Shohei Ohtani stays hot and hits another home run as the Dodgers split the series with the Angels

The Dodgers continued two important trends on Saturday night.

Shohei Ohtani stayed hot, hitting another home run against his former team in the Dodgers’ 7-2 victory over the Angels at Dodger Stadium.

The Dodgers’ bottom end also remained productive, yielding six hits and five runs from the bottom four to secure the win in the two-game Freeway Series over the weekend.

Ohtani’s home run continued his red-hot week at bat. In seven games since last Sunday – the last six of which have seen him as the team’s first hitter in place of the injured Mookie Betts – the slugger has a .481 batting average (13 for 27) with seven home runs, 12 RBIs, seven walks and just two strikeouts.

Read more: Hernández: Shohei Ohtani retired a meme by joining a team where his heroics aren’t the only story

His two-run home run on Saturday was a line-drive giant hit that landed halfway up the right-field pavilion. With an estimated distance of 459 feet, it was his fourth hit of at least 450 feet this week. And it gave him big flies in both of this weekend’s games against the Angels – his first against the club since signing with the Dodgers in the offseason.

Even though Ohtani takes the helm of the Dodgers’ offense, it is the once-weak bottom half of the lineup that is helping the team make its recent comeback.

A month ago, the club’s Nos. 6 through 9 hitters were among the worst in the major leagues, posting a .194 batting average through the season’s first 46 games, better than only the Oakland Athletics.

“It’s still a really good lineup, and we know it’s going to change,” second baseman Gavin Lux, one of many culprits for the group’s early-season struggles, said in late May. “But yeah, I think we all expect more from ourselves.”

A month later, the Dodgers (48-31) actually experienced a reversal of their fortunes.

Through Saturday, the team’s bottom-half hitters had a .243 batting average since May 17, ranking a solid 14th in MLB during that span.

They then played one of their best collective games to date in their victory over the Angels (30-46), getting two hits each from Lux, Miguel Rojas and Cavan Biggio and two walks from Jason Heyward.

Lux, the No. 8 hitter, opened the scoring with a massive leadoff home run in the bottom of the third inning, just his second home run of the season and first since May 7.

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Rojas, batting seventh, continued one of the more interesting statistical trends of the season: In games in which he had a hit, the Dodgers are 22-0.

Biggio had his best game as a Dodger at the No. 9 spot, continuing to fill in for injured third baseman Max Muncy, whose return from an oblique strain is still uncertain and took much longer than originally expected (Muncy said one problem was that his entire oblique was affected, not just an isolated area).

No. 6 hitter Heyward, whose return from a back injury on May 17 was a key factor in the recent bottom-half performance, also contributed with his two walks and kept his OPS above .800 this season.

The lineup was so good that Roberts was able to start a new trend that will likely continue to grow as the season progresses.

Leadoff hitter Tyler Glasnow got off to a great start, allowing just two runs (one earned) on two hits in a seven-inning, 10-strikeout performance, but with the Dodgers leading 7-2 in the bottom of the seventh inning, Roberts decided to take him off the field after just 74 pitches.

The reason: Glasnow has already completed 100 innings this season, just 20 fewer than his career high from last season.

The Dodgers don’t plan to use the right-hander as a skip starter or rest him until October, but they will “pay attention to his workload” in smaller steps, Roberts said.

Thanks to Ohtani’s breakout role at the beginning of the lineup and continued plentiful production at the end, Saturday presented the perfect opportunity.

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.