Saturday night was, hands down, the best outing of the season for 31-year-old Dodgers right-hander Kenta Maeda. Oh sure, you can argue that his 7.2-inning start against the San Diego Padres on July 6 was a good one, despite the fact that he allowed three runs on four hits with one walk and six strikeouts in a 7-5 losing effort. But his, and the Dodgers, 4-0 shutout win over the Arizona Diamondbacks in front of a Dodger Stadium crowd of 52,606 was flat out dominating.

In his 7.0 shutout innings, the Senboku-gun, Japan native allowed only three hits while walking none and striking out six to even his 2019 record at 8-8 and lower his ERA to 4.12.

So what happened? How does a guy who hasn’t gone more than 5.2 innings in any of his five starts since July 6 suddenly go seven strong innings while being virtually unhittable?

The answer? Sixty-five-year-old Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt.

“Honey worked with some things as far as kind of getting his arm up a little bit instead of kind of off to the side and that seemed to have helped a little bit,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said after the game. “But tonight was really really good from Kenta.

“To give us seven innings I think that more importantly, it was good for our ball club, but more importantly for his confidence the way he threw the baseball,” Roberts added.

Maeda acknowledged that with Honeycutt’s held, he changed his pitching mechanics, more specifically his arm slot, and it has improved all of his pitches.

“Yes, I did go to Honeycutt after that game (against the Padres on July 6),” Maeda said through an interpreter. “Not just my arm slot and pitching mechanics but overall my pitch mix … I had a discussion with him on that.

“As the season goes on, my pitching mechanics (arm slot) did go up. I was able to readjust that, and dealing with a new arm slot, I was able to execute a little better on my off-speed and my fastball,” he added.

Better indeed. In his seven innings of work on Saturday night, Maeda made a total of 93 pitches, of which 63 were strikes. And of his six strikeouts, five of them were swinging.

When the subject of being moved to the bullpen for the postseason came up, Maeda made it abundantly clear that he isn’t even thinking about that right now.

“Postseasons are a whole different story, I’ll think about it once we get there,” Maeda said. “But as of now, my job during the season is to pitch as a starter, so that’s not really on my mind as of now.”

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