TORONTO – Sent to the showers in the third inning, Blue Jays starter Josh Johnson had plenty of time to pick out the perfect word to sum up his performance.
A.J. Ellis hit a two-run homer and drove in a career-best five runs, Hyun-Jin Ryu pitched 5 1-3 innings, and Los Angeles set a season high in runs with a 14-5 win over Johnson and Toronto on Monday night, their fourth straight victory and 21st in 26 games.
"I was pitiful," Johnson said. "It's the only way I could put it. I didn't even battle them. Everything was in the middle of the plate."
Johnson (1-6) allowed five runs and seven hits in two-plus innings. He walked one and struck out two.
He is 0-4 with a 7.71 ERA in five starts since his lone victory of the season, June 23 against Baltimore.
"You feel for the guy because he's competing but it just hasn't happened," Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said. "It's not for a lack of effort, but basically it comes down to locating the ball and he's had trouble doing that."
Toronto made a season-high five errors and lost its fifth straight game. The Blue Jays have lost 12 of 16 overall.
"It wasn't a very good game," Gibbons said. "We got whipped all the way around."
Touted as a favorite to win the division this spring, the Blue Jays are last in the AL East, well out of the wild-card race.
"We've put ourselves in a significant hole," infielder Mark DeRosa said. "I don't know if we're capable of coming out of it."
Johnson got the Dodgers in order in the first, striking out Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, but his outing went downhill from there. The right-hander allowed four runs in the second, two of them on Ellis' homer.
"First at-bat he looked pretty good," Gonzalez said. "I don't know if they were changeups or two-seamers but they had pretty good bite. It looked like he had his stuff going and then after the home run he kind of lost it and gave up those extra runs."
Ellis went deep in the second inning and had RBI singles in the third, sixth and seventh. He also reached on first baseman Adam Lind's fielding error in the fourth.
Seventh-hitter Skip Schumaker added a three-run shot as the Dodgers moved a season-high four games above .500 and won their eighth straight road game, their longest streak since a nine-game run in July 2004.
Ryu (8-3) had gone 4-1 with a 2.25 ERA in 10 starts before matching a season worst by giving up five runs in five innings at Arizona on July 10. He was better against the Blue Jays, allowing four runs and nine hits, all singles, in 5 1-3 innings. Ryu walked two and struck out three.
A large group of Korean fans cheered loudly when Ryu's name was announced before the game, and again when he walked in from the bullpen. Waving flags and chanting, they kept up the noise through much of his outing.
"That was definitely more than I expected here in Toronto," Ryu said through a translator. "I was very appreciative of that, it was a big help for me."
Jose Dominguez got two outs, J.P. Howell worked two innings and Chris Withrow finished.
The Dodgers played without outfielder Matt Kemp, who is expected to miss the three-game series with a sprained left ankle. X-rays on Kemp were negative.
"We'll see how it looks tomorrow, if it's any better," Mattingly said.
Kemp came off the 15-day disabled list Sunday after sitting out 11 games with a sore left shoulder. He went 3 for 4 with a home run in a win over Washington, but limped off after sliding into catcher Kurt Suzuki on a force play in the ninth.
Puig started in center Monday and Andre Ethier was the DH. Mattingly said Ethier would likely return to center for the next two games.
Puig prevented a run with a sensational leaping catch at the wall on J.P. Arencibia's deep drive in the eighth.
Los Angeles batted around in its four-run second. Ethier hit a one-out double and Ellis followed with his fifth homer. Three batters later, Carl Crawford and Puig hit back-to-back RBI singles.
Ethier doubled and scored on Ellis' single off reliever Aaron Loup in the third, but Toronto got two in the bottom half on RBI singles by Melky Cabrera and DeRosa.
Gonzalez walked and scored on Ethier's double play grounder in the fourth, and the Dodgers piled on with four more in the sixth against Dustin McGowan and Brett Cecil.
A.J. Ellis and Crawford had run-scoring singles, Juan Uribe hit an RBI grounder and Mark Ellis added a sacrifice fly.
Toronto chased Ryu and cut it to 10-4 in the bottom half. Brett Lawrie hit an RBI grounder and Colby Rasmus scored on a wild pitch by Dominguez, but the Dodgers added four more off Steve Delabar in the seventh, three of them on Schumaker's second deck homer to right, his first.
DeRosa doubled and scored on Rasmus' single off Howell in the eighth, but Puig robbed Arencibia of extra bases on the next play.
NOTES: The Dodgers are 5-5 in interleague games. ... Toronto's most recent five-error game was May 18, 2011, against Tampa Bay. The Blue Jays made a team-worst six errors at Texas on May 13, 1982. ... Paul Stanley of the rock group KISS threw out the first pitch.
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