After the Los Angeles Dodgers dropped their fifth game in a row in perhaps the worst way imaginable, manager Dave Roberts alluded to pulling his team together to regroup.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto had a no-hitter and a 3-0 lead through 8.2 innings before allowing a solo home run, but when Blake Treinen and Tanner Scott failed to record an out, the Dodgers would lose in walk-off fashion to the Baltimore Orioles.

• “I think that when you’re mired in something, you have to kind of sometimes step back or have somebody allow you to step back and look at what’s going on,” Roberts said. “I think that we’ve done that.”

Although Roberts didn’t directly say what he talked to his team about, he shed more light on his team’s current approach and how to shift it moving forward.

“There’s an approach, a mental part. I think that right now it seems like guys are trying to be a little too careful, trying to be perfect and trying not to fail,” Roberts said. “That kind of mindset doesn’t bode well when you’re trying to not make a mistake or be perfect.

“I think those are things, the conversations I’ve had with the guys as far as giving them the freedom to just play freely. With that, the hope is you’ll see some more smiles and some more sunflower seeds and the energy. … There’s a balance between urgency and focus and being too tight. So just trying to find that fine balance where I do think that the conversation we all had, we found that balance.”

It seems like balance has been the last thing that the Dodgers have displayed lately, but after such a devastating loss, it seems like things can’t get much worse.

All the Dodgers can do with less than a month remaining in the regular season is to regroup and try to play a more familiar brand of baseball. With a dwindling lead in the NL West, that familiar play must return as soon as possible.