LOS ANGELES — October baseball isn’t always a crapshoot.
Sometimes, the sport’s deepest-pocketed, most talent-rich juggernaut swats away an 83-win, small-market opponent like a pesky fly.
A Los Angeles Dodgers team that had hoped to be resting up for the division series this week played its way out of the wild-card round as quickly as possible Wednesday. They swept a Cincinnati Reds team that slipped into the postseason with the second-fewest regular-season wins of any playoff team in the wild-card era, clinching the best-of-three series with an 8-4 victory in Game 2.
For two straight days, the Dodgers mostly looked like the team hailed as the preseason favorites to be World Series champs for a second straight year, the team with three league MVPs at the top of its lineup, the team with a starting rotation so deep that Clayton Kershaw was left off the wild-card roster. The Dodgers’ offense and starting pitching were more than strong enough to overcome a tenuous bullpen, one that twice took breezy victories and needlessly injected moments of late-game tension.
But this was the Reds. This was the easy part. For the advancing Dodgers, much tougher challenges await.
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Up next come the talented, rested, playoff-tested Philadelphia Phillies, the Dodgers’ opponent for a best-of-five division series beginning Saturday at Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies piled up 96 wins this season, won four of six against the Dodgers and edged them in the race for home-field advantage and a first-round bye.
On Wednesday, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts described the Phillies as a “very talented ball club” but insisted that he thinks the Dodgers “match up very well against those guys.” He contended that his squad could be the sharper team early in the series, having played two wild-card games while the Phillies had the week off.
“Getting through the wild-card series kind of seamlessly like we did, I think we’re in a great spot,” he said.
If the performance of the starting rotation the past two nights is any indication, the Dodgers will arrive in Philadelphia fists bared, ready for a fight. In the wild-card round, the Reds were unable to make Roberts pay for the decision to save Ohtani to start Game 1 against the Phillies.
In their outings against Cincinnati, Blake Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto both secured 20-plus outs, struck out nine-plus batters and surrendered five or fewer hits. That’s the first time in MLB postseason history, per OptaSTATS, that a team’s starters have done that in back-to-back games.
Yamamoto was especially resilient Wednesday after the Reds loaded the bases with nobody out and the Dodgers leading by a single run in the top of the sixth. He caught a break when Austin Hays’ one-hop liner found Mookie Betts’ glove at shortstop and Betts astutely threw home to force out the third-base runner. Then Yamamoto locked in and struck out both Sal Stewart and Elly De La Cruz on sharp curveballs below the zone.
Through an interpreter, Yamamoto said postgame that he worried he was “throwing too many curveballs” during that sequence, but he said he trusted catcher Ben Rortvedt. Only after De La Cruz checked his swing but could not hold up at strike three did Yamamoto concede, “That was a good call.”
And as deep as the Dodgers’ starting rotation is, so is their lineup.
Just two games into this postseason, October heroes of the past are heating up, most notably Kiké Hernandez. After the Dodgers fell behind in the first inning on two unearned runs made possible by a Teoscar Hernandez error, Kiké helped his team recover. In the fourth, he drove in the tying run with a ringing double in the gap, then scored the go-ahead run on a Miguel Rojas single, pumping his fist as he stepped on home plate.
The Dodgers star who struggled most over the course of the regular season has also caught fire at the ideal time. Betts had four hits Wednesday, including three doubles, which tied a Dodgers single-game postseason record dating to 1953.
“Better late than never,” he said afterward with a smile. “I went through arguably one of the worst years of my career. But I think it really made me mentally tough. So now there’s just a different level of focus. And it’s not really on myself. It’s more on winning the game.”
In the Game 2 victory, nearly everyone in the lineup contributed. Teoscar Hernandez hit a two-run double. Rojas and Rortvedt had two hits apiece. It’s no wonder that before the game, Reds manager Terry Francona scoffed at the idea of intentionally walking Ohtani, who singled and scored a run.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said. “Have you heard of Mookie Betts or Freddie Freeman? … You start walking people in that lineup, and you’re asking for trouble.”
But if there’s one reason for concern heading into the Philadelphia series, it’s the same one that plagued the Dodgers throughout the second half. Their relievers can’t be trusted to protect big leads, let alone small ones in high-leverage situations.
On Tuesday in Game 1, relievers Alex Vesia, Edgardo Henriquez and Jack Dreyer frittered away much of an eight-run lead over the course of a 59-pitch top of the eighth inning. Boos rained down from the Dodger Stadium crowd after Dreyer walked in a run, the Reds’ third of the frame, to allow Cincinnati to send the tying run to the on-deck circle.
A pattern emerged in Game 2, when Roberts called starter Emmet Sheehan in the top of the eighth with the Dodgers leading 8-2. Sheehan walked the bases loaded, then yielded a base hit and a sacrifice fly.
When Sheehan nearly hit Will Benson with a pitch on an 0-2 count, Roberts had seen enough. He pulled Sheehan in the middle of the at-bat and brought on Vesia, who sandwiched two strikeouts around a walk to wriggle out of the inning with an 8-4 lead intact.
Why didn’t Roberts allow Sheehan to finish pitching to Benson? The skipper conceded postgame that Sheehan “wasn’t sharp” and said he felt better about Vesia against the right-handed hitters on deck. Would Roberts hesitate before turning to Sheehan in future postseason games? No, the manager gave Sheehan his vote of confidence.
“I believe in him,” he said. “I really do.”
The one pitcher who earned Roberts’ trust in this wild-card sweep was starter-turned-reliever Roki Sasaki, who finished off the Reds with a pair of strikeouts in the ninth inning Wednesday. Asked if Sasaki would be the Dodgers’ postseason closer moving forward, Roberts gave a non-answer but acknowledged, “I don’t think the moment is going to be too big for Roki.”
With the Phillies looming, Sasaki will need to be ready for bigger moments as October rolls on. For the Dodgers, the Reds were a speed bump.
Now comes the hard part.
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