This year, October started a day early for the Dodgers.
Thanks to their underwhelming regular season, their march toward postseason history began before the month even started.
This season’s team, coaches and players acknowledged repeatedly in recent weeks, had played their way into this spot: Having to begin the playoffs on the last day of September, in a daunting best-of-three wild-card series against the Cincinnati Reds on Tuesday; facing the slimmest of margins in their pursuit of back-to-back World Series championships, having won the National League West but failed to secure a top-two playoff spot.
That meant, unlike the last three years, the Dodgers did not have a bye to the division series.
It meant, this fall, they had to hit the ground running.
“The pitfalls are just [avoiding] kind of easing your way into a series,” manager Dave Roberts said Tuesday afternoon.
But, he added declaratively, “I don’t see that as a problem.”
In a 10-5 Game 1 defeat of the Reds at Dodger Stadium, it indeed was not.
Shohei Ohtani led off with a home run. Blake Snell was superb in a seven-inning, two-run start. And in a rollocking two-batter sequence in the bottom of the third inning, the Dodgers broke the score wide open, with Teoscar Hernández hitting a three-run bomb moments before Tommy Edman went back-to-back with a solo shot.
The Dodgers’ troublesome bullpen made things uncomfortable at the end, nearly walking the Reds out of a 10-2 deficit in a three-run eighth inning that included four free passes (two of them with the bases loaded) from three different relievers.
Nonetheless, the Dodgers held on. And now, with Game 2 on Wednesday at 6:08 p.m., just one more win will advance them through the opening round.
For most of the night, this game was everything the Dodgers hoped it would be, extending the momentum from their 15-5 finish to the regular season with star-studded offense (they matched a franchise postseason record with five home runs) and dominant starting pitching (Snell’s seven innings were a new personal postseason high).
Ohtani delivered the first blow, taking Reds starter and Los Angeles native Hunter Greene deep on the right-hander’s fourth pitch. Behind 2-and-1 in the count, Greene tried to go inside with his trademark 100-mph fastball. Ohtani, fresh off a 55-homer regular season that should earn him his fourth MVP award, turned it around with a 117.7-mph line drive that rocketed into the right field pavilion.
From there, the Dodgers’ offense never looked back.
In the bottom of the third, the team landed a knockout blow. Hernández got a hanging slider from Greene and — in a scene so reminiscent of his heroics last October — sent a three-run home run sailing deep to left, flipping his bat as he skipped out of the box.
A crowd of 50,555 had barely settled back into its seats before the Dodgers went yard again, this time on a hooking fly ball from Edman that wrapped around the right-field foul pole, giving the Dodgers a 5-0 lead.
That was plenty for Snell, who picked apart a Reds offense that ranked just 14th in scoring and 19th in batting average during the regular season. In a four-hit, nine-strikeout, 91-pitch start, he got quick outs with his fastball early in counts, and snapped off a wicked combination of curveballs and changeups to put them away when he got to two strikes.
The Reds — who were no-hit by Snell last year when he pitched for the San Francisco Giants — didn’t get their first hit until Matt McLain doubled with two outs in the third. And though TJ Friedl walked in the next at-bat, Snell responded with three swing-and-miss changeups to Noelvi Marte to retire the side.
That was the start of 11 consecutive batters Snell would set down in a row, not letting another Cincinnati hitter reach base until Austin Hays’ seventh-inning single sparked a two-run rally that got the Reds on the board.
By then, the Dodgers had kept adding onto their lead. In the fifth, Hernández hit his second home run of the game off right-hander Connor Phillips (one of the Reds’ best relievers late in the season). Ohtani did the same in the sixth, belting his second long ball (also against Phillips) on a 454-foot blast that landed near the top of the right-field stands.
The score was 10-2 when Roberts finally turned to his bullpen in the eighth, trying to take no chances by summoning top left-hander Alex Vesia. Vesia, however, wasn’t sharp, retiring only one of the three batters he faced. And after that, the Dodgers flirted with an unthinkable collapse.
Edgardo Henriquez gave up two walks (one to load the bases, another to force in a run) and an RBI single. Jack Dreyer followed with the inning’s fourth free pass, again with the bases loaded, before finally escaping on a strikeout of Tyler Stephenson (who three times swung at what would’ve been yet another ball four) and a pop-up from Ke’Bryan Hayes.
The bullpen concerns will hang like a cloud over the team going forward. Even in the ninth, Blake Treinen had to work around a two-out single from Gavin Lux.
Still, as the calendar officially flips to October, the Dodgers are already one step closer to defending their title.
The post Dodgers waste no time finding their October groove in Game 1 win over Reds appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
