Dodgers left-hander Tarik Skubal thought he could go the distance when he got through seven shutout innings in San Francisco last week on just 75 pitches.
Then Dodgers manager Dave Roberts greeted him in the dugout with a handshake and the news: “Get ready for Game 1.”
The Dodgers made it official Friday: Skubal, the two-time Cy Young Award winner acquired from the Detroit Tigers at the trade deadline, will start Game 1 of the National League Division Series against the Atlanta Braves. First pitch is scheduled for 1 p.m. PDT Saturday.
“It’s an honor and a privilege to start Game 1 and have the trust in the coaching staff and my teammates and the organization to take the ball and go out there and do what I can do to put our team in a position to win,” Skubal said. “I’m excited for it.”
Skubal is no stranger to postseason baseball. He made three starts in each of the Tigers’ postseason runs the last two years. All of them were on the road.
“When I walk out onto the field in a playoff game, it’s usually received with a lot of boos,” Skubal said. “So I’m excited to get some cheers in there for us. And to pitch at home, I think it’s going to be a ton of fun in front of this atmosphere.
“Hopefully everyone is drinking a lot of water and staying hydrated. It’s going to be a hot one.”
Weather reports forecast the temperature reaching 100 degrees Saturday.
Skubal, after leaving the only organization he’d known, has been every bit the top-of-the-rotation starter he was advertised to be. In 10 starts for the Dodgers, he posted a 2.61 ERA. And he finished the regular season with a gem against the Giants: seven three-hit innings on an efficient pitch count, cut short only by the Dodgers’ postseason plan.
“I loved delivering that message,” Roberts said. “I don’t always get to deliver good messages, and that was a good one, a fun one. And he was great because obviously with this ball club, it’s an easy kind of thought that [right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto] would be the Game 1 starter, absolutely. So Tarik was very respectful of Yoshinobu, but we have thoughts on why we do things, and all these guys are all-in for whatever we decide.”
The full scope of the Dodgers’ rotation plan was not immediately clear, but Blake Snell and Yamamoto are expected to pitch in Game 2 and 3, not necessarily in that order.
Yamamoto pitched to batters during the Dodgers’ workout Wednesday. If he takes his usual five days of rest, that would line him up to pitch Game 3 in Atlanta on Tuesday. That would also line him up for NLCS Game 2 and Game 6 — as long as the Dodgers advance.
“It’s a good process, appreciating that the most important thing is this series right now,” Roberts said. “But if you have talented arms at your disposal, it’s prudent to kind of map out potentially how they could line up, and that’s just doing your due diligence.
“But we are very fortunate because we have four guys essentially that you could really kind of pick through to figure out what’s the best way to deploy all four starters … that’s the exercise, but it starts with having four talented guys.”
It’s a luxury other teams don’t have. The Braves certainly didn’t when they used ace Chris Sale in relief Wednesday in Game 3 of their wild-card series against the Philadelphia Phillies.
“What makes a team like that dangerous is they’ve already been in the fight,” Roberts said. “They’ve already got their intensity up, they can manage emotions, they’ve come out of the series with some momentum, coming out of winning a series.
“The advantage for us is we have an opportunity to not let their pitching staff come up for air, and how do you do that? You have to exhaust the starter tomorrow. You have to get in their pen, and you have to have them deploy arms as soon as possible and get that carousel going and continue to beat starters.”
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