The Milwaukee Brewers have no chance.
Neither will the Seattle Mariners or Toronto Blue Jays.
The clear truth emerged from the Dodger Stadium shadows late Thursday amid a downtown-shaking roar of delight and disbelief.
This is ridiculous. This is simply ridiculous, how well the Dodgers are playing, how close the history books are beckoning, and how an ordinary summer has been followed with unbelievable days of the extraordinary.
The Dodgers are not going to lose another game this October. Write it down, bet it up, no major league baseball team has ever played this well in the postseason, ever, ever, ever.
With their 3-1 victory over the Brewers Thursday in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series, the Dodgers take a three-games-to-none lead with a sweep likely in the next 24 hours and coronation coming in the next two weeks.
The Dodgers are going to win this NLCS and follow it with a four-game whitewash of the World Series because, well, you tell me.
How is anybody going to beat them?
Match their aces-flush rotation? Nope. Equal their hot closer and revived bullpen? Sorry. Better than their deep lineup? Nobody is even close.
The Dodgers are more than halfway to finishing the most dominant postseason in baseball history, it’s all there in the numbers.
The only team to go undefeated through the playoffs since the divisional era began was the 1976 Cincinnati Reds. But the Big Machine only had to win seven games. Since the playoffs were expanded and the test became tougher, the greatest October streaks have belonged to the 2005 Chicago White Sox and 1999 New York Yankees, both of whom went 11-1.
These Dodgers were forced into that early wild-card series, so if they end this postseason without another loss, they will finish 13-1.
The last time a team in this town had such a dominating postseason was the champion 2001 Lakers, who went 15-1 in the postseason with only one stumble against Philadelphia on the night Allen Iverson famously stepped over Tyron Lue.
Those Lakers were legendary. These Dodgers will be soon.
They are currently 8-1 in the playoffs and have won 23 of their previous 29 games and again, who’s going to beat them?
Start with that rotation. Tyler Glasnow followed gems by Blake Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto Thursday by twirling 5 ⅔ innings of swing and miss, holding the Brewers to one run with eight strikeouts, and in three games the Brewers have scored two runs in 22 ⅔ innings against Dodger starters.
And perhaps their best pitcher hasn’t even taken the mound yet, that being Friday’s starter Shohei Ohtani.
Now for their deep lineup. Ohtani is still mired in a career-worst slump, but his one hit Thursday was a leadoff triple that led to him scoring the first run, and seemingly everybody else chipped in. Mookie Betts had the first RBI, Tommy Edman knocked in Will Smith with the go-ahead run in the sixth, a hustling Freddie Freeman scored on a wild pickoff attempt, and on and on..
Finish with their bullpen, which is actually finishing. Taking over for Glasnow with a runner on first and two out in the sixth Thursday, Alex Vesia, Blake Treinen, Anthony Banda and Roki Sasaki shut the Brewers down the rest of the way, and their regular-season weakness has become their strength.
Incidentally, Sasaki’s ninth-inning shutdown was aided by a brilliant in-the-hole putout by shortstop Betts, and that’s just one more way the Dodgers can beat you.
All this, and as Thursday confirmed, they have arguably the best home-field advantage in baseball.
No place is bigger. No place draws more fans. And no place is louder, from the bleacher-rattling roar to the cover-your-ears sound system.
“This place has an aura about it,” said Max Muncy of Dodger Stadium. “It’s the biggest capacity in baseball. Everybody talks about it when you come here. The lights seem a little brighter. The music seems a little louder — that might actually be because it is a little louder.”
Yeah, fans, you might hate the otherworldly stadium volume, but the players like it.
“That’s part of the perks of being at Dodger Stadium, we have that sound system,” said Muncy. “It sounds silly to say something like a sound system could be an advantage. But it really is. When the speakers in the center field are cranking and the crowd is going absolutely nuts and you feel the field shaking beneath your feet, it’s a really big advantage. And that’s something we’ve always had here.”
The stadium rose to the occasion Thursday as it always does this time of year, filling up despite the weird mid-afternoon starting time, constantly standing and screaming by the game’s end.
“When we’ve had those big moments, there’s arguably no place that can get louder than Dodger Stadium, especially in the postseason,” Muncy said. “When you have 56, 57,000 people screaming all at the same time in a big moment, it’s pretty wild. That’s an advantage that we’ve always had here, and the guys love it.”
There’s a lot to love.
The post Plaschke: Are these Dodgers the best postseason team in baseball history? They will be appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
