LOS ANGELES — A winner-take-all game – be it a Game 7 or, in this case, a Game 5 – can be worth the wait.
It certainly was for Dodger fans Friday night.
All of those frayed nerves after being pushed to the verge of elimination by the San Diego Padres after Game 3 of the National League Division Series?
All of that pent up angst after consecutive NLDS exits the previous two years?
All of those doubts that Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Friday’s starter, was the right guy to pitch an elimination game, especially against a Padres team that had roughed him up at the start of the season in South Korea and again in the first game of this series?
Fuhgeddaboutit, as they’d say in New York. Which, incidentally, represents the Dodgers’ next hurdle. The quest continues, the Amazin’ Mets – that description as true this season as it’s been in years – will be at Dodger Stadium on Sunday night for the start of the NL Championship Series … and Dodger fans, you have all of Saturday to rest and take a few deep breaths before the obsession resumes.
The Padres were swept aside Friday night, finally, all of the commotion and noise from earlier in the series dissipating in a 2-0 victory that included solo home runs from Kiké and Teoscar Hernández and, not least, a masterful five innings from Yamamoto, the kind of pitching that Andrew Friedman and his front office envisioned when they agreed on a 12-year, $325 million contract to bring the Japanese right-hander stateside.
The doubts that Yamamoto could handle elimination game pressure subsided quickly Friday night. He sat around 97-98 mph with his four-seamer, a couple of ticks above his average velocity. He allowed two hits, let only one man get into scoring position, showed no nerves and (we presume) tipped no pitches.
“What he did tonight, that’s who he is,” Kiké Hernández said. “And we’re not surprised whatsoever. Game 1 didn’t go his way, but this is the beautiful thing about baseball; you get to do it over the next day. In this case, it was five, six days later. He did his thing.”
Five innings was probably two more than the Dodger faithful were hoping for and maybe three or four more than expected, and it set up the likely method by which the Dodgers will have to operate throughout October if they’re to provide the parade they and their fans never received after the 2020 World Series title.
This is a superior bullpen to the ones that Dodger fans have railed at in past years, and it was a parade of relief pitchers who finished off this series with a 24-inning scoreless streak. After a six-run second inning in Tuesday night’s 6-5 Game 3 victory that pushed the Dodgers to the brink, San Diego not only never scored again but got runners into scoring position in only six of those 24 innings, 15 of those against the Dodgers’ high-leverage relievers.
So this should be the script for a team whose original starting pitching plan has been severely compromised by injuries: Get what you can out of the starter and then turn it over to a bullpen with multiple leverage arms and multiple looks (including a verified flamethrower in Michael Kopech, whose final pitch of the eighth inning was a 102 mph four-seamer up in – or maybe above – the zone that Jake Cronenworth waved at futilely for strike three).
Given that scenario, there was one scary moment Friday night. Alex Vesia got the final out of the seventh, striking out Jackson Merrill. He came out to warm up for the eighth and then walked off the mound accompanied by an athletic trainer, headed for the dugout and then the clubhouse. Manager Dave Roberts later said that Vesia described it as a cramp, but he’ll undergo further examination.
“I’m crossing my fingers that it’s not any type of intercostal or oblique situation,” Roberts said. “I hope it’s just a cramp.”
If it’s more serious, that could be trouble given that Vesia and Anthony Banda were the only left-handed relievers on the roster for this series, and presumably would be targeted for Mets’ left-handed hitters Brandon Nimmo and Jesse Winker in critical spots. The only other left-handers currently on the Dodgers’ 40-man roster are rookies Justin Wrobleski and Zach Logue … and Clayton Kershaw, who had been ruled out of the postseason because of injury before it started.
But there’s a day to sort that out, just as there’s a day for the Dodgers to sober up after the traditionally raucous clubhouse celebration. While the players were spraying champagne, family members were milling around the field and their children were romping on what had become L.A.’s coolest playground. Meanwhile, a couple thousand fans remained in their seats on the field level, enjoying the scene too much to leave.
After the past two Octobers, you’d stay, too.
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The Dodgers won four elimination games in 2021, counting the Wild Card game, before being eliminated by eventual champ Atlanta in Game 6 of the NLCS. The last two years they lost both elimination games they played, in a four-game NLDS loss to San Diego in ’22 and a sweep by Arizona in ’23.
Is this a tougher team mentally? Maybe so.
“Credit to the front office and all that for putting this team together to put us in the spot to succeed,” Kiké Hernández said. “And whether we don’t have the starting pitching or whatever it is that makes people doubt – inside those doors, inside those walls, we don’t really care. And that’s where, like, not giving a damn comes into play … I don’t care what anybody says, I don’t care what it looks like, we’re all in this together.
“We believe in each other and we’re going to do whatever it takes to win a ball game, to win tonight. And it doesn’t have to be pretty.”
Still, this is L.A., a city of big expectations. And these are the Dodgers, a franchise with a big payroll. So it’s a fact of life, and a sobering thought: If they don’t win the next series, and the one after that, people likely won’t remember this one.
jalexander@scng.com