LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Dodgers do big-game hunting better than any team in baseball. The Boston Red Sox aren’t sure if they want to pay Mookie Betts? Get him in a trade and lock him up. Negotiations between the Atlanta Braves and Freddie Freeman get weird? Swoop in and sign him. The historic talent of Shohei Ohtani on the market? Make him the centrepiece of a billion-dollar winter that also includes Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Teoscar Hernandez. It’s best-in-class shock and awe.
At the same time, the difference between them and other big-budget behemoths is that the Dodgers are elite at everything else, too, from dumpster-dive waiver claims to advanced scouting and game-planning. It’s why they had enough depth to withstand injuries to an entire staff’s worth of pitchers, among other roster losses, to once again win the National League East, rally past the San Diego Padres in the division series and get the jump on the New York Mets with a 9-0 win in the NL Championship Series opener Sunday.
Jack Flaherty threw seven shutout innings, fellow trade deadline pickup Tommy Edman added an RBI single while covering shortstop for the too-hurt-for-the-roster Miguel Rojas and Max Muncy, built up into a two-time all-star after being released by Oakland in 2017, delivered a two-run single in the first that made a shaky Kodai Senga pay for his early trouble. Betts’ three-run double in the eighth capped the scoring while the pitching staff has now thrown a post-season record-tying 33 consecutive shutout innings, matching the 1966 Orioles.
An electric crowd of 53,503 at Dodger Stadium ate it all up and the Mets are now on their heels, having used four relievers before a quick-turnaround Game 2 Monday afternoon. They’ll need Sean Manaea to hold in that one, while Flaherty set his team up to execute the bullpen day it hoped for, allowing Walker Buehler to start Game 3 at Citi Field.
Not how the Dodgers drew it up in a season manager Dave Roberts described as the most challenging of his career, given how they’ve gone way “beyond” the many contingencies they’d planned for.
“Goodness, you look at the roster right now and certainly on the pitching side, there are three or four guys that I didn’t know if they were going to get major-league service this year and they’re on a post-season roster in the CS,” said Roberts. “That is a lot on the front office … their biggest thing is trying to plan for the unforeseen and have depth and have young players kind of continue to emerge, so the machine keeps going and doesn’t take a step back.
“We’ve needed every bit of it.”
There is perhaps no more fitting contrast to what the Dodgers have done this year than the Mets of a year ago, who appeared set to storm the post-season after a spectacular winter buildup only to shed aces Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander at the deadline after an epic collapse.
David Stearns, hired by the Mets as their president of baseball operations to reset the mess, is seeking to emulate the foundation underpinning the Dodgers’ success, with this current trip to the NLCS a somewhat surprising and unexpected early byproduct.
Still, there’s a clear gap between the clubs in this series and it’s L.A.’s drafting, development and markedly unsexy floor-raising roster adds that kept this season afloat, even at times when injuries to Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw and Tony Gonsolin, among many others, kept coming.
“At different times, you could see where it was a little deflating to the clubhouse,” said Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations. “They’re out there battling, doing everything they can to accomplish our regular season goal of winning the division, and things keep happening.
“Doc’s just relentless optimism helped keep things directionally positive and moving forward and allowed us to do what we did to put ourselves in position to have the bye that allowed us to kind of reset some of our pitching, which then put us in position for the five-game (win over San Diego).”
Friedman and the front office’s role can’t be understated there, from small moves like purchasing briefly a Blue Jay lefty reliever Anthony Banda from Cleveland in May and plucking righty Brent Honeywell from the Pirates in July. Both are on the NLCS roster, as is Flaherty, a late deadline add after Houston outbid them and others for Yusei Kikuchi.
“We had some back and forth with Detroit but had been kind of more focused on other fronts thinking that Detroit was going a different direction,” Friedman said. “And then they got back to us, I think 40 minutes before and things happened pretty quickly from there.
“Jack’s been great for us. The look in his eye, he wanted the ball today. And we feel really confident with him on the mound.”
Flaherty rewarded that confidence by going perfect through three, not allowing a hit until the fifth and leaving just two innings for the bullpen to cover. Daniel Hudson pitched the eighth and Ben Casparius, a fifth-round pick in 2021 with all of three big-league outings under his belt, handled the ninth.
Senga, on the other hand, was a mess out of the gate, walking the bases loaded after getting Ohtani on a groundout and getting lucky when Will Smith just got under a middle-middle cutter right after. Muncy then dunked a single into centre to score Betts and Freeman, who hobbled in from second on his sprained right ankle, leaping into the right-fielder’s arms after touching the plate.
Before the game, Muncy had presciently noted that whatever the Mets’ pitching plans were, the opening hurler would only “go as long as we let him go.” The Dodgers then made sure to force Senga out early, with Ohtani’s RBI single in the second pushing the early lead to 3-0 and ending Senga’s night after only four outs.
RBI singles by Edman and Freeman sandwiched around an Ohtani single and error that brought home another run in the fourth pushed the game out of reach, precisely the type of start the Dodgers wanted in their first game after an emotional series with the Padres.
In 2021, the Dodgers survived a gruelling division series with the Giants before falling to Atlanta and Muncy remembers how “you beat the division rival, you’re really, really high up and you almost let your guard down and it gets taken out from underneath your feet.”
“That’s something we’re going to reiterate today and this whole series,” he continued. “We have to make sure we maintain our intensity and maintain our focus, and I think that goes back to the group we have in this clubhouse and the fire that we have and just the chemistry we’ve had.”
Even with all that, there are no guarantees, as the Dodgers’ recent playoff history shows, but time again this season, whenever they’ve needed an answer, they’ve managed to find one.
