley offense.

“He’s been like that all year long,” Lemas said. “He’s pretty special, he’s doing some great things on the mound for us and he competes. He does a great job.”

The senior has yet to be figured out by opposing offenses. He has an 0.30 ERA and 7-0 record.

Arcadia’s offense was powered by Julian Salmon. The junior third baseman finished 2 for 3 with a two-RBI single in the fourth inning that put the Arcadia ahead for good.

“Thank God, luckily I came up in that big situation, scoring those two runs,” Salmon said. “I had Cooper’s back. He was pitching all game, just competing up there so you know I had to back up my boy and come through.”

Crescenta Valley starter Mike Herman made it a pitchers’ duel through the first three innings.

Apart from a leadoff double from the Falcons to begin the game, neither team could get anything going offensively as each pitcher efficiently moved through the lineup.

The Apaches’ offense was able to break through in the bottom of the fourth inning when Salmon struck for a two-RBI single.

Two batters later, Maverick Silva delivered an RBI single to push Arcadia’s lead to 3-0.

“We got some good hitters and we strung it together and we’re able to get a guy across,” Lemas said. “It was a big at-bat from Salmon to get those guys in.”

The run support was more than enough for Cooper, who powered his way through three more shutout innings to earn the win.

“That’s definitely huge,” Cooper said of the three runs Arcadia scored in the fourth. “I was hyping up my teammates, dugout was great…That feels really great as a pitcher knowing I can go out there with a lead to work with and that was just really big.”

Crescenta Valley will look to even the season series Friday as they host the Apaches in the Pacific League finale.

LOS ANGELES — The recipe to overcome what was starting to look like a championship hangover was to add a little spice.

Less than a week ago, the Dodgers were on the hunt for offensive consistency. A 15-2 victory over the Miami Marlins on Tuesday night was the most definitive example yet that the flavor has returned.

“From the beginning of the season, it was like one side or another,” said outfielder Teoscar Hernandez, who had a season-high four hits with two doubles and four RBIs. “It was like, if the pitching was there, we didn’t hit, or when we hit, the pitching wasn’t there. So today was the first game that I remember that everything was working out from all over. So pitching, defense, base, running, hitting, everything is good today.”

Shohei Ohtani’s leadoff home run sure looked like 2024 again. The flashbacks continued with 18 total hits from the lineup, five doubles in that total, and eight walks that were the most telling sign of all. The Dodgers were back to waiting out the bad pitches, driving up pitch counts and hammering the strikes.

Over their current four-game winning streak, they have averaged 9.8 runs per game.

“Just recently, it just seems like team wise we’re beating a starter, creating stressful innings, we’re taking walks, situationally we’ve been good, and this is all while a few guys are still just trying to find their footing and getting on track,” Manager Dave Roberts said. “This is what we potentially can do, and you just give yourself a fighting chance when you can kind of take those at-bats.”

But the similarities to 2024 did not end there. The Dodgers also used a bullpen game for success, just like they did in last year’s postseason run when they used three starters and a pile of relievers to get through the San Diego Padres, New York Mets and New York Yankees for the eighth title in club history.

While they used an opener and mostly one-inning contributions while winning in the playoffs, the Dodgers turned this bullpen game on its ear with two innings from rookie left-hander Jack Dreyer and five from right-hander Matt Sauer (1-0), who was called up from Triple-A Oklahoma City on Tuesday specifically to take down as many innings as possible. Utility man Kiké Hernandez closed it out with a scoreless ninth inning from the mound.

After the first win of his career, Sauer is expected to be sent down in advance of Tony Gonsolin’s return to the major leagues Wednesday, but the outing is sure to earn him another call in the near future.

“Even when we’re down in OKC, you still follow the big-league club,” Sauer said. “And I knew the bullpen has been used a lot. So coming into today, I had a goal of at least five innings, help the boys down in the pen a little bit. Just happy I was able to do that.”

Sauer gave up one run on five hits with no walks and four strikeouts. And it was nearly a scoreless outing, with the Marlins only scoring a run against him on the second to last of the 19 batters he faced.

“I can’t say enough about his performance,” Roberts said. “Got his first major league win, which was great, and to chew up five innings was big. (We) needed every bit of it, considering where our pen is at, the leverage guys and with another game to play and then going into 10 in a row (on the road), so what Matt did today picked us up big time.”

Ohtani’s seventh home run of the season came on the first pitch of the game from Marlins right-hander Sandy Alcantara, who allowed seven runs on seven hits in 2⅔ innings with five walks and two strikeouts.

Alcantara’s outing can serve as a cautionary tale. It was his sixth outing since returning from 2023 Tommy John surgery. He now has an 8.31 ERA.

Gonsolin also will be returning from 2023 Tommy John surgery on Wednesday afternoon.

If the Dodgers can continue to produce on offense, it should be an eventful return for the right-hander.

In the same week Hernandez hit his 200th home run, he hit his 200th career double Tuesday with two runs scored. Freddie Freeman also had two doubles with two runs. Will Smith had a double among his two hits with two RBIs, while Tommy Edman drove in three runs, one game after his game-ending two-run single in the 10th inning.

After the Marlins scored a run in the top of the first inning off Dreyer, the Dodgers responded with three in the bottom half, getting a Hernandez RBI double and a run-scoring fly ball from Edman after Ohtani’s home run. It was Ohtani’s first home run in eight games since returning from the birth of his daughter.

“It was a good home run to get back on the board for this game,” Ohtani said through an interpreter. “Haven’t hit one since being a father, so it’s a really nice one to be able to do that.”

Ohtani’s leadoff home run was his second of the season and the 14th of his career. After a 1-for-16 dry spell, Ohtani is now 7 for 15 over his last four games with six runs scored.

“I think we feed off Shohei, certainly, at the top of the order,” Roberts said. “And for him to (tie it) after the first pitch that their starter throws certainly gets some life into our offense, and we just took it from there. When he’s going, you can see our offense sort of follows suit.”

LOS ANGELES — After the Kings’ two losses in Edmonton evened their first-round playoff series against the Oilers, they wanted to circle the wagons, but instead they found themselves circling the drain.

They dropped a third consecutive decision, 3-1, though this time there was no third-period lead to blow as there had been in their Game 4 and 5 losses, as well their Game 1 win.

They white-knuckled their way through two periods in which they were beaten up analytically and territorially, but not on the scoreboard, until they lost yet another closing stanza.

They now trail the team that has ended their season three years in a row, 3-2, and will face elimination in hostile territory in Game 6 on Thursday night. The Kings have struggled on the road all season, winning just 17 of 43 games in the regular season and playoffs so far, while Edmonton has never failed to close out a Western Conference opponent after mounting three wins in any of the past three postseasons.

After giving up a season-high in shots on goal in consecutive games in Edmonton – 37 in a Game 3 fiasco and 48 in Game 4’s overtime folding act – the Kings allowed the most shots in a home game all season in Game 5 with 46.

Edmonton has outshot the Kings 79-35 since the start of the third period of Game 4.

“They executed way better than us tonight. They were stronger. They beat us in every area of the game, except for the special teams, oddly enough,” Kings coach Jim Hiller said. “The goaltender was great for us to give us a chance. They were just better, in every way. We can’t look to one part of our game and think that it was acceptable or good enough.”

Andrei Kuzmenko tallied with the man advantage. Darcy Kuemper did his best to steal the game with 43 saves after making 44 in Sunday’s Game 4.

Evander Kane, Mattias Janmark and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins each scored a goal for Edmonton. Calvin Pickard moved to 3-0-0 in the series by making 21 saves.

“We couldn’t really get anything going, obviously,” captain Anže Kopitar said. “You look at the shot clock and it was pretty evident, the same with the (offensive)-zone time, when you don’t have that, it’s hard to string shifts together and gain (any) momentum.”

The Kings were a top-10 team in the final frame during the regular season but their third-period woes persisted on Tuesday, as they slunk to a 13-5 third-period playoff deficit (plus a 1-0 hole in overtime), which is an NHL-worst in terms of both goals allowed and goal differential.

A largely miraculous 1-1 tie was broken at the 7:12 mark by a familiar face when former Kings winger Viktor Arvidsson ripped a far-side shot off an odd-man rush that gave Janmark an easy putback for the go-ahead goal. With 57.8 seconds showing on the game clock, Nugent-Hopkins heaped dirt on the Kings’ grave with an empty-netter.

Leon Draisaitl extended his playoff scoring streak to 19 games with an assist on Nugent-Hopkins’ goal, on which Connor McDavid’s helper made him the third player in NHL history with eight or more series during which he scored 10 or more points (Oilers legends Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier are the other two).

Yet the goal-scorers on Tuesday were not the marquee names but rather a pair of role players and the intermittently visible Nugent-Hopkins.

“We challenged every line to bring something tonight. There’s no line that we’re hiding,” Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch said. “We can have our fourth line play against the other team’s top line, we feel very confident with that. Doing that, we don’t have to worry about matchups, we can just roll our lines.”

Trailing 33-12 in shots and having accumulated a meager 16% of the first 40 minutes’ expected goals, per Natural Stat Trick, the Kings still managed to earn the first goal of the game, 3:33 into the second period. They would find themselves back in a tie game less than three minutes later, a stalemate that stood at the second intermission.

The Kings’ power play scored the first goal of the game, just as it did in Games 1 and 2, when Kopitar let fly with a shot attempt from the left point that was redirected to Pickard’s glove side by Kuzmenko.

Kuzmenko now has three goals and six points in the postseason, all coming at home. Kopitar’s assist moved him within one point of Luc Robitaille for second on the all-time Kings postseason scoring list on a night when Drew Doughty skated in his 100th career playoff game.

But a tripping penalty on Doughty gave Edmonton its second man advantage of the night, and they scored seven seconds after it expired. The Oilers swarmed the net and nearly got a goal from Zach Hyman before a shot recovery and a keep-in at the blue line kept the sequence going. It culminated in Kane sniping a far-side shot from just inside the right faceoff circle for his second goal of the series and his 14th playoff goal against the Kings in the past four postseasons (23 games).

“We wanted to play pedal-on-the-gas type hockey, and we did that from the get-go. We looked at their record here at home and how tough of a team they are at home, and knowing we have to eventually win a game here if we want to win this series,” Kane said. “We stayed in the fight and we didn’t get frustrated, even though they scored first and we were outplaying them.”

Negative momentum from the Kings’ pair of heart-wrenching losses in Edmonton carried over into an opening salvo for the Oilers that saw them hit the net 19 times to the Kings’ four. In all, the Kings were outshot 52-17 in the third period and overtime of Game 4 combined with the first period of Game 5.

The game remained scoreless thanks to Kuemper, whose highlight reel included two saves in two seconds on Adam Henrique and a lunging glove save to deny Evan Bouchard’s sterling chance off a silky setup by McDavid.

“They’re shooting from all areas. They’re trying to get the puck to the crease and they’ve got bodies there. Thankfully we’ve got (Kuemper), he’s been unbelievable for us,” said Joel Edmundson, who was on for both goals Kuemper allowed. “We’ve relied on him too much in the series, so we’ve got to block more shots, we’ve got to take care of our ‘D’ zone and limit their chances.”