Loss puts L.A. on brink of elimination

PHOENIX -- The Dodgers moved a step closer to official elimination from the playoffs Friday night.

They lost their sixth game in a row, dropping their series opener to the Arizona Diamondbacks, 12-3, at Chase Field and falling eight games back of the Diamondbacks in the National League West with eight games to play.

The Dodgers will be eliminated from the division race the next time they lose or the next time the Diamondbacks win. The Dodgers are also 6 1/2 games behind the San Diego Padres in the wild-card race, meaning it won’t take much longer to eliminate them from that race either.

Friday’s defeat was followed by a closed-door meeting during which Manager Grady Little and veteran players Jeff Kent and Nomar Garciaparra spoke to the team.

Kent and Garciaparra drove in two of the runs that gave the Dodgers an early 3-1 lead. But in the bottom of the third, Esteban Loaiza went back to looking like a 35-year-old pitcher who missed most of the season.

Loaiza gave up two-run home runs by Tony Clark and Chris Young in the third and fourth innings, during which Arizona put up five runs to take a 6-3 lead. Before hitting his homer, Clark hit a popup in foul territory that might have been catchable but fell between Garciaparra and Tony Abreu.

“Recently, whenever we’ve made mistakes, we had to pay severely for them,” Little said.

Loaiza was charged with six runs and five hits in four innings. His only consolation was that he walked two batters, the first time in three starts that he had fewer walks than innings pitched.

Little said Loaiza would make his next start.

Few of the 37,753 fans at Chase Field realized it, but in the seventh inning, Luis Gonzalez collected the 2,500th hit of his career, a single to right. Gonzalez had made it no secret that he wanted to reach the milestone this season. “It’s nice to do it here, where I played for a long time,” Gonzalez said.

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dylan.hernandez@latimes.com