Tag Archives: Los Angeles Dodgers

WS Game One: “Those are the scenarios you dream about”

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Freddie Freeman

Freeman won Game One with an ultimate grand slam Friday night. Eat your heart out, Lady Liberty!

Has anyone noticed that this year’s World Series features the best regular-season team against the third-best regular-season team? It certainly beats hell out of last year’s Series, when the eighth-best regular-season team had the pleasure of beating the eleventh-best regular-season team.

Right away, then, the Yankees vs. the Dodgers has something going for it above and beyond the ultimate outcome. Above and beyond even ankle-challenged Freddie Freeman seeing and raising Kirk Gibson in Dodger and baseball lore when he walked it off with an ultimate grand slam—in the Game One bottom of the tenth.

Already the World Series has everything real baseball fans crave, from comedy to drama and back to the absurd. Even if both teams had to grind their way through a small pack of also-rans to get to where the Dodgers could overtake the Yankees, 6-3, to start their eleventh World Series against each other.

“Never throw a slider to a cripple,” lamented Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis (the Menace) Eckersley after the legless Gibson pinch-hit for Dodger reliever Alejandro Peña in Game One of the 1988 Series. After Friday night’s eleventh-hour dispatch, Yankee manager Aaron Boone might have been tempted to lament, “Never throw a first-pitch fastball to the near-cripple you preferred to face over Mookie Betts.”

“When you’re five years old with your two older brothers and you’re playing whiffle ball in the backyard,” Freeman said postgame, “those are the scenarios you dream about—two outs, bases loaded in a World Series game. For it to actually happen, and get a home run and walk it off to give us a 1-0 lead, that’s as good as it gets right there.”

They plus the Yankees only had to go through the flotsam and jetsam to make this Series possible in the first place. The Dodgers had to get through the fifth-best Padres and then the tenth-best Mets to get here. The Yankees had to get through the twelfth-best Royals and then the sixth-best Guardians to get here. Is that any way to treat the long season’s champions?

Most of the cream rose to the top regardless of the current postseason system; the second-best regular-season team (the Phillies) got dispatched by the Mets early enough. (A 3-1 division series dispatch.) Forget the old and getting-tired cliché about short series and what the lessers can do with them.

Phrase it another way, if you dare: Four division winners were also shoved to one side and sent home for the winter a lot earlier than they hoped to be sent. One was the season’s second-best Phillies, of course. The other three: The season’s fourth-best Brewers, sixth-best Guardians, and eleventh-best Astros.

In a saner time and place, the Astros, the Braves, the Brewers, the Guards, the Mets, Orioles, the Padres, the Royals, and the Tigers would have been told, quote, “Thank you all for helping make the regular season one whale of a great run, but now it’s time to say goodbye and wait till next year, because something’s still bloody wrong with stirring up the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second or third place.”

That’s just in divisional terms. Now put it in overall terms. There’s something bloody worse with stirring up the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish anywhere from fourth to thirteenth place. Bloody worse about the Dodgers and the Yankees being rewarded for their regular-season efforts by being made to get through their far lessers first.

It’s nothing but wonderful that there are going to be baseball stars in abundance for this Series. Betts vs. Juan Soto. Freeman vs. Giancarlo Stanton. Shohei Ohtani vs. Aaron Judge. Even Commissioner Pepperwinkle isn’t unaware that there’s history blowing in the wind here. “Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson played against each other in a Yankee-Dodger World Series,” he’s told The Athletic. “So did Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax. This one is a continuation.”

Well. If you’re going that way, so did Yogi Berra and Don Newcombe. So did Whitey Ford and Duke Snider. So did Reggie Jackson and Tommy John. So did Don Mattingly and Fernando Valenzuela. The latter pair were part of the last Series between these two franchises, at the end of a season whose postseason experiment nobody predicted might seed today’s mishmosh.

Dodgers starting pitcher Jack Flaherty and Yankee starter Gerrit Cole matched shutouts, mostly, until the bottom of the fifth, and a one-out triple (Kiké Hernandez) leading directly to a sacrifice fly down the right field line (Will Smith). Then Flaherty made the only bad mistake of an otherwise superb mound outing, with one on (Soto, leadoff single) and one out (Judge, swinging strikeout), feeding Stantion a 1-2 curve that landed in the lower zone region Stanton happens to love. It flew into the left field bleachers before Flaherty could finish thinking, “Oh, you-know-what!”

A 2-1 score wasn’t really liable to remain static between these two. Sure enough, once the sides were into each other’s bullpens, Soto misplayed Ohtani’s eighth-inning double into allowing Ohtani to third, ending one Yankee reliever’s (Tommy Kahnle) outing, and Betts whacked successor bull Luke Weaver’s 1-2 changeup for a game-tying sacrifice fly.

The game went to the tenth and the Yankees managed to pry one out of Dodger reliever Blake Treinen by way of a one-out single (Jazz Chisholm, Jr.), a stolen base (Chisholm, second), a free pass (Anthony Rizzo), another theft (Chisholm stealing third), and a run-scoring forceout (Chisholm home, Rizzo out at second).

Every Yankee fan in the house who thought their heroes had it in the bag with a one-run lead for the bottom of the tenth got disabused soon enough. Jake Cousins might have gotten rid of inning opener Smith with a fly out to right, but then he walked Gavin Lux and surrendered an infield single to Tommy Edman.

Oops. Cousins gave way to Nestor Cortes, a Yankee who hadn’t pitched since September. Lux and Edman took third and second on Ohtani’s long foul fly out, with Alex Verdugo making what might have ended up the play of the night as he lunged for the ball, caught it, then rolled over the fence before his momentum ended, allowing Lux and Edman’s advances.

Still. It put the Yankees an out away from winning it. That’s when Boone decided he was in far safer hands putting the Mookie Monster aboard to load the pads and hope Cortes could get Freeman and his still-ailing ankle to whack a game-ending grounder or swing into a game-ending strikeout.

“I know everybody’s focused on Ohtani, Ohtani, Ohtani,” said Cortes postgame. “We get him out, but Freeman is also a really good hitter. I just couldn’t get the job done today.” Cortes threw Freeman a fastball toward the inside of the zone—exactly where Freeman was looking for the pitch, knowing Cortes’s heater can ride like a horseman when thrown right.

The only place this one rode was into the right field bleachers.

Cortes threw the pitch he wanted to throw but, as he said postgame, didn’t get it elevated enough in the zone to keep Freeman from detonating it. Among other things, it caused a lot of Yankee fans to wonder why Weaver, who’d been rested well enough, didn’t get to work a second inning, or why sidearming lefthander Tim Hill wasn’t even a topic against the lefthanded swinger.

Freeman held his bat like the Statue of Liberty holding her torch straight up, until he was several steps up the first base line, then dropped it to take his trip around the pillows. Give us your tired, your not-so-poor, your not-so-huddled but standing-O Dodger Stadium mass yearning to breathe the World Series championship.

He became the fifth man in Series history to end a Game One with a home run, joining Gibson plus Adolis Garcia (Rangers, last year), Dusty Rhodes (1954 Giants), and Tommy (Ol’ Reliable) Henrich (1949 Yankees). But he’s the only man to end any World Series game with a slice of salami.

“When you get told you do something like that in this game that’s been around a very long time—I love the history of this game, to be a part of it, it’s special,” Freeman added. “I’ve been playing this game a long time, and to come up in those moments, you dream about those moments. Even when you’re 35 and been in the league for fifteen years, you want to be a part of those.”

Even when you’ve had a season pockmarked by injuries (hand, ankle) and compromised by your alarm as your youngest child fights Guillain-Barré syndrome. That was then: Max Freeman’s father admitting, “It just puts everything in perspective . . . I would gladly strike out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game Seven of the World Series 300 million times in a row than see that again.”

This was now: Max Freeman on the way to a full recovery according to the family’s doctors, and his father standing top of the heap for World Series Game One home run hitting. And just about everyone around baseball seemed to agree it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

You might care to note, too, that every one of those teams getting a Game One-winning home run went on to win the Series in question. The ’49 Yankees in seven; the ’54 Giants in a four-game sweep; the ’88 Dodgers in five; last year’s Rangers in five. No pressure, you understand.

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.

NLCS Game Two: Knuke the Knack

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Landon Knack, Mark Vientos

The wrestle between a Dodger reliever and a Met batter insulted by a bases-loading intentional walk ahead of him ends with Mark Vientos knuking the (Landon) Knack . . .

Let’s see. The Mets built a postseason rep for deploying serious weaponry when the games got late. But after a 9-0 blowout loss to the Dodgers in Game One of their National League Championship Series, the Mets struck early enough in Game Two. And, as things turned out, often enough, for a 7-3 series-evening Game Two win.

They struck first with one of their usual late-game demolition experts. This time, Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor wrestled Dodgers opener Ryan Brasier to an eighth pitch on a 2-2 count before sending that pitch into the right field bleachers to open the game. One inning later, with second and third, two outs, a second Met run home (RBI double), and rookie Landon Knack working the second for the Dodgers, they elected to put Lindor on to try their luck with Mark Vientos.

Said a broadcast announcer of Vientos: “As good as he’s been this year, nobody’s Lindor.” Said Vientos to himself, probably, knowing that he’s done damage enough for the Mets cause—he had a measly 1.674 with two home runs against the Phillies in the NLDS—Sure, he’s Francisco Freaking Lindor, but you’re gonna put him on thinking I’m a pushover for a third out? Boy, have I got a surprise for you, gentlemen.

It took Vientos a ninth pitch on a full count, but just like that he knuked the Knack.

Just like that, too, his blast over the center field fence had the Mets up 6-0, and they’d never really look back despite a Dodger run in the fifth and two in the sixth. Not on a night Mets starter Sean Manaea had the Dodgers stone frozen until Max Muncy punctured him for a fifth-inning solo bomb before he ran out of fuel in the sixth.

Two walks to open, a bases-loading fielding error at second base, and Manaea’s night was over. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza brought Phil Maton in to pitch. He got an almost immediate pop out from Will Smith. But he surrendered a two-run single to Tommy Edman, before getting Kiké Hernandez to dial Area Code 5-4-3 for the side and before any further Dodger damage.

The Mets tacked another insurance run on in the ninth with Starling Marte’s RBI single. But their bullpen held the Dodgers off admirably from the seventh forward. Even if Edwin Díaz had to channel his inner Craig Kimbrel in the Dodger ninth with a leadoff single (Andy Pages) and a walk (Shohei Ohtani) before striking the side out swinging to secure it.

All most of the Mets seemed to want to talk up, other than sending the NLCS to New York even-up, was Vientos leaving Dodger manager Dave Roberts with an omelette on his face.

“There’s one thing that Mark doesn’t lack,” chuckled Lindor himself, “and that’s confidence. That’s who he is. I’m glad he took it personal.”

“I didn’t think he was going to give me a fastball,” Vientos said of Knack, who’d fed him a diet of sliders four straight, two of which he let go and two of which he fouled off. “My approach was to see a heater up, but I wasn’t expecting heater. I thought I was going to get a slider and I was just going to poke it in the hole.” But he got the fastball at last. “Yeah, I wasn’t going to miss it,” he said.

The Dodgers did win a bullpen game in their division series conquest of the Padres. But that was before one of their key high leverage men, Alex Vesia, was lost for the rest of the postseason thanks to a side injury. And, before one of their others, veteran Daniel Hudson, let Roberts know he was still sore from a twenty-pitch eighth inning in Game One, available only if a dire emergency presented itself.

Roberts got three innings’ shutout relief from Brent Honeywell, Jr. and two innings’ one-run relief from Edgardo Henríquez Monday night. Second guessers might wonder why he didn’t turn to either of those instead of toward Knack, a 27-year-old rookie with a 3.83 strikeout-to-walk ratio on the regular season but a tendency toward surrendering the long ball, as in fourteen bombs in 69 innings.

Still, Roberts did manage to spare some of his other medium-to-high leverage for the New York leg, where the Mets and the Dodgers pick up after a day’s travel and rest. And, with three of those higher-leverage men, Blake Trienen, Michael Kopech, and Evan Phillips, all on four days rest. Considering the Dodgers’ starting rotation took such big hits this year they that have to think of bullpen games now, they may face another one in a Game Six if the game’s needed.

And, by then, the Mets may have figured enough out about working, hitting, pitching, and sneaking their ways around these Dodgers to make it irrelevant. May. They know the series isn’t won just yet. But they also have the home-field advantage now.

Maybe the Mets won’t get a shot at knuking the Knack again too soon, but don’t dismiss their home audience from their chances, either. Citi Field can make Dodger Stadium resemble a crypt when need be.

Hernández Hideaway

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LosAngeles Dodgers

Ahead for the Dodgers: playing the Mets for the NL pennant.

They had a starting rotation most of which belonged in post-op. But the Dodgers are going to the National League Championship Series.

They had Shohei Ohtani, maybe the National League’s 2024 Most Valuable Player winner in waiting (though Francisco Lindor has a powerful claim), hitting a hefty home run in the first division series game but nothing much after. And they’re going to the NLCS.

They had Freddie Freeman, trying to play despite not giving a rolled ankle sufficient healing time, as close to plain ineffective as he’s ever been at any time in a brilliant career so far. And they’re still going to the NLCS.

Their starting picture so belonged in an orthopedic journal that they went to a Game Four bullpen game. And they’re still going to the NLCS.

They surrendered three homers to Padres superman Fernando Tatis, Jr. (two in Game Two, one in Game Three). And they’re still going to the NLCS.

They lost the sason series to the Pads and didn’t look quite as good on paper coming into the now-done division series. They’re still going to the NLCS.

They scored only two runs Friday night. But those were more than enough to send them to the NLCS.

The Dodgers did it with resilience. They did it with that eight-man bullpen game in the hostile arterials of Petco Park and the pen going lights out otherwise, to where the Dodgers were somehow able to shut the Padres out over the final 24 innings of the set.

They coaxed a magnificent Game Five start out of Yoshi Yamamoto, who turned a five-inning shutout over to that pen, where a mere four relievers were needed to finish what he started. On the first MLB postseason night featuring two Japanese-born starting pitchers, Yu Darvish was brilliant for the Padres over seven, except for two blemishes, and Yamamoto was better over five for the Dodgers.

But the Dodgers had to turn Dodger Stadium into Hernández Hideaway to get there, too, Friday night.

First, Kiké Hernández—back with the Dodgers for a second homecoming year after a detour to Boston, where he’d had a pocketful of postseason heroics for the Red Sox—punished Padres starter Yu Darvish with two outs in the bottom of the second, sending Darvish’s first service halfway up the left field bleachers.

Five innings later, Teoscar Hernández—a first-year Dodger after a tour taking him to Houston, Toronto, and Seattle, whose hefty grand slam pulled the Dodgers to within a run of the Padres in Game Three but only that—didn’t need full pillows. With one out, he hit Darvish’s 2-1 service to the same real estate his fellow Hernández reached.

Padres third baseman and slugger Manny Machado had perhaps the best post mortem from anyone in their silks: “We didn’t hit and score some runs. They did a tremendous job on the other side, on the pitching side. You have to give credit where it’s due. We just couldn’t string along hits. We had some opportunities, we couldn’t [push] through, and we fell short.”

That from a representative of the regular-season offense that threshed, of the team whose starting rotation could and often did dominate, and whose bullpen was one of baseball’s deepest of the year. The Dodgers said, essentially, in Kiké Hernández’s shameless postgame phrase, “[Fornicate] ’em all.”

“What was it,” said third baseman Max Muncy, “80 percent of the f—ing experts said we were going to lose? F— those guys. We know who we are. We’re the f—ing best team in baseball, and we’re out there to prove it.”

That won’t be as easy as they think. Awaiting the Dodgers are the Mets, who picked themselves up from the May scrap heap, rumbled their way to the postseason and through the first two rounds, have a lot more starting pitching depth (and lack of injury), a lineup with more depth than suspected going in, and (big “and”) they’re known lately for leaving bullpens wasted.

Both teams have their issues. The Mets need Pete Alonso to stay in the zone he’s rediscovered this postseason and closer Edwin Díaz to return all the way to form as he hinted in his last outing against the Phillies.

The Dodgers need length from at least two or three starters if they don’t want to tax that bullpen into letting the Mets do what they’ve done best this time around—make the final three innings their personal marquee stage. They also need Mookie Betts to continue becoming the Mookie Monster again after his slumpbusting bombs against the Padres.

This forthcoming NLCS does promise to see two teams throwing the proverbial kitchen sinks at each other as best they can with what they have. Whoever wins it stands to become a heavy World Series favourite.

“I’m the one probably most surprised . . . “

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Shohei Ohtani

Ohtani takes one of his curtain calls from the Miami audience Thursday evening.

If you absolutely must become baseball’s first 50/50 man, as in 50+ home runs and 50+ stolen bases in a single season, you couldn’t pay for any more earth-moving way to do it than Shohei Ohtani found Thursday evening.

A 6-for-6 day at the plate. As many runs batted in in one game as his Dodgers teammate Freddie Freeman has so far in all September. Three RBI hits serving as just the overture to both Ohtani’s history-making suite and the Dodgers smothering the hapless Marlins, 20-4, in the Fish’s own tank.

Theft number 50 after a first-inning double and theft number 51 after the second-inning RBI single. A two-run double in the third ruined only by Ohtani getting himself thrown out trying to stretch it into a triple.

Almost exactly the way Hall of Famer in waiting Albert Pujols demolished the Rangers after the sixth inning in Game Three of the 2011 World Series (three bombs: one each in the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings), Ohtani’s real mayhem began in the sixth:

A man on second and one out in the sixth, Ohtani sent an 0-1 slider into the second deck behind right center field. It made him only the second Dodger behind Shawn Green to hit 49 in a season. Second and third off a wild pitch and two out in the seventh, Ohtani hit one the opposite way into the left field bullpen. That founded the 50/50 Club and earned him a loud curtain call in a road ballpark.

First and second and two out in the ninth, Ohtani slammed the best possible exclamation point upon the proceedings when he drove a high meatball from a sacrificial lamb (read: Marlins position player, Vidal Bruján) well into the upper deck behind right field. With another curtain call to follow.

“To be honest,” Ohtani told a television interviewer through an interpreter post-game, “I’m the one probably most surprised. I have no idea where this came from, but I’m glad that I performed well today.”

The loanDepot Park audience in Miami didn’t have much to root for from their own lack of heroes this year (the Marlins have already been eliminated from the postseason mathematically), so it didn’t cost them anything but netted them plenty of respect to hand history their day’s loudest ovations.

If you’re my age, you can compare it to the day the usually unapologetic rooters of the early Mets suddenly turned on their anti-heroes on that fine 1964 Father’s Day in Shea Stadium, when Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Bunning threatened to pitch the first perfect game in the 20th Century National League. When Bunning finished what he started, he was hit with a wild standing O and an invitation to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Credit Marlins manager Skip Schumaker, whose ten-year major league playing career included one season (2013) with the Dodgers, for looking into the teeth of the hurricane demolishing his club, with Ohtani potentially carrying number 50 in his bat, seeing second and third and two outs in the seventh, electing not to put Ohtani aboard to give the Fish a better survival chance with aging Kevin Kiermaier—whose bat is now as useless as his glovework remains a study—due to hit behind him.

“If it was a tight game, one run lead or we’re down one,” the manager said postgame, “I probably put him on. Down that many runs [nine], that’s a bad move baseball-wise, karma-wise, baseball god-wise. You go after him to see if you can get him out. I think out of respect for the game, we were going to go after him. He hit the home run. That’s just part of the deal.”

“A lot of us actually looked at the opposing dugout and I think a lot of the coaches were telling Skip, ‘Hey, we should walk him right here’,” said Dodger third baseman Max Muncy, who’d scored on Ohtani’s early single and final home run. “I’ve always loved Skip. When he was the first base coach in San Diego, I always talked to him. I heard all guys love to play for him. For him to do that, that’s awesome.”

“The game was certainly out of hand,” said Dodger manager Dave Roberts. “Guys got their starters out and then to take that potential moment away from the fans, Shohei himself, Skip understood that. It was bigger than that and I’ve got nothing for respect for that.”

Kiermaier striking out to end that seventh merely amplified the magnanimity of what Schumaker refused to do. A team out of any pennant race has a lot more for which to apologise to their fans than trying to stop the unstoppable force on a night he’s making history on its dollars. And leading his team to a National League West division clinch while he’s at it.

Ohtani previously entered the rareified 40/40 club by hitting a grand slam. This was different. This was a night the Dodgers used the Marlins for target practise and Ohtani proved to have the most ammunition to expend. Even MLB officials were in on the act, swapping out regulation game baseballs for pre-authenticated balls before Ohtani batted in the seventh.

When he turned Mike Baumann’s curve ball into history, those officials scurried to siphon as much memorabilia as they could carry away from Ohtani, perhaps leaving observers to ask only how they’d managed to miss his uniform belt, undershirt, and jock strap.

It isn’t every day that a player has a ten-RBI, six-hits, five extra-base hits, three home runs, two stolen bases day. No player had done all of those over a career, according to OptaSTATS. Not Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig, not Ted Williams or Stan Musial, not Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, not Henry Aaron or Roberto Clemente, not Dick Allen or Mike Schmidt, not Barry Bonds or Ken Griffey, Jr.

Ohtani did all five in a single day.

“With this game of baseball, it was a win for Major League Baseball,” said Roberts. “I know people all over the globe were watching this game and we’re excited to see that they got a chance to witness history.”

Roberts and Schumaker understood what too many forget, including among those who administer the game, but which longtime New York Times baseball writer George Vecsey got, watching then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti getting it, too, when Giamatti almost gave in and pumped his fist watching Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan ring up his 5,000th lifetime strikeout at Hall of Fame outfielder/base larcenist Rickey Henderson’s expense: “baseball is about rooting, about caring.”

Nowhere was that more evident than when Ohtani popped out of the visitors’ dugout to take one of a couple of curtain calls after his blasts. A young fan on the other side of the side rail, holding a sign up just above the rail, but level with Ohtani’s face:

I SKIPPED MATH
TO WATCH
HISTORY.
OHTANI 50/50.

If I’m that boy’s English teacher, I give extra credit for the school-age pun of the season.