LOS ANGELES — Does anyone have a good reason why the Dodgers’ October dominance shouldn’t continue for one more series?
I said “good” reason. Not just more of the same old chatter about buying a championship and how unfair it is … ad nauseam. It’s an old, lazy take and we’ve pretty well debunked it in these pages, noting that while the Dodgers are more able than most to paper over mistakes, there’s far more to their success than just payroll – including new age competence in the front office and on the player development side.
But forget about money for a minute. Have the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays, on the other side of baseball’s postseason bracket, provided enough evidence that they’re strong enough to take down the defending champs?
I’m not seeing it. Especially since the October Dodgers bear more resemblance to the March-through-June Dodgers, who assembled a nine-game lead in the National League West, than they do the July-through-September Dodgers, who frittered away most of that lead and created nervous breakdowns in living rooms throughout Southern California – as well as throughout Dodger Stadium – every time a relief pitcher would fail to protect a lead.
Maybe the final piece snapped into place Friday night, as the club punched its ticket to its fifth World Series in nine years with a 5-1 victory over Milwaukee to sweep the National League Championship Series and reverse that 0-6 regular-season ledger against the Brewers.
After a woeful first nine games of the playoffs in the batter’s box, Shohei Ohtani reintroduced himself to autumn baseball: A 446-foot home run off Jose Quintana leading off the bottom of the first, and a 469-foot missile off of Chad Patrick in the fourth that sailed over the right field pavilion roof and into the plaza beyond.
And just in case anybody missed the first two, Ohtani became the 12th player to hit three homers in a postseason game. His third in the seventh inning was a comparative chip-shot, 427 feet into the pavilion in center for a 5-0 lead.
Remember what I wrote in this space after Thursday night’s Game 3 victory? “If the three-time league MVP gets on the type of heater of which he’s capable, getting those five remaining victories might just be a matter of time.”
Look out.
And this was on a night when Ohtani also pitched six shutout innings and struck out 10, and so much for those stats detailing how his offensive production slipped when he took the mound. (Oh, by the way, for those who compare The Unicorn to The Original, Babe Ruth: Babe did it twice, in the World Series in 1926 and again in 1928. So there’s another achievement for Ohtani to pursue.)
But it’s not just Ohtani who makes these Dodgers the favorite to end the pattern of non-repeaters in baseball’s signature event. He is, after all, their No. 4 starting pitcher now. Blake Snell and Yoshinobu were brilliant in Games 1 and 2 in Milwaukee, and Tyler Glasnow was efficient in his 5⅔ innings on Thursday in Game 3. The four starters now have a collective postseason ERA of 1.28.
And, well, these Dodgers have outscored their postseason foes 46-28 – and that’s with an 8-2 loss in Game 3 of the Division Series against Philadelphia. They held Milwaukee, the team that finished with the most regular-season wins in the sport, to four runs in four games.
Their bullpen, the source of so much angst for three months – up to and including the two games of the Wild Card Series against Cincinnati – is again acting dependable, and as the ninth-inning guy Roki Sasaki is moving ever closer to folk hero status. (Consider the way the players in the Dodger dugout grooved to Sasaki’s new entrance song, “Bailalo Rocky,” in the ninth inning on Friday along with many of those in the announced crowd of 52,883.)
The Dodgers scored just under 5.1 runs per game in the regular season, finishing behind only the Yankees (849 runs to the Dodgers’ 825), and gave up just 4.2 per game (earned and unearned), which was about middle of the pack. But do you really expect the Blue Jays or Mariners to score even that much against this rotation at this time of the year?
Then there are the intangibles that set this team, and this organization, apart. The opportunity to repeat as champions, for the first time in a quarter-century, has not been taken lightly in this clubhouse, with a group of veterans who have felt both the sting of unmet expectations and the joy of winning on the game’s biggest stage. And by all accounts there was a determination dating to the spring at Camelback Ranch not to let this opportunity slip away.
“I feel like we’ve gone through a lot together as a group,” utility player Kiké Hernandez said before Friday’s game. “There’s people who were here in 2020. There’s people who were here last year. And there’s new guys that have bought in and are all in with the mentality and the goal, the final goal, which is to win a World Series.
“… In the past, we’ve had maybe some pressure to perform or whatnot. But we’ve gone through so much as a group that you just know that at the end of the day things are going to be all right and we’re going to find a way to win. So even if you’re not performing, you trust that the guy that comes in behind you is going to get the job done. As long as we’re winning games, nothing else matters. And that’s kind of the mentality that we’ve acquired. And we’re going to keep with it.”
Kiké is the one who said it in 2020, before his team had won one:
“The goal wasn’t to get to the World Series,” he said. “The goal is to win the World Series.”
That hasn’t changed around the Dodgers, and it won’t change. And sometime in the next two weeks that goal should be realized again.
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