Dodgers beat Padres 8-2 to tie NL West as Ohtani homers in ninth

In a key matchup at Petco Park, the Los Angeles Dodgers avoided a weekend sweep by San Diego with an 8-2 victory that kept the National League West race tense. Shohei Ohtani added a ninth-inning homer for his 45th of the season after spending most of the series facing Padres fans’ taunts, and the Dodgers rode a late surge to snap a skid and pull even with San Diego with 31 games left in the schedule. The night underlined how evenly matched these teams remain as they chase the division crown.

The Padres carried the momentum for much of the game, with Yu Darvish delivering six strong innings and mixing a varied repertoire of cutters, sweepers, splitters and curveballs to keep Los Angeles off balance. Darvish did not have his command over the first series of games, but on Sunday he flipped the script, allowing only a pair of runs and stifling the Dodgers’ offense through most of the night. The Dodgers finally breached his performance in the later innings, but the damage was largely done by a Dodgers lineup that had struggled all weekend to produce consistent offense.

For most of the game, the Dodgers were limited to a single hit before the seventh or eighth inning, a troubling...