NLDS Game 3 - LAD 10, WAS 4: A Tale of Two Games
I’ve been through this enough where I’ve developed unhealthy coping mechanisms. Any postseason event has ended with the Dodgers losing, so any postseason event will end with the Dodgers losing. At least, until they do something good and remind me of why I am so severely addicted to baseball. My brain has been fried. I think the 2017 World Series did it.
So the first two games of this NLDS have validated what my parents describe to be, “Highly distressing emotional behavior”.
Game 3? Well it was just more of that, and I’m afraid I’m stuck in the world of Binary Baseball. Remember the win probability graphs for the first two games? Game 3’s looks like if you were to do the ‘now kiss’ meme to them.
The beginning of the game looked like the Dodgers picked up right where they left off in LA, only worse. Cody, Corey, and especially Pollock looked helpless against Anibal Sanchez and his literal 75 mph change up, squandering a bases-loaded opportunity in the first inning.
According to what we saw in Game 2, that was all we needed to see to know how the game would go. Heck, this was all we needed to see to know how the series would go. It didn’t matter that Hyun Jin Ryu continued pitching well and that Muncy and Turner were doing their best to keep the Dodgers in it. They looked horrible for the first five innings.
As Patrick Corbin came out of the pen to face Cody + Corey, it seemed like they squandered their opportunity against a Not Big Three pitcher and were ready to get bodied by the next starter in line to come out of the pen.
And then it happened.
Cody singled against Corbin, breaking his 0-for-8 streak in the series. (A.J. proceeded to have one of the worst at bats of the series, striking out on 3 sliders). Team Fun Bench Dudes, proceeded to make Doc look like a genius. After a Freese pinch hit single, Old Man Martin muscled a go-ahead double and the pinch hitters, and Chris Taylor and Kiké Hernandez, kept the line moving.
Ah yes the Game 1 model of just relying on pinch hitters against a shaky bullpen.
After spending the next 3 innings being a bullpen bully and playing “I’m not touching you” with the Nats, the Dodgers brought in Kenley to close out the win. It felt a little like the comfortable Game 1 win, but it brought with it comforting signs. Cody and Corey had two solid hits, Taylor replaced Pollock, and our pen proved resilient by surviving a Joe Kelly panic attack.
“See? Cody, Corey, and A.J. look at how easy it is to win when you just Get. On. Base.”
Look, I wish I was mature enough to temper expectations, but I’m in too deep. All I can do now is hope that they found a 1.1 version of The Game 1 blueprint that includes “Good players should get hits.”
When you only have the last couple games to judge performances and only one definition of success, you’re stripped of any logical assurance of success. You can only ride the unpredictable and reactive present, not the past that tells you AJ Pollock was Mike Trout-lite or the future that tells you he’ll figure it out. Unfortunately, the present carries the baggage of waiting 162 games + 30 World Series-less years to get there. Let’s just hope they continue to figure it out.