TORONTO — The Dodgers played 162 games in 193 days during the regular season. Then they played 10 more times in 18 days in the first three rounds of the playoffs.
It was a grind that gave way to a routine as comfortable as an old shoe.
That routine was upended when the Dodgers swept the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series, giving them a week off before the start of the World Series, the team’s longest break since February. And the Dodgers looked anything but rested and refreshed in Friday’s 11-4 shellacking by the Toronto Blue Jays, which left them trailing a postseason series for the first time since last fall’s NLDS.
“I’m pretty sure the guys kind of felt the velocity a little bit more,” said Miguel Rojas, one of just a handful of Dodgers who spoke to the media after the loss. “But there’s nothing that we can do. That’s not going to be an excuse for us to underperform.”
It may not be an excuse. But it could be an omen.
This World Series is the fifth in which a team that swept its best-of-seven LCS, as the Dodgers did, faced a team that needed to go seven games to win its series, as Toronto did. The team that swept and got the break lost each of the four previous World Series, winning just two of 18 games.
Dodger manager Dave Roberts dismissed that history Friday.
“I really don’t think the week layoff had anything to do with tonight,” he said. “We were rested. I thought we were in a good spot. We had a 2-0 lead. So I don’t think that had anything to do with it.”
Blake Snell, the pitcher who gave up that lead, brushed off the break as well.
“There’s no excuses. I need to be better,” said Snell, who went 10 days between starts, his longest break since coming off the injured list in August. “I don’t care if it’s a month off. Find a way to be ready.”
He wasn’t against the Blue Jays. After averaging 16 pitches an inning in 14 previous starts, he needed 29 to get through the first inning Friday. And after giving up two runs and six hits in 21 innings this postseason, he gave up five runs and eight hits in just five-plus innings in Toronto, with two of those runs coming on Dalton Varsho’s fourth-inning home run, the only homer Snell has conceded to a left-handed hitter this year.
Emmet Sheehan, who followed Snell to the mound, hadn’t pitched in two weeks. He had his worst outing of the year, facing four batters and watching three of them score.
“I felt good going into the game. I felt the same as I have been,” he said. “I thought I made some good pitches, and they made some really good swings.
“It’s not a good feeling.”
A prolonged break can affect pitchers more than hitters because after throwing with a slightly fatigued arm all season, they suddenly feel fresh and strong and their pitches lose some of their movement.
“You don’t want to feel too good. You feel too good, you try to throw too hard because you feel good. And it doesn’t go where you want it,” said Will Klein, who mopped up for the Dodgers, pitching a scoreless eighth inning. “[The ball] doesn’t go where you want it to because you’re used to pitching a little down, like 90 or 95%. You’re never really at 100.
‘There’s such a thing [as] too fresh.”
Klein’s last appearance in a big-league game was a month ago; since then he’s been working out at the Dodgers’ facility in Arizona. He said the team tried to keep the rest of their pitchers in their familiar routine with bullpen sessions or simulated games, but it’s not the same as throwing in high-leverage situations against opposing hitters in a World Series game before 44,353 fans, as Snell, Sheehan and Klein had to do Friday.
And the history shows the Dodgers aren’t the first team who have been broken by the break.
But they had less than 24 hours to wait for Game 2, which means they’re back into the comfortable — if exhausting — routine that got them to the World Series in the first place.
“There’s another one tomorrow,” Klein said. “We can’t go and unlose today, as much as we’d like to. Thinking about today isn’t going to help you win tomorrow.”
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