Dodgers Ambush Hunter Greene, Slug Five Homers in 10-5 Victory Over Reds

The margins were so thin on this first day of the 2025 postseason. Aces shoved, the games stayed close, and the high-leverage innings piled up; the first six teams to play combined for just 11 runs. At this unusual time of the year — when the patient regular season gives way to a best-of-three all-out sprint, when managers summon a flame-throwing reliever at the first sign of trouble — even a momentary slip in form can spell the end of the contest. And so it was for Hunter Greene in the third inning of the Dodgers’ (mostly) emphatic 10-5 win over the Reds in Game 1 of their NL Wild Card Series showdown. Greene faltered, the Dodgers capitalized, and Los Angeles gained a crucial series lead.

It seemed like this last game of the day would be yet another tightly contested pitchers’ duel. The Dodgers hurler, Blake Snell, headed into Tuesday night’s matchup in fine form, spinning a 2.01 FIP in September. He held up his end of the bargain, striking out nine Reds over seven innings, bullying the heavily right-handed lineup with hard heaters in and feathery changeups away. But for about 10 minutes, Greene was a touch off, and that was that. The Reds never really got back into the game after that four-run third inning, even as the shaky Los Angeles bullpen briefly stirred up a scene in the late innings.

On one level, Greene’s first pitch of the third inning was impressive — he chucked it 101 mph. The velocity was representative of his night. His 39 fastballs averaged 100.3 mph, nearly a tick up from his best-among-starters regular season average. Unfortunately, the firm fastball was just about all he had going. That first pitch to Mookie Betts was yanked all the way to the backstop. If the bases are empty, a ball is a ball, no matter how badly you miss. But the bad miss was portentous. He escaped from his encounter with Betts, but just barely; the Dodgers shortstop rocked a 2-2 slider 385 feet to center field, but it landed just short of the wall. One out.

Against Freddie Freeman, Greene seemed to lose faith in his primary pitch, one he threw 54% of the time in his excellent regular season. He yanked an 0-1 fastball well inside, and after four more pitches, he found himself in a full count. Greene went fastball, but aimed a tiny target low and away. He just missed, handing Freeman a free base.

The Max Muncy confrontation went nearly the same way. After Greene missed with a first-pitch slider, he once again went nibbling with his fearsome fastball. The first one nipped the zone; the second one just missed. He threw an uncompetitive splitter on 2-1, then sailed a four-seamer high to put two on with one out.

While it was the second pitch to Teoscar Hernández that ultimately doomed Greene and the Reds, it was the first pitch — a 99.2-mph heater spiked into the other’s batter box — that likely sealed his fate. The runners each moving up a base wasn’t ideal, but the ugly miss — his second of the inning — was perhaps more significant for Hernández’s assessment of the situation.

Across the third inning, Greene told a story. He either did not trust the fastball to play in the zone or did not have the command to throw it there. Either way, the outcome was the same: He didn’t want to go to the number one, especially after that 0-0 pitch. Hernández could be pretty sure he was seeing slider, and he got what he wanted.

If Greene executed, it may not have been an issue. But he floated that thing up like a water balloon, and Hernández was all too happy to pop it. His three-run blast broke the game open, handing the Dodgers a four-run lead.

A 4-0 lead with Snell dealing — it didn’t look great. And it looked even worse after Tommy Edman launched another hanging slider into the right field seats in the next at-bat. Greene ultimately squeezed his way out of the inning, but the damage was done. The Dodgers led 5-0, and the game would not again be close.

For that, you can thank Shohei Ohtani. Prior to Greene’s third-inning meltdown, the near-certain NL MVP got the scoring started in the first on a solo dinger pulverized to the pull side. Ohtani took the first three pitches he saw, then turned on 100 mph painted middle-in. Noelvi Marte and Miguel Andujar each got heaters in roughly identical locations in their half of the inning and made contact somewhere on the label, each producing parachutes that dropped into the gloves of the Los Angeles fielders.

Ohtani is a different kind of guy. There’s something special about the way he is able to turn on inside pitches, clearing out his hips and whipping the bat through the zone at violent speeds. The pitch came in at 100 mph; it went out at nearly 118. He hit it so hard that the ball was barely visible on the broadcast. There was the sonic boom, and then there was the towering lefty circling the bases.

He added to his power display later in the affair. It was the bottom of the sixth inning, and the Dodgers were up 6-0; Hernández had tacked on another run with a oppo shot, his second homer of the game, off a 99-mph Connor Phillips fastball. Phillips stayed in for the sixth and allowed a one-out single to Enrique Hernández. In a 1-1 count to Ohtani, Phillips went sweeper, looking to go backfoot for a swing-and-miss. Instead, it sat up like a Christmas ham. Ohtani tends to do one thing and one thing only to middle-middle Christmas hams, and that’s put the whole thing in his mouth. He launched a no-doubter to deep right-center, putting the Dodgers up 8-0. The win expectancy was 99.6%.

The Reds tacked on a couple of runs in the top of the seventh, both attributable to the speed of Elly De La Cruz, but the Dodgers grabbed them right back. Snell finally left a changeup over the plate, and Austin Hays punished him with a one-out single. Spencer Steer followed that up with a line drive that just snuck past Freeman’s glove, putting runners on the corners. De La Cruz came to the plate and rolled over a changeup right to Betts at short. Against most hitters, that’s an easy double play. But De La Cruz got down the line in 4.02 seconds, beating the throw by an eyelash. Instead of a scoreless seventh, the Reds had their first run; De La Cruz cruised home on a Tyler Stephenson double three pitches later, scoring easily on a ball played well by Enrique Hernández in the corner. Cincinnati’s momentum was stunted in the bottom half of the inning. Los Angeles got both those runs back on a Marte throwing error and a Ben Rortvedt RBI single.

The Dodgers bullpen, as it is wont to do, managed to make a big old mess in the low-leverage endgame. Even with a 10-2 lead in the eighth inning, the relief corps manufactured some drama. Three pitchers somehow threw 59 pitches in one inning, an inning that started with an eight-run lead. Alex Vesia got one out but walked two guys; Edgardo Henriquez also walked two, the last of those bringing in a run to make the score 10-3. Pitching coach Mark Prior sauntered to the mound. Jack Dreyer started warming up. Henriquez surrendered up an RBI single to Steer to make it 10-4. Manger Dave Roberts bolted out of the dugout to summon Dreyer.

A De La Cruz homer would’ve brought the game within two runs. But Dreyer did his job, living up to his billing as perhaps the most stable of the Dodgers bullpen arms this season.

OK, fine, he did walk De La Cruz, bringing the deficit to five. And he also threw 11 pitches to Stephenson, who fouled off pitch after pitch. But Dreyer ultimately got the strikeout on a nasty backfoot slider for the second out, and Ke’Bryan Hayes lifted a lazy popup to Freeman at first to avert any serious threats to the Los Angeles lead. Blake Treinen pitched a mercifully clean ninth inning, and the Dodgers were halfway to the NLDS — albeit not without a late-night reminder of their own glaring weakness.