Brewers hold off Dodgers again for 9th straight win

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Freddy Peralta won his seventh straight start, Isaac Collins and Joey Ortiz homered, and the Milwaukee Brewers held off the Los Angeles Dodgers 8-7 on Saturday night to extend their win streak to a season-best nine.

Shohei Ohtani hit his National League-leading 33rd homer and drove in three runs for the Dodgers. Tommy Edman and Miguel Rojas both went deep in the eighth to pull the NL West leaders to 8-7.

But then Ohtani’s flyball died on the warning track to end the eighth, and Trevor Megill threw a 1-2-3 ninth for his 23rd save as Los Angeles lost for the ninth time in 11 games.

Milwaukee improved to 5-0 against the defending World Series champions this year, including a three-game sweep at home last week.

Peralta (12-4) wasn’t particularly sharp, giving up four runs and five hits in five innings as his ERA rose from 2.66 to 2.85. But the Brewers tacked on three insurance runs to maintain the lead after the All-Star right-hander exited.

After the teams traded four-run rallies in the third, the Brewers took a 5-4 lead on Collins’ 363-foot homer over the short right-field wall in the fourth. They made it 6-4 on Caleb Durbin’s RBI double in the sixth.

The Dodgers pulled to 6-5 in the sixth when Edman snapped an 0-for-29 skid with a single and Ohtani sliced an RBI single to left.

Milwaukee pushed it to 7-5 in the seventh when Andrew Vaughn hit a two-out RBI single, and 8-5 in the eighth on Ortiz’s homer.

Los Angeles starter Emmet Sheehan (1-1) allowed five runs and seven hits in three-plus innings.

Peralta prevented an even bigger rally in the third when, with four runs in, a runner on third and no outs, he struck out Andy Pages, got Michael Conforto to ground out to shortstop with the infield in and retired Edman on a fly to left.

The Dodgers were hitting .157 with four runs in four-plus games against the Brewers this season before scoring four times in the third.

Dodgers left-hander Clayton Kershaw (4-1, 3.88 ERA) faces Brewers lefty Jose Quintana (6-3, 3.28) in Sunday’s series finale.