Tag Archives: Dave Roberts

NLCS Game Three: “Be really stubborn in there”

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Jackson Chourio

Chourio accepts his props for hitting Game Three’s first pitch into the bleachers Thursday night.

After his Dodgers lost National League Championship Series Game One by a measly 2-1 score, Mookie Betts said they needed to start playing Dodger baseball, “whatever Dodger baseball is.” Then, they lost Game Two a little more decisively, 7-4.

Now, you might not really want to know what they’re thinking. Not after the Brewers knocked them into the NLCS hole 0-3, with Wednesday night’s quite emphatic 6-2 Game Three win.

The Damndodgers are on the brink of winter vacation without a World Series berth to show for being 2026 baseball’s . . . second-winningest team. For being even-up with the Brewers prior to this NLCS, going 8-2 in their last regular season ten and going 15-5 in their last regular season twenty and going 20-10 in their last regular season thirty.

Oops. The Brewers went 22-8 in their last regular season thirty. They also went 4-3 against the Dodgers in their regular season series against each other. The Brewers team OPS was .743 to the Dodgers’s .762, a -19 point difference. Their team fielding-independent pitching (fourth in Show this year) showed the Dodgers (second in Show) only four points lower.

In other words, there wasn’t that much reason to assume the Damndodgers—those money-throwing monstrosities who can’t possibly have anything else such as scouting, player development, analytics, brains, and guts to make them NL West champions thirteen of the last fourteen seasons—were that far superior to these saintly scrappers out of the Milwaukee bargain houses.

Well, now. The Family Dollars are on the threshold of going to the Big Dance. All they have to do is take one more from the Cartiers. Difficult, but not impossible.

If the Dodgers find a way to batter the Brewers in Game Four Thursday night, the Brewers could always elect to make sacrificial lambs of relievers they haven’t yet deployed, comfortable knowing they have Jacob Misiorowski to ride in Game Five. Les Mis, plus their usual case of off-off-off-off-Broadway anti-stars. Even if it’s a Misiorowski-Tarik Skubal rematch.

Misiorowski to one side, how many people outside the burg that made beer ubiquitous could name one of the Brewers’s current cadre of characters not named Les Mis, Christian Yelich, Jackson Chourio, or William (Kid Brother of Willson) Contreras, before this postseason began?

Chourio merely renewed his name recognition Thursday night. All the left fielder had to do was exactly what he did in Dodger Stadium, hit Game Three’s first pitch the other way and over the right center field fence.* With one swing, he renewed his prospects of becoming the second Jackson behind a certain Hall of Famer to be thought of as any type of Mr. October.

“I was still putting my batting gloves on to get ready,” said Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers, who batted fifth in the lineup Thursday. “I just saw the ball flying, and I knew he got it. It kind of set the tone for the day and let everyone know that we’re here to win this game.”

There’d be two more bombs to come later in the game, from two of the Brewers’s heretofore-unknown soldier contingency. From Bauers, hitting a two-run homer in the seventh, then from center fielder Garrett Mitchell, following almost immediately with a solo blast landing not far from Bauers’s bomb.

So where did this power originate? Isn’t that anything but the Brewers’s usual game of scrape, fleck, hunt, and peck?

Jake Bauers

Bauers rounding third off his eleventh-pitch two-run homer.

“It’s funny,,” said outfielder Sal Frelick postgame. “We are hitting some homers, but that’s not the approach at the plate. It’s just: apply pressure, apply pressure. I think by applying pressure, we’re able to dictate that pace of play. It’s not result-oriented, it’s just at-bat oriented. It doesn’t matter if you get out, get on, strike out, whatever. Just take a chunk of the pitcher with you and establish playing that way.”

They’d take their chunks out of Dodgers starting pitcher Blake Snell in due course. First, they had to navigate the lefthander shutting them out for five innings to follow Chourio’s rude introduction. Other than a one-out walk (Mitchell) and base hit to left (rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt) in the second, Snell looked as though he’d filed ownership papers on the guys too many still underrate.

Brewers starter Robert Gasser (now, there’s a name for a pitcher, even if his fastball isn’t the type to be called a gasser) was almost as good as Snell before turning it over to the bullpen. He pitched five solid and survived the Dodgers putting their leadoff men aboard three times and coming up scoreless.

At first, it looked as though manager Pat Murphy played the wrong hand. Abner Uribe, heretofore one of the Brewers’s more effective relievers, had his first truly shaky postseason outing in the sixth: walk (left fielder Teoscar Hernández), walk (right fielder Kyle Tucker), swinging strikeout (pinch hitter Max Muncy), walk (still-ailing designated hitter Shohei Ohtani), two-run double (catcher Will Smith). Forcing Murphy to reach for DL Hall to keep the deficit to 1-2.

Come the top of the seventh, though, the Brewers made Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pay for forgetting Snell’s career-long vulnerability: going the third time around the enemy lineup. Already leaving himself vulnerable by switching parts of his better defense out of the game, Roberts’s forgetfulness may yet prove a key reason why the Dodgers don’t three-peat, if they don’t.

Snell walked DH Andrew Vaughn after a seven pitch battle to open. With Christian Yelich pinch running, the lefthander fought the portside-swinging Bauers epically, through ten pitches. On the full-count eleventh pitch, Yelich took off as though a police cruiser bore  down upon him . . . and Bauers hit the pitch into the right field bleachers.

That overthrew the not-quite-secure Dodger lead by a run. Mitchell checked in, took ball one, then drove one not far from where Bauers’s blast landed. Ending Snell’s evening two batters too late, leaving Evan Phillips to come in and get three outs to contain the damage.

Unfortunately for the Dodgers, that containment lasted only long enough for Roki Sasaki to surrender back-to-back one-out eighth-inning singles to second baseman Brice Turang and catcher Contreras. Roberts brought Justin Wrobleski in for Yelich. Wrobleski put Yelich in the hole 0-2 before throwing a ball off the plate and Smith’s mitt, enabling Turang to score.

It almost felt as though the Brewers rubbed it in a little in the ninth. Pratt singled with one out, stole second with two out and third baseman Joey Ortiz at the plate, then came home with the sixth and final run when Ortiz punched a bast hit. Walk the line? They’ll walk, single, punch, slash, grind, and bomb the line. Whatever it takes.

“Murph says it, Murph preaches it, Murph expects it. Ball-strike them, get good pitches to hit,” said Vaughn post-game. “If [the pitcher’s] not going to give you anything, walk to first base. Be really stubborn in there, and that’s going to help us win ballgames.”

“Not swinging at crap” is the way Pratt put it. Roberts isn’t that blunt, but he all but agreed with the freshman shortstop.

“They’re taking better at-bats than they did last year,” said Roberts, recalling the Dodgers’s sweeping the Brewers in last year’s NLCS. “Their ball-in-play averages, gosh dang, it’s got to be .400. When they put the ball in play, it’s a hit. They’re also slugging, which they didn’t do last year. Those are good combos.”

Good, stubborn combos. The kind that win postseason games. Postseason series, even.

* As analyst Jessica Brand pointed out, it’s the first game-opening, first-pitch, first-batter bomb in Brewers history. Chourio hit a first-pitch, first-inning homer in NLCS Game Two last year, but it was the bottom of the first.

 

“I don’t really get the owners pinching pennies . . . “

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So what is with A’s owner John Fisher suddenly opening his purse?

Dave Roberts supports a players’ salary cap and a salary floor. Clayton Kershaw probably thinks his now-former manager could use a little extra enlightenment. It would have made for some lively discussions in the Dodger clubhouse if Kershaw hadn’t retired after the World Series.

“You know what? I’m all right with (a salary cap),” Roberts told Amazon Prime’s Good Sports a month ago. “I think the NBA has done a nice job of revenue sharing with the players and the owners. But if you’re going to kind of suppress spending at the top, I think that you got to raise the floor to make those bottom-feeders spend money too.”

Kershaw picked a slightly showier place to say he thinks the owners bleating for salary caps are talking through their scalps, actor Rob Lowe’s Literally! podcast. But it ain’t the venue, it’s the verdict. “I don’t understand some of the ownerships’ arguments with this stuff,” the future Hall of Fame lefthander began near December’s end.

Because there’s probably hundreds of multi-billionaires that would love to own a professional baseball team. I bet we could get a list of 100 guys right now that are uber-wealthy, that would love to run a baseball team . . . It might not make the money you would want it to make, but over time it’s just like a stock. It’s going to continue to appreciate.

It’s just like anything else. [The Dodgers are now] worth 3x of what it was . . . I don’t really get that part of it, of the owners pinching pennies.

Grammar aside, Kershaw has the amplifier of Roberts’s second point. But what he doesn’t quite get is that the penny-pinchers have one view of baseball. They think, and they have a commissioner who behaves accordingly, that the good of the game is nothing more than making money for themselves.

My Internet Baseball Writers Association of America newsletter colleague Bill Pruden says responsible baseball ownership begins with a full commitment to fielding a competitive team, but you don’t have to look fast to see that’s not exactly every team’s aspiration. “The A’s and the Pirates immediately come to mind,” he continues, “when one thinks of teams that have, for years, offered little evidence of a real commitment to winning.”

It depends upon what your definition of “winning” is.

For years, A’s owner John Fisher wanted nothing more than to dump Oakland like an inconvenient wife. He let his A’s shrink to compost but failed to strong-arm Oakland and its home county into handing them a new home almost entirely on the house. He finished what was started long enough ago and let the Coliseum and his team finish becoming compost. He said it was the fans’ fault for not wanting to watch scrap heap baseball.

Then Las Vegas’s mouse-like political (lack of) class signed off on $380 million tax dollars with no public hearings or votes toward building the A’s a garish new playpen on the Strip. The owners rubber stamped Fisher’s betrayal while agreeing to waive the normal $1 billion relocation fee.

Fisher got off the way wealthy husbands only dream of getting off when dumping their aging wives for younger mates. While playing in Sacramento’s minor league playpen awaiting the finish of their glass house, we wonder reasonably whether Las Vegas bought the proverbial pig in the proverbial poke.

But lo! As Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills once wrote and sang, there’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear. Or is it? All of a sudden, the A’s are spending. In the past year, Fisher’s purse has opened wide and said, “Aaahhhhhhhhh.” Sort of.

* The A’s extended right fielder Lawrence Butler with seven years at $65.5 million.

* They extended designated hitter/outfielder Brent Rooker with five years at $60 million.

* Most recently, they extended left fielder Tyler Soderstrom to seven years at $86 million, with an eighth-year team option that includes escalators which could hike the value as high as $131 million, according to The Athletic‘s Devon Henderson and Will Sammon. It’s the largest guaranteed deal in the history of the A’s.

No, those aren’t exactly the kind of glandular long-term deals bestowed upon the Shohei Ohtanis, Bryce Harpers, and Mike Trouts of the game. Bo Bichette could land a more valuable deal than those three combined. And optimists think the A’s are prepping for 2028, when their new playpen is supposed to open where the Tropicana Hotel and Resort used to stand.

But $256.5 million is money not heretofore seen flying out from the A’s piggy banks, even if it’s less than a) some teams’ entire payrolls, and b) a third the full value of Ohtani’s ten-year contract. And it might be hard to remember Fisher speaking the way he did to another Athletic writer, Evan Drellich, earlier this offseason.

“At the end of the day,” Fisher told Drellich, “our goal is to put the greatest team on the field that we can and payroll is an important part of that. But our [front office has] demonstrated over decades now that they can see things in players that other teams don’t see . . . We’re going to sign our guys to longer-term deals, as well as sign free agents who can make our team better.”

Until they aren’t?

Those three extensions, wrote Yahoo! Sports’s Mark Powell, were “a stark reminder that [Fisher] always had the money, but chose not to spend it.” Tell the abandoned wife named Oakland what she didn’t know.

Real cynics think you can tell most baseball owners lying when you see their lips move. The current collective bargaining agreement’s coming finish at the end of the 2026 season already has “salary cap” on those lips, with “salary floor” seeming to be a sotto voce side or afterthought.

Maybe few to none among those owners might dare to ponder Kershaw’s thought about wealthy men and women willing to buy in and actually invest in building competitive teams. They might sooner respond to him, now that he’s retired with only his Hall of Fame election ahead of him so far, “Beat it, buster.”

Ask Oakland whether Fisher’s words are his bonds. They’re liable to demand polygraph proof.

First published at Sports Central.

“I’m really at peace with this”

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Clayton Kershaw

Kershaw gets to retire as few of the greats truly do—on his own terms.

Often as not, you learn more about those whose careers you admire by the way they face the end than by the ways they did what earned your admiration. In Clayton Kershaw’s case, it might not be learning but re-learning.

When Kershaw froze the Giants’ Rafael Devers like ice cream with a strike-three fastball that could have been accused of clogging up the passing lane to open the top of the fifth Friday night, his mates in the infield surrounded and hugged him, then he handed the ball to Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. Roberts’s final season as a player was Kershaw’s first.

Now, Roberts put an arm around Kershaw and congratulated him on the career that’s written his likely first-ballot Hall of Fame ticket. Kershaw had only one reply: “I’m sorry I pitched so poorly tonight.”

Then, the 37-year-old lefthander looked toward his wife and four and a half children (Mrs. Kershaw is expecting their fifth) in the stands and motioned to the Dodger Stadium crowd before walking down from the mound and toward the dugout. He gave the crowd the curtain call they all but demanded, knowing they’d seen him pitch at home for the final time, then disappeared.

“I’m kind of mentally exhausted today, honestly,” he said after the Dodgers finished the game with a 6-3 win, “but it’s the best feeling in the world now. We got a win, we clinched a playoff berth, I got to stand on that mound one last time. I just can’t be more grateful.” Note the order in which he listed all of it. We first, I second.

That attitude enabled Kershaw not just to rule the earth from the mound in his prime but to pick up, dust off, start all over again after more mound heartbreak than the all-time greats should be allowed. When he triumphed, it was splendor on the mound; when he didn’t, it was down at the end of Lonely Street to Heartbreak Hotel. Never once did Kershaw take the triumphs for granted or the heartbreaks for finalities.

Clayton Kershaw

Kershaw beginning to deliver the strike three freezer to the Giants’ Rafael Devers, his final regular season batter and strikeout in Dodger Stadium.

No worse hour befell him, perhaps, than the night the Nationals yanked the Dodgers out of the 2019 postseason. The division series night Roberts sent Kershaw in relief of Walker Buehler and Kershaw yanked the Dodgers out of a seventh-inning Game Five jam by striking Adam Eaton out on three pitches. The night Roberts should have met Kershaw en route the dugout, given him the proverbial pat on the posterior, then taken the ball and brought Kenta Maeda in for the eighth to do what the manager later admitted thinking should have been done originally: face Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto.

Oops. Kershaw went out for the eighth. He threw Rendon a 1-0 fastball that looked as though it might catch the corner. Looks were so deceiving that Rendon sent it over the left field fence. The next pitch Kershaw threw, to Soto, was a slider that hung just enough for Soto to hang it into the right field bleachers. Then Roberts brought Maeda in. And Maeda struck the next three Nats out in order.

Those blows tied the game at three each, but Kershaw wasn’t anywhere near the mound when Howie Kendrick wrecked Joe Kelly and the Dodgers with the grand slam that punched the Nats’ tickets to the National League Championship Series. (And, to their eventual World Series conquest.) Some small packs of Dodger fans relieved themselves by running their cars over Kershaw jerseys in the postgame parking lot anyway.

Kershaw couldn’t bring himself to say what had to be said, that his manager inexplicably set him up to fail. Instead, he took the responsibility for himself.

“That’s the hardest part every year,” Kershaw said postgame. “When you don’t win the last game of the season and you’re to blame, it’s not fun . . . Everything people say is true right now about the postseason. I understand that. Nothing I can do about it right now. It’s a terrible feeling, it really is.”

He’d go forth to claim two World Series rings, in 2020 and 2024, even though his fractured toe kept him from pitching in last October other than cheerleading. His career 154 ERA+ leads all still-active pitchers. His 2.85 lifetime fielding-independent pitching rate is second among the active only to the often ill-fated Jacob deGrom. His resumé includes three Cy Young Awards, a Most Valuable Player award, and a no-hitter. Baseball-Reference considers Kershaw the number 20 starting pitcher who ever hit the mound; he was the best starting pitcher of his own time before his body finally started telling him, “That’s what you think.”

The fastball isn’t Little Johnny Jet anymore. The curve ball Vin Scully himself labeled Public Enemy Number One might be headed for Leavenworth. The slider that really turned Kershaw from good to great to extraterrestrial has lost just enough of its slide. But he is still Clayton Kershaw, and he will still have a role in the Dodgers postseason. Even if it’s coming out of the bullpen. He’ll be valued, even if he’ll let other arms hog the headlines for better or worse.

He didn’t pitch as poorly as he thought he did Friday night. Sure, he surrended a pair of earned runs and walked four while scattering four hits otherwise, but he struck six out in his 4.1 innings’ work. Even if that freezer to Devers looked borderline enough that you could wonder whether plate umpire Lance Barksdale might have let the moment and the legacy inform his judgment.

Kershaw Family

L to R—Cooper, Charley, Chance, Ellen, and Cali Kershaw contribute to the ovation for their future Hall of Famer as he’s about to begin his final regular-season Dodger Stadium start.

The night before, Kershaw made his pending retirement official, after an annual flirtation with the idea. True to form, he was humble and appreciative, right down to letting his wife share the moment by way of reading a letter she wrote him for the occasion:

From my perch, I have been uncomfortably pregnant, nursed newborns, rocked them to sleep to the roar of the seventh-inning stretch to get their last nap in. Fed them baby food, pouches, teething with crackers, changing blowout diapers, been frazzled with toddlers, tantrums and meltdowns, chased them through the concourses. A Mary Poppins bag filled with tricks and games to keep them occupied, and ironically teaching them the ins and outs of baseball. Explaining all the numbers on the scoreboard and the concession line, the ballpark food.

(I’ve) cried over some really hard losses and some really incredible milestones. (I’ve) watched our kids fall in love with the game, with the players and watching you pitch. Singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” chasing beach balls, ducking from fly balls, spilling food and popcorn all over the fans below them. (I’ve) done it thousands of times, thousands of bathroom runs, all in the stadium. The workers and ushers are (our) best friends now.

A tear crept down Kershaw’s cheek as he read it.

“I’m really not sad. I’m really not,” he said later in the conference. “I’m really at peace with this. It’s just emotional.”

Few of the greats get to choose their own retirement terms. But they show more of what they’re made of when they do so than they ever showed on the field. Kershaw facing the end, whenever it may prove to be, showed more than any triumph and transcended any tribulation. No wonder grown adults wept for and with him.

If they really must visit this White House . . .

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Jackie Robinson

The Dodgers should remind Trump and his minions—quietly, but profoundly—that they don’t hold with Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson’s dismissal as just another DEI hire.

The defending World Series champion Dodgers will go to the White House Monday at the invitation of President Donald Trump. Including Mookie Betts, who once declined the visit when his then-defending World Series champion Red Sox accepted the same invitation from the same president.

Three days before the Dodgers’ scheduled White House visit, Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano urged the Dodgers to show up wearing jerseys with Jackie Robinson’s number 42. I hope the Dodgers read that column and heed the advice. Then, after the White House visit, I hope they perform a team march in those jerseys from the White House to the Pentagon, right up to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s office.

Of course I can dream, can’t I?

Hark back to March. When the Defense Department scrubbed from their Websites the stories of Robinson (an Army lieutenant in World War II, who beat a court martial for refusing to go to the back of a bus), the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Ira Hayes, the Native American Marine who was one of the six raising the American flag at Iwo Jima.

When DoD press secretary John Ullyot cited Hegseth saying, “[Diversity, Equality, Inclusion] is dead at the Defense Department.” Until it wasn’t, within just days, following an uproar of the type that’s become second nature to Trump/Trump Administration doings, sayings, undoings, unsayings.

“It’s not a political stance that I’m taking,” the Mookie Monster told The Athletic‘s Fabian Ardaya last Friday. “I know no matter what I say, what I do, people are going to take it as political, but that’s definitely not what it is. This about an accomplishment that the Dodgers were able to accomplish last year.”

Was Betts unaware of Trump’s DoD’s bid to turn Robinson and other wartime African-Americans of the 1940s into non-persons? No one says he or his Dodger teammates should turn the visit into a giant, noisy raspberry. But just wearing the Robinson jerseys would be a more powerful rebuke to Trump than any verbal schpritz.

“Opponents of Trump can’t scream into the void, or among themselves, and think that’s resistance enough,” Arellano wrote.

They shouldn’t cede the traditions of this country, like the flag, the White House and democracy, to a tyrant like Trump just because he has wrapped himself in them.

Going to the White House does not normalize Trump—it’s a reminder that the place is ours, not his . . .

. . . Guys: Y’all pioneered the type of globalism and multiculturalism that Trump loathes, that L.A. now exemplifies and that continues to power the best franchise in baseball. It’s time to stand tall for the Dodger Way at the moment it matters the most.

“We have a lot of different people that are part of this organization,” said Dodger manager Dave Roberts.

Different backgrounds, different cultures, race, gender. So everyone had a different story. Economic situations. So we are all going as an organization. I do know that we’re all aligned, and everyone’s going to have their opinions.

This is not a political thing, and I’m not going to sit up here and make it political. I’m excited to, again, recognize the 2024 World Series champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Roberts should be excited likewise to offer the president a reminder that the Dodgers stand for something above and beyond World Series rings. If they don’t want to wear number 42 Dodger jerseys to the White House, Roberts should think of handing Trump a number 42 Dodger jersey. Hand it to him, and say nothing.

Then—before they lend or spend any further credibility upon a man who rejects that for which the Dodgers have stood, since Jackie Robinson stepped onto a field to begin the Dodger career that launched a powerful rebuke to formal segregation and Robinson himself into Cooperstown and world immortality—Roberts and his players should get the hell out.

NLCS Game Five: A Mets blowout and a Dodgers gambit

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Jack Flaherty

On a day he didn’t have it, Dodgers righthander Jack Flaherty had to take eight (runs in three innings) for the team while the Mets blew them out in NLCS Game Five, so as not to compromise manager Dave Roberts’ Game Six bullpen game plan.

If the Mets deliver what some still think is near impossible, and snatch the National League pennant right out from under the Dodgers, don’t be terribly shocked if the number one question on the lips of Dodger fans and others will be, “Why did Dave Roberts leave Jack Flaherty in to take a three-inning, eight-run beating in Game Five?”

The most likely answer—considering the Mets would go on to finish what they started and blow the Dodgers out 12-6, thus sparing their elimination for another day—is Game Six.

In a National League Championship Series during which each team has won its games by blowout, Game Five may yet secure a place among the least conscionably allowed pitcher abuse by any manager. Ever. Abuse nobody could have seen coming. Could they?

Hadn’t Flaherty, a comeback kid of sorts starting with the Tigers before his trade to the Dodgers at this year’s deadline, pinned the Mets with seven shutout innings in Game One en route the Dodgers finishing with a 9-0 opening thrashing?

Yes, he had. But in Game Five he didn’t have it. His fastball wasn’t terribly fast, his breaking balls could have been court-martialed for insubordination, and the Mets were only too willing to wait him out, wait for the balls coming into the meat of the strike zone or close enough, and pounce.

Now the 29-year-old righthander went from virtuoso extension of Dodger pitching’s consecutive scoreless inning streak this postseason to a piñata in five days. But Roberts didn’t want to reach into his bullpen unless he absolutely had to with a likely bullpen game looming for the Dodgers in Game Six.

Their starting pitching has been so compromised that bullpen games became necessary survival for them. Roberts is counting on his Game Six bullpen game to win the pennant for him. He knows these Mets aren’t quite pushovers, but he has to take the chance that, somehow, his bullpen bulls can help him win a pennant and save Walker Buehler to open a World Series.

The manager had better be right, because what the Mets did to Flaherty Friday could have been called human rights violations. They only began with surrendering a one-out, three-run homer to Pete Alonso in the bottom of the first.

Flaherty shook a leadoff double by Starling Marte off to get three straight second inning outs. But then came the third. Then came back-to-back walks (Alonso, Jesse Winker) to open. Then came Marte doubling into left field to send them both home. Two outs later, Marte came home on Francsco Alvarez’s single, Francisco Lindor tripled Alvarez home, and Brandon Nimmo singled Lindor home.

Leaving things 8-1 Mets—Kiké Hernandez scoring on David Peterson’s wild pitch in the top of the inning seemed almost an excuse-us run for a good while—and leaving Flaherty the fourth pitcher in postseason history to get himself torn for eight or more runs in a game  that would have meant a series clinch for his team. (The others: Hall of Famers Walter Johnson [Game Seven, 1925 World Series] and Tom Glavine [Game Six, 1992 NLCS], and Charles Nagy [Game Five, 1999 American League division series].)

On a day Dodgers center fielder Andy Pages homered twice (solo in the fourth, three-run bomb in the fifth), you could remove Flaherty’s eight-run bequest and the Dodgers would have won the game and clinched the pennant with a 6-4 tally. Flaherty didn’t look like his best self early enough, but this was as unconscionable as it could get.

Roberts even hinted postgame that Flaherty was dealing with a health issue. He didn’t specify what, and Flaherty hadn’t discussed it at this writing. He’s dealt with injuries enough in his career—repeated shoulder injuries, an oblique injury—which helped reduce him from a Cardinals super pitcher to a kind of journeyman who shows flashes of his old mound brio and pitches as much on heart as stuff.

That the Dodgers don’t need. Not after everything else bedeviling their starting pitchers this year.

The Mets, of course, are showing how easy it isn’t to kill them this time around. Even if their bullpen isn’t as strong or consistent as the Dodgers. Blow them out one day, get blown out by them the next. With the set returning to Los Angeles, the Mets face yet another arduous test, even if they do find ways to pick, peck, pounce, and pound the Dodgers’ Game Six bullpen parade.

That test, if they make it, is called Game Seven, in hostile territory.

But wouldn’t it be nice to see one or two NLCS games that won’t become blowouts? They’re fun when the team for whom you root does the blowing out, but a good hair raiser has its place as well. Just so long as the hair isn’t raised because of sloppy or shaky play.