Tag Archives: National League division series

Who has the next-to-last-laugh now?

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Kyle Tucker

Kyle Tucker’s seventh-inning strikeout seemed to take what remained of the Cubs’ wind away Saturday night. (TBS television capture.)

“It’s really the only inning you could talk about,” lamented Cubs manager Craig Counsell about the top of the sixth, after National League division series Game Five. “We just didn’t do much.

“We had six base runners. You’re going to have to hit homers to have any runs scoring in scenarios like that,” Counsell continued. “They pitched very well. I mean, they pitched super well and we didn’t.”

“They” were the Brewers, whom Counsell used to manage, until he reached managerial free agency and the Cubs decided to dump David Ross for no reason better than that Counsell became available. Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer admitted as much earlier this month.

Two second-place National League Central finishes and one division series loss later, Cub fans could be forgiven if they think it’s been karma for the manner in which Ross was vaporised. The Brewers won Game Five, 3-1, with 90 percent pitching depth, five percent unusual slugging, and maybe five percent karma-the-bitch.

Until, that is, they review the seventh inning in American Family Field Saturday night. First and second, nobody out, and Kyle Tucker—the man for whom the Cubs traded three to the Astros last December, in perhaps the signature moment that explains why they made that trade—coming to the plate.

He faced Aaron Ashby, the nephew of former major league pitcher Andy Ashby, and possibly the best relief pitcher on the Brewers staff. (Regular season: 2.16 ERA; 2.70 fielding-independent pitching rate.) His Cubs were down only 2-1. He got ahead of Ashby three balls, no strikes. Michael Busch (leadoff single) and Nico Hoerner (hit by a pitch) leaned away from second and first itching for a reason to take off.

The odds were in favour of them getting that reason momentarily. Tucker had spent the first three games of the division series as a singles hitter, but in Game Four he finally unloaded, blasting a leadoff home run in the bottom of the seventh. Maybe, despite an early strikeout and a subsequent ground out Saturday night, Tucker’s power strokes were back from the fixit shop.

Big maybe. Ashby pumped a pair of bullets Nolan Ryan himself might have applauded. Tucker swung through both of them.

Then Brewers manager Pat Murphy brought rookie righthander Chad Patrick into the game. Patrick, a righthander with seven minor league seasons behind him and not one Show appearance until the Brewers called him up from AAA Nashville for this year. He got Seiya Suzuki—who’d tied the game at one in the top of the second, when he answered William Contreras’s first-inning solo home run with a bomb of his own against Jacob Misiorowski—to drive one to left that found Jackson Chourio’s glove. He dropped strike three called in on Ian Happ.

Not one Cub came home in that inning or the rest of the way. The Brewers added one more in the seventh, when Brice Turang took Cub reliever Andrew Kitteredge over the right center field fence.

“I was looking up at the heavens to Bob Uecker,” said Brewers general manager Matt Arnold, referencing the beloved late Hall of Fame broadcaster and wit, who’d become as much a face of the Brewers as any player in their history until his passing last January. “Like, during the game, I’m like, ‘Bob, we need you’.”

“I must be in the front row,” Uecker must have said from his roost in the Elysian Fields.

He must have. This team had baseball’s best regular season record this year but entered the division series with a string of failure to get past their first postseason stages for five out of the previous six seasons. They were still recovering from their former closer Devin Williams, now a reliever and frequent hate object (by their own fans) for the Yankees, serving a pitch Mets first baseman Pete Alonso demolished like a munitions expert in the deciding wild card series game last year.

This time, they had to recover from the Cubs, their next-door-state rivals, coming back from a 2-0 game deficit.

This time, they made it. So far.

They have a National League Championship Series date with the Dodgers. They secured the date doing what enough people thought they couldn’t do if it meant paying the ransoms for their kidnapped families: slug. Contreras and Turang were joined by Andrew Vaughn in the fourth, blasting a full-count service from Collin Rea into the left field seats.

They even did it with men who weren’t even topics on last year’s team. Vaughn and Patrick were joined in that club by Misiorowski, who relieved Game Five’s opening closer Trevor Megill, surrendered only Suzuki’s second-inning smash, but otherwise worked spotlessly for his four innings. In what turned out a bullpen battle, the Brewers pen was just that much more efficient than the Cubs pen, which also deployed one starter (Rea) among a group of bulls.

Andrew Vaughn

Vaughn running out his fourth-inning bomb. (TBS television capture.)

And, boy, is the deal that brought Vaughn from the pathetic White Sox to the Brewers looking better every hour. It happened when the Brewers elected to move Aaron Civale from the starting rotation to the bullpen, and Civale responded with a spoken desire to play somewhere else if that was the case. Be careful what you wish for, was the answer . . . and Civale went from a contender to a basement dweller just like that, in early June, with Vaughn—once a first-round draft pick, demoted to the farm a month earlier—coming aboard.

Therein lies a distinction between these Brewers and the Cubs they just turned aside. The Brewers don’t have Cub money, but they don’t let that stop them from constant upgrade searching when necessary. The Cubs have Cub money.  But they’d rather undergo root canal without anesthetic than spend it. And they lack the Brewers’s bargain basement ingenuity. They haven’t yet figured out that you don’t have to shop at the Magnificent Mile all the time. You can find amazing upgrades at Lots 4 Less.

How will these Brewers be perceived going into an NLCS against those Dodgers? Contradictorily, of course. The Brewers swept the Dodgers in their regular-season series, 6-0. But there’ll be more than enough who think the Dodgers will still be the overdogs. Even if the Dodgers’ NLCS ticket was stamped by a horror of a throwing error by Phillies relief pitcher Orion Kerkering in Game Four of their division series.

But how will these Cubs be perceived going into winter vacation? Not too favourably, after all, one fears. The top of their lineup acquitted themselves well enough, particularly Busch with three of his four division series hits clearing the fences and Nico Hoerner with his hits in each game and his team-leading .476 postseason on-base percentage. But the bottom of the lineup disappeared. The collective slash line of the Cubs’ bottom five? .120/.215/.205.

And they’re likely enough to move forward without Tucker, who becomes a free agent and who’s perceived widely enough as thinking about moving on. Even if this usually un-expressive fellow who prefers to let his game do his talking calls it “an honour” to play with this group of Cubs.

That group of Cubs needs a small, not major bullpen remake, and they need to romance and re-sign Tucker, whom they could and should have extended during the second half of the season. But maybe the Cubs need a front-office overhaul, too. The kind that brings in persuaders who can convince the Ricketts family that it’s time to open the purse strings but think about trying Lots 4 Less after that one Magnificent Mile splurge.

Finishing with their best regular-season record since 2018 shouldn’t be enough. Three straight second-place NL Central finishes shouldn’t be enough. But maybe watching the Brewers go forth and tangle honourably with the ogres of the National League West will give these Cubs—and their ownership that’s as endowed as Mercedes-Benz but prefers to drive indiscriminately off the Chicago Auto Warehouse lot—more than a little pause.

The Brewers couldn’t care less for now. They’re enjoying their first postseason series clincher since 2018, the year they shoved the Rockies aside in a division series sweep. And if they wanted any further incentive, they got it from cynics and Cub fans alike who snarked that they hadn’t won a postseason series yet as they took the Cubs on. As if their round-one bye meant squat.

So who has the next-to-last laugh now?

Once upon a time, the early rock and roll era included a novelty hit, “Beep Beep,” in which a little Nash Rambler (I always presumed it to be the anti-classic, two-seat Metropolitan) went tire-to-tire with a Cadillac in a daring little race. The Brewers are the Nash Rambler about to go tire-to-tire with the Dodgers’ Cadillacs.

And, unlike “Beep Beep’s” challenger, they know how to get themselves out of second gear.

Kerkering Agonistes

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Orion Kerkering

Kerkering’s mistake throw home sailing wide left of Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto as Hyeseong Kim hits the plate with the Dodgers’ NLCS ticket punch. (ESPN broadcast capture.)

In Greek mythology, Orion is the mighty hunter who was felled by either the bow of the goddess of the hunt Artemis or by the sting of a giant scorpion. In National League division series Game Five, Orion was Kerkering, the Phillies relief pitcher stung in the bottom of the eleventh by the gravest mistake of any 21st century Phillie, ever.

If Kerkering wanted immediately to scream for help, you wouldn’t have blamed him. If the next place he really wanted to be was a Himalayan cave at altitude high enough to stop anyone from finding him, you wouldn’t have blamed him for that, either.

Baseball players and other professional athletes are human enough to make grave mistakes on the field. Many of them play for teams whose fans run the gamut from entitled to fatalistic to . . .

Well, put it this way. Again. Those playing in Phillies uniforms represent a city about which it’s said, often enough, that a typical wedding finishes with the clergyman pronouncing the happy couple husband and wife before telling the gathering, “You may now boo the bride.”

So let’s say a prayer, or three, or ten, for Kerkering. Let’s pray that, no matter how the rest of his baseball career goes, he has the heart and soul to stand up, count himself a man, acknowledge that he blew it bigtime enough, and stare the infamous Philadelphia boo birds down without giving in to the temptation to hunt them down for Thanksgiving dinner.

With the bases loaded and two outs Thursday evening, Kerkering served Dodgers center fielder Andy Pages a sinker that didn’t fall from the middle of the strike zone. Pages whacked a two-hop tapper back to the box. Kerkering sprang forward and knocked the ball down, then reached to retrieve it with his bare hand.

Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto stood fully erect and pointed to first base, with Pages about halfway up the line and Dodgers pinch runner Hyeseong Kim hurtling down the third base line. In a single instant, Kerkering went for what he thought would be the quickest out, as opposed to what every soul in Dodger Stadium expected to be the sure, guaranteed-not-to-tarnish, twelfth-inning-securing out.

He threw home, where he had no shot at bagging Kim, instead of to first baseman Bryce Harper, where he still had a clean shot at bagging Pages. The throw went wide left of Realmuto at the moment Kim hit the plate with the Dodgers’ National League Championship Series ticket punched by his spikes.

Thus ended a game during which neither the Phillies nor the Dodgers flashed anything resembling their usually powerful offenses, while both teams fought a magnificent pitching duel. Whether the 2-1 final was the Phillies losing or the Dodgers winning, take your pick.

Kerkering didn’t duck, either, once he arose from his haunches in front of the mound while the Dodgers celebrated and then let a teammate urge him out of the dugout into the clubhouse for comfort. Then, facing reporters, Kerkering owned up without hesitation.

“I wouldn’t say the pressure got to me. I just thought it was a faster throw to J.T., a little quicker throw than trying to cross-body it to Bryce,” he said. “It was just a horse [manure]  throw . . . This really [fornicating] sucks right now.”

Until Kerkering’s mishap, the Dodgers’ sole score was a bases-loades walk Mookie Betts wrung out of Phillies reliever Jhoan Duran in the bottom of the seventh. And the Phillies’s sole score came in the top of that inning, when Nick Castellanos sent Realmuto home with a double down the left field line.

Other than that, neither side had any real solutions to the other guys’ effective starting pitchers, Tyler Glasnow for the Dodgers and Cristopher Sanchez for the Phillies. These lineups, full of MVPs and big boppers and rippers and slashers, never landed the big bop or rip or slash.

Until Pages swung at Kerkering’s second service of the plate appearance, the story of the game figured far more to be the Dodgers’s Roki Sasaki, the starter who ran into shoulder trouble early in the season, returned to finish the season as a reliever, and now found himself the jewel of a Dodger bullpen about which “suspect” was the most polite adjective deployed.

Sasaki merely spent the set appearing in three games, allowing not one Phillie run, and keeping his defense gainfully employed. The record says he pitched 4.1 innings in the series. He pitched three of them Thursday, the eighth, ninth, and tenth. Whatever he threw at them, not one Phillie reached base. Two struck out; four flied, lined, or popped out; three grounded out. If the Dodgers could have won it in the tenth, Sasaki had a case as a division series MVP candidate.

The Phillies’s usual closer, Jhoan Duran, found himself deployed earlier than usual, relieving Sanchez in the seventh. After Betts’s RBI walk, Duran settled, ended the seventh, and pitched a shutout eighth. Matt Strahm succeeded him for a shutout ninth, and Jesús Luzardo—who was supposed to have been the Phillie starter if the set got to a fifth game—worked a shutout tenth.

Alex Vesia took over for the Dodgers in the top of the eleventh. He walked Harper, then wild-pitched him to second with two outs. Then he fought Harrison Bader—usually the Phillies center fielder but reduced to pinch hitting thanks to a bothersome groin injury—to a full count and a tenth pitch before he pulled Bader into a swinging strikeout.

Luzardo went back out for the eleventh. The tone of the game still suggested it wasn’t going to end too soon. Then Tommy Edman rapped a one-out single down the left field line, with Dodger manager Dave Roberts sending Kim out to run for him. Will Smith lined out deep enough to center field, but Max Muncy grounded a base hit past the left side of second base, pushing Kim to third.

Phillies manager Rob Thomson lifted Luzardo in favour of Kirkering, the 24-year-old righthander who’d become one of their more important bullpen bulls as the postseason arrived. He’d gone from untrusted to unimportant to invaluable in one year.

Now the Phillies needed him to push this game to a twelfth inning in which both teams were all but guaranteed to throw what little they had left at each other until one of them cracked. First, he had to tangle with Enrique Hernández. While Muncy helped himself to second on fielding indifference, Hernández worked out a six-pitch walk.

Up stepped Pages. Into the night went the Phillie season.

J.T. Realmuto, Orion Kerkering

Realmuto was just one Phillies teammate trying to make sure Kerkering could shake it off and not do as Kyle Schwarber advised, let one bad moment define his career and life. (ESPN broadcast capture.)

Kerkering sank in front of the mound as the Dodgers poured out to celebrate around and behind. Nothing mattered to him or to the Phillies now. Not even the unlikely fact that the Phillies had kept Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers’ best hitter and the best hitter in the game who isn’t named Aaron Judge this year, toothless, fangless, and clawless throughout the set, 1-for-18 with a single RBI hit and nine strikeouts.

The Dodgers weren’t sure what to think, either. “That,” Vesia said postgame, “was a badass baseball game.” Through ten and a half innings, yes. What to call the bottom of the eleventh would probably take time. Even “disaster” seemed like a disguise.

But Thomson and the rest of his players had no intention of throwing Kerkering under the proverbial bus. Realmuto made sure to be the first to embrace and try to comfort him. Castellanos, who’s endured his own share of trials and tribulations, sprinted in to get to Kerkering with brotherly comforts.

“I understand what he’s feeling,” said the Phillies right fielder. “I mean, not the exact emotions. But I can see that. I didn’t even have to think twice about it. That’s where I needed to run to.”

The same mind set overtook Schwarber, who’d done more than enough to push the Phillies toward Game Four after losing the first two in Philadelphia, especially his space launch of a home run in the fourth to tie the game and start the Phillies toward the 8-2 win. (He helped the piling-on with a second bomb, too.) “One play shouldn’t define somebody’s career,” said the Schwarbinator in the clubhouse. “I’ve had tons of failures in my life.”

Just how that team will be defined going forward is up in the air for now. Realmuto, Schwarber, and pitcher Ranger Suárez can become free agents come November. But the Phillies are expected to push to entice Schwarber to re-up, and Realmuto is still too valuable behind the plate for the team to let walk without trying to keep him, too, especially since the organisation is considered very lacking in catching depth.

“I’m thinking about losing a baseball game. That’s what it feels like right now,” said Realmuto after Game Four. “The last thing I’m thinking about is next year.”

Schwarber, too, preferred to stay in most of the moment. “This is a premier organization,” said the designated hitter who sent 56 home runs into orbit during the regular season.  “And a lot of people should feel very lucky that you’re playing for a team that is trying to win every single year, and you have a fan base that cares and ownership that cares and coaches that care. You have everyone in the room that cares. We’re all about winning, and it’s a great thing. That’s why it hurts as much as any other year.”

These Phillies lost the 2022 World Series in six games, the 2023 NLCS in seven, a division series last year in four, and a division series this year in four. What’s up in the air right now just might turn to finding where and making changes enough. Especially since the average age of their regulars this year was 31. (The two youngest regulars, Brandon Marsh and Bryson Stott, are 27.)

Right now, they’re entitled to lie down and bleed. None more so than one young reliever who may not find comfort in knowing that he wasn’t the sole reason the Phillies fell short yet again. He may not find comfort yet in knowing that his teammates outscored the Dodgers by two runs across the entire division series but still couldn’t cash more than one scoring chance in in Game Four to make a difference.

“I feel for him,” Thomson told the postgame press conference about Kerkering, “because he’s putting it all on his shoulders. But we win as a team and we lose as a team.”

His sole comfort for now might be his teammates having his back. “Just keep your head up,” he said was their collective message to him. “It’s an honest mistake. It’s baseball. S— happens. Just keep your head up, you’ll be good for a long time to come. Stuff like it’s not my fault—had opportunities to score. Just keep your head up.”

The question is whether the more notorious side of Philadelphia fandom will try to knock his head off while he tries keeping it up. Maybe—as happened so notoriously to Mitch (Wild Thing) Williams after he surrendered a 1993 World Series-losing home run to Joe Carter—Kerkering’s refusal to hide and willingness to own up should help.

Or not, unfortunately. Even if Kerkering didn’t throw a World Series-losing pitch but committed only a division series-losing error.

If not, it’ll come to whether the worst sides of Philadelphia fandom compel the Phillies  brain trusts to decide, however good his pitching future might be, that it’s not safe for him to see it in a Phillies uniform.

Maybe someone should find ways to ask those sides pre-emptively whether they would have had half the fortitude to own up to a grave on-the-job mistake made in front of 50,000+ fans in a ballpark, and a few million more watching on television, or streaming online, or listening to the radio.

As with too many others who hammered those I call Merkle’s Children—Fred Merkle himself, plus Williams, Ralph Branca, Bill Buckner, John McNamara, Donnie Moore, Don Denkinger, Tom Niedenfeuer, Gene Mauch, Johnny Pesky, Mickey Owen, Ernie Lombardi, Fred Snodgrass, maybe every St. Louis Brown ever—you might be lucky to find a very few who’d answer, “Yes.”

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.

The last of the big boys buried

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Johan Rojas

Young center fielder Johan Rojas making the catch of his life so far, robbing Ronald Acuña, Jr. of a possible Game Four-changing double and saving the Phillies’ NLDS triumph in the bargain Thursday night.

If you consider 100+ game regular season winners the truly big boys, they’ve all been knocked out of the postseason before it even got to the League Championship Series. The 90-game winning Phillies secured that dubious distinction when they sent the Braves home for the winter Thursday night.

And they didn’t need Bryce Harper to do the heavy lifting this time. Nick Castellanos was more than happy to do that when he hit two more solo home runs, this time off the Braves’ best starting pitcher, this time making himself the first man ever to hit two bombs each in two postseason games.

Spencer Strider all but owned the Phillies in regular season play. In postseason play the Phillies puncture him just enough, including in their National League division series Game Four. And, unlike a lot of young men whose ownership thus becomes subject to hostile postseason takeover, Strider didn’t flinch when asked the wherefore.

“I’m not a person that makes excuses,” Strider said after the Phillies punched their NLCS ticker with an emphatic enough 3-1 win. “I’m sure there’s a lot of Braves fans out there that are not happy, and they have every right to be that way. We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves. Me personally, I wasn’t good enough.”

Neither did he flinch when asked whether the postseason system awarding byes to the top two seeds in each league harmed the Braves for the extra week off.

“I think that the people trying to use the playoff format to make an excuse for the results they don’t like are not confronting the real issue,” Strider continued. “You’re in control of your focus, your competitiveness, your energy. And if having five days off (means) you can’t make that adjustment, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.”

“We got beat,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said, “by a really good club that has a penchant for this time of year.”

For me, the real issue is letting teams into the postseason at all who give their fans the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second place. Forcing the teams who owned the regular season to run the gamut through lesser-performing teams in order to even think about a shot at the World Series.

And yet, it couldn’t hurt to watch the games, anyhow.

Especially between the Braves and the Phillies, finishers one and two in the National League East. Especially since the Braves were the only departing division champions who didn’t get swept out of what’s now their only postseason set of the year.

The Phillies didn’t have easy work to do. Not against the team who hit a record 307 regular-season home runs. But nobody figured anyone, never mind the Phillies, to out-homer these Braves in this division series 11-3, with Castellanos and Harper accounting for 63 percent of those bombs, and Harper himself hitting as many homers as the entire Braves team for the set.

And, with Ronald Acuña, Jr., Mr. 40/70, held to three hits without reaching the seats while walking twice but stealing nothing.

The nearest Acuña got to serious damage was in the top of the Game Four seventh. With Cardiac Craig Kimbrel relieving Jose Alvarado, entering a first-and-second jam, Kimbrel went from 1-2 to 2-2 before handing Acuña something to drive to the back of center field. Citizens Bank Park’s crash carts were on red alert.

Then young Phillies center fielder Johan Rojas, who wasn’t hitting much but who was making his bones with the leather (he was worth nine defensive runs on the regular season), ran the drive down and, after one hesitation step at the track, hauled it in on the track two steps shy of the wall . . . and just shy of becoming at least a two and possibly three-run double.

Strider dodged a Harperian bullet in the first inning Thursday night. He had Trea Turner on second with a one-out double down the left field line and off the wall. He tried to pitch around Harper, knowing that Harper needs only one swing to wage nuclear destruction, but after falling behind 3-0, Braves manager Brian Snitker said don’t even think about it, put him on.

For that moment Snitker resembled Casey Stengel the Yankee dominator, as Strider struck Alec Bohm out and got Bryson Stott to fly out to center field for the side. Strider didn’t look overwhelming with two walks and two hits on his jacket in two innings. He needed help from center fielder Michael Harris II again, Harris making a highlight-reel sliding catch of Rojas’s one-out liner to center in the second, then doubling Castellanos off second for the side.

The Phillies’ plate plan included just making Strider throw as many pitches as possible whatever the results. But they wouldn’t say no if an early count pitch looked delicious enough to dine. With one out in the bottom of the fourth, and the Braves up 1-0 thanks to Austin Riley’s solo homer in the top of the frame, Strider served Castellanos just such a slider, and Castellanos served it into the left field seats.

Phillies shortstop Trea Turner saw a similar feast heading his way on the first pitch with one out in the bottom of the fifth, breaking the tie with his own launch into the left field seats. Until then, Turner had faced Strider seventeen times in his career and gone hitless for his effort. What a difference two months plus makes.

One moment, in August, Turner’s struggles were so profound that someone asked, and Phillies fans agreed, to bathe him in cheers just for encouragement his first time up. Now, he put the Phillies in the lead and would finish the set with a 1.441 OPS for it. He also finished a triple short of the cycle in Game Three and became the first Phillie—ever—to have a 4-for-4 game in a postseason set.

An inning after Turner unloaded, Castellanos finished Strider’s evening’s work with another solo homer. This time, Castellanos was kind enough not to do it on the first pitch, hitting a 1-2 fastball not too far from where his first bomb landed.

The Braves had one more shot at forcing a fifth game in the ninth. Marcell Ozuna wrung a leadoff walk out of Phillies reliever Gregory Soto and Sean Murphy singled him to third. Exit Soto, enter Matt Strahm. He got Kevin Pillar to pop out behind second base where Turner hauled it in; he got pinch hitter Eddie Rosario to fly out to left not deep enough to score Ozuna; and, he landed a swinging strikeout on pinch hitter Vaughan Grissom.

That sealed the fate of the Braves who’ve been ousted from two straight postseasons after winning the 2021 World Series. This time, the Phillies pitching staff and defense found a way to keep their regular-season threshing machine from threshing in this set. (Their NLDS slash: .186/.255/.264.) The Braves’ pitching staff and defense couldn’t stop the Phillies from looking . . . almost like the regular-season Braves. (The Phillies: NLDS slash: .275/.373/.565.)

“Obviously, we’re going to have to make an adjustment in the way we handle the postseason and the way that we focus and prepare for it,” Strider said, “but we’re going to get to work the moment we get out of here.”

Like the Dodgers, the Braves had compromised starting pitching. They missed veteran Charlie Morton, dealing with an index finger injury. Also, having Max Fried pitch only once in three weeks prior to Game Two because of finger blistering hurt.

But Braves catcher Travis d’Arnaud, who pinch hit for Harris in the Game Four seventh and drew the bases-loading walk from Kimbrel, handed the Phillies the major credit. “All of them stepped up,” he said. “All of their big offense and their pitching. Their bullpen all stepped up. Their starters all stepped up. Ranger had a tremendous series, Zack (Wheeler) had a tremendous game, (Aaron) Nola, their whole bullpen. Their pitching was unbelievable.”

Wheeler, Nola, and Game Four starter Ranger Suárez have started all six Phillies postseason games thus far. Their collective ERA for the span: 1.54. The Phillies bullpen over the same six games: 1.29 ERA. D’Arnaud may have made the understatement of the postseason through today.

“In baseball, it’s not always the best team that wins, it’s the team that plays the best that day,” said Braves reliever A.J. Minter, who surrendered one earned run in two and a third series innings. “And they played better than us, that’s what it came down to. We’ve just got to come back this offseason and be ready to go at spring training . . . When we won the World Series in ’21, we weren’t necessarily the best team.”

The best team doesn’t always win. You can ask the 1921 Yankees, the 1924 Giants, the 1952 Dodgers, the 1954 Indians, the 1969 Orioles, the 1981 Reds, the 1987 Tigers and Cardinals, the 1990 Athletics, and the 2001 Mariners, among others. Now, you can ask this year’s Braves, Brewers, Dodgers, Orioles, and Rays, too. Those were baseball’s top five teams this season.

But now the number six Astros go to the American League Championship Series against the number eight Rangers, and the Astros will be the only division winner involved in an LCS. The number seven Phillies go to the National League Championship Series against the number twelve Diamondbacks. There’s a reasonable if not ironclad chance that baseball’s seventh or twelfth best team could face its eighth best team in the World Series.

You tell me something isn’t terribly wrong with that picture no matter how much fun the games were to watch, anyway. No matter how much you loved Harper answering the post-Game Two trolling Braves. No matter how much you loved Castellanos’s Games Three and Four demolition or Harper’s continuation as his own kind of Mr. October. No matter how much you loved watching the Phillies’ pitching keep the Braves from truly serious mischief. No matter how much fun we’ll have watching the two LCSes, anyhow.

Just don’t ask commissioner Rob Manfred.

“I’m sort of the view you need to give something a chance to work out,” Manfred said. “I know some of the higher-seeded teams didn’t win. I think if you think about where some of those teams were, there are other explanations than a five-day layoff. But I think we’ll reevaluate in the offseason like we always do and think about if we have the format right . . . It’s Year Two (of the three-wild-card format). I think we need to give it a little time . . . We all want the competition to be the best it can possibly be.”

As the great (and Spink Award-winning Hall of Fame) New York Times baseball writer Red Smith once said of then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn dismissing Curt Flood’s reserve challenge out of mealymouthed hand, Commissioner Pepperwinkle really seems to be saying, “Run along, sonny, you bother me.”

Snakes alive!

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Arizona Diamondbacks

Assorted Diamondbacks take a victory dip in the Chase Field pool after they swept the Dodgers in their NLDS Wednesday.

This may actually be the worst Dodger takedown of all time. They’ve suffered legendary takedowns as much as legendary triumphs in their storied history, but this one may actually out-rank all the others.

Worse than the day the Philadelphia Whiz Kids’ veteran Dick Sisler ruined them on the season’s final day after Cal Abrams couldn’t score from first to keep the pennant-losing game out of an extra inning.

Worse than the day Bobby Thomson ruined Ralph Branca after a second-half Giants surge from thirteen games back through the lens of Leo Durocher’s telescopic from-the-clubhouse sign-stealing.

Worse than the day a still-not-himself Sandy Koufax couldn’t hold the Giants off in another pre-division play, three-game pennant playoff deciding game. Worse than the week the Orioles swept them in a World Series.

Worse than the day Tommy Lasorda let Tom Niedenfuer pitch to Jack (the Ripper) Clark with first base open and the Dodgers an out from forcing a seventh National League Championship Series game. Worse than back-to-back World Series losses in 2017-2018.

Never before were the Dodgers swept out of a postseason set in which all three Dodgers starting pitchers including a future Hall of Famer combined to pitch four and two thirds innings.

And never before had any team surrendered four postseason home runs in a single inning until Lance Lynn, the husky righthander who was the Dodgers’ key trade deadline pitching pickup, but who surrendered a Show-leading 44 home runs all regular season long, went to work for the third inning of their National League division series Game Three.

Geraldo Perdomo, Diamondbacks shortstop—leadoff home run. Ketel Marte, Diamondbacks second baseman, an out later—home run. Christian Walker, Diamondbacks first baseman, an out after that—home run. Gabriel Moreno, Diamondbacks catcher, following Walker, and after a long drive ruled just foul—home run.

None of baseball’s classic slugging teams ever did in any postseason what the Snakes did in that inning. Not the Ruth-Gehrig Yankees. Not the Foxx-Simmons-Grove Athletics. Not the DiMaggio-Berra-Mantle Yankees. Not the Boys of Summer Dodgers. Not the Mantle-Maris Yankees. Not the Swingin’ As or the Big Red Machine. Not the Pittsburgh Lumber Company, Harvey’s Wallbangers, or the Bash Brothers A’s.

“I’m a fan, too,” said Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo, after his Snakes banked the 4-2 win, the division series sweep, and a date with either the Phillies or the Braves in the National League Championship Series, “and I was looking at it thinking, what in the world is happening here?”

So were the Dodgers. Maybe all series long, never mind in the third inning Wednesday night.

“You look at the game, the series, they outplayed us, and there’s no other spin to it,” said manager Dave Roberts. “As far as our clubhouse, it’s just a lot of disappointment.”

As far as the Diamondbacks clubhouse, this team of rising youth, veterans who’ve been called “quirky” among other things, role players, and about as much star power yet as a cactus plant, has arrived. They slipped into the postseason via the wild card system after an 84-win season, swept the Brewers out of the wild card series, then dismantled a Dodger team full of stars who’d usually dismantled them while owning the National League West for most of a previous decade.

And they couldn’t have cared less about the financial power behind that Dodger star power, either. “We shouldn’t be worried about what their payroll is or who they’ve got over there,” said Snakes outfielder Alek Thomas after Game Three. “We’re just worried about what’s right in here in this clubhouse. You saw that this series.”

“They kept punching us in the face,” lamented Dodgers utility man Enrique Hernandez, “and we weren’t able to get back up.”

Just when did the Diamondbacks and their fans really start believing they might have more than a few lessons to teach the pitching-compromised Dodgers (three injured starters, a fourth on administrative leave over domestic violence charges) and the country this time around?

Was it when they bludgeoned six runs out of a possibly still-ailing and finally out of fuel Clayton Kershaw in the Game One first?

Was it when they pried three Game Two first-inning runs out of Bobby Miller, the Dodger rookie who’d looked promising enough over the regular season but now looked as though he was in enough over his 24-year-old head?

Was it after Lynn actually spent the first two Game Three innings on cruise control despite a pair of second-inning hits, before Perdomo hit a 2-1 meatball over the right center field fence, Marte hit a 1-0 service into the right field seats, Walker hit a 3-1 meatball into the left field seats, and Moreno hit a full-count hanging slider into the left center field seats to end Lynn’s night?

Was it when the Diamondbacks’ bullpen, formerly cause for plenty of alarm, left the torches behind long enough to surrender only four of the six series-long Dodger runs?

The Dodger bullpen did what their starters couldn’t do and kept them alive and within reach in the final two games. But their big bats couldn’t do anything, either. Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman may have posted Most Valuable Player-style regular seasons, but after fueling the Dodgers lineup all year long they went 1-for-21 together in the division series.

“I know for sure I did absolutely nothing to help us win,” Betts acknowledged. It was the first postseason series of his entire career in which the Mookie Monster went hitless.

“It doesn’t feel real,” Diamondbacks rookie star Corbin Carroll said after Game Three ended. This is a team with whom the Dodgers had their regular season way from 2021-2023, the Dodgers going 38-13 against them over the span.

But the division-series beatdown they laid upon the Dodgers was real enough. And it’ll feel even more real to the Dodgers as they face a winter whose number one mandate will be figuring out how to turn their regular-season dominance into anything other than postseason submission.