You probably don’t believe the slumping Dodgers can come back from this gaping 3-0 deficit to beat the surging Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series.
And you probably didn’t believe that manager Dave Roberts should continue penciling in Shohei Ohtani — flailing and failing and having gone three for 20 this postseason entering the Dodgers’ 6-2 loss in Game 3 — as his designated hitter.
But Ohtani rejected Roberts’ invitation to remove himself — after a season of fighting biceps and knee issues — from the lineup.
Because Ohtani is an athlete whose belief in himself knows no bounds.
Exactly the kind of guy a team on the brink of elimination needs.
Remember back in 2018, most of baseball’s foremost brainiacs thought there was no way the 23-year-old hot-shot prospect from Japan would actually be able to do what no one in nearly a century had: both pitch and bat in the big leagues.
The majority of major league scouts believed Ohtani’s swing was flawed in balance and mechanics, that his bat-to-ball skills weren’t going to be good enough.
You know what happened: Ohtani only went on to become the first MLB player to record 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in the same season.
He became the first two-way All-Star starter.
And last year he gave us the greatest game ever, striking out 10 and hitting three home runs in Game 4 of the NLCS, sending Milwaukee home and the Dodgers back to the World Series, on the way to a second consecutive championship.
This is someone for whom the impossible is probable. Someone who’s made us all believe in unicorns. An audacious, delusional, radical optimist.
And with Wednesday’s defeat having backed them into the corner, the Dodgers should be glad to have Ohtani, for whom all things are possible, still working and tinkering and trying his best.
Ohtani drove the Struggle Bus into Game 3, having struck out seven times in 20 playoff at-bats, with only three singles and no extra-base hits and no RBIs.
But he wasn’t dissuaded: “It’s a constant, ongoing process that’s headed in the right direction,” he said Tuesday, through interpreter Will Ireton, adding several times in an impromptu interview: “I take full responsibility.”
Ohtani stayed late Tuesday night working on his swing, Roberts said: “Out with the guys, talking about things on how we’re going to beat these guys … and I will say this, this was a different look from Shohei. Determined, and that’s an understatement.”
And then, while the debate around him raged — should he or shouldn’t he play — Ohtani clocked in and got to work.
The superstar who deferred most of his record 10-year, $700 million salary so as to enable — to obligate — the Dodgers to build a championship roster around him reached base in three of his four plate appearances Wednesday.
As a team, the Dodgers went one for six with runners in scoring position and left eight runners on base — including Ohtani those three times.
He took one for the team, getting hit by a pitch on the backside in the fourth inning. He drew a Josue De Paula-esque five-pitch walk in the sixth. And then in the eighth, Ohtani knocked a single up the middle that came off his bat with an exit velocity of 113.5 mph, one of his four hardest balls of the whole season.
Ohtani didn’t, however, pop one out of the park; he hasn’t homered since Aug. 18.
The live-by-the-slug, die-by-the-slug Dodgers have hit zero home runs in the NLCS. But the small-market Brewers known for their small-ball approach have hit five — including three off Blake Snell on Wednesday.
As a team, the Dodgers have much of their massive $415 million payroll going to hitters who are collectively batting .188 this postseason. They’re three for 32 with runners in scoring position.
Call it quiet-quittin’ hittin’, because the Dodgers’ bats and their stadium got so quiet you could hear “Let’s Go Brewers!” chants in the Ravine — and probably from as far away as Racine, Wisc.
And if it appears that L.A.’s hit baseball show is about to go on hiatus, its main actors are telling us they still believe in miracles.
“At the beginning of this year, we set out to do something historic,” Max Muncy said. “It looks like we’re going to have to make a little more history along the way if we want to accomplish that.”
“It’s certainly possible,” said Roberts, MLB’s only manager to have experienced a 3-0 postseason series comeback as a player when his Boston Red Sox did it against the New York Yankees in the ALCS.
“I’ve lived it, and I think the thing is that our guys have been battle-tested, as was that team I was a part of … it’s just you’ve got to win tomorrow. It’s an elimination game. We’ve played in a lot of elimination games. We’ve just got to get a win.”
Four wins, actually. In a row.
Does that seem impossible? Seems like Ohtani’s type of challenge.
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