Dodgers Quiet Padres to Advance to NLCS

Forget second-guessing — I first-guessed Dave Roberts as the fifth inning of Game 5 ended. It was partially his hugging form – a little too hands-off-y for my tastes – but mostly, it was who he gave the hug to. Yoshinobu Yamamoto is the highest-paid pitcher in baseball history. Eleven months ago, he pitched the game of his life in the biggest spot of his career. His complete game, 14-strikeout masterpiece in Game 6 of the Japan Series was one of the great playoff performances of the 21st century. Against the Padres, he looked nearly untouchable. He rolled through five innings on just 63 pitches, and he seemed to be picking up steam as the game wore on.

Roberts didn’t agree. The top of San Diego’s order was due up for a third time the following inning, and Yamamoto has exclusively turned in short outings since returning from injury in September. He simply hasn’t had a ton in the tank, and the Padres had roughed him up in Game 1 of the series. The Dodgers bullpen has been dominant, and had just turned in nine shutout innings to force this deciding game.

Maybe Roberts felt like he had no choice. Yamamoto’s counterpart, Yu Darvish, was no slouch himself. He’d allowed a second-inning home run to Enrique Hernández, but other than that, he’d given up pretty much nothing. He did it with smoke and mirrors – or, to be more specific, a curveball that vanished like smoke into the night every time the Dodgers took a swing. He threw that hook a whopping 19 times, more than any other pitch, and the Dodgers managed to put exactly one into play, a harmless groundout off the bat of Mookie Betts.

Darvish has absolutely owned the Dodgers this year. He shut them down completely in Game 2, surrendering one earned run over seven innings in a laugher of a victory. He, too, was going strong, dicing up the opposition, with weak contact galore. He even had a little extra when he needed it: He struck out Shohei Ohtani twice and held down the top three hitters of the Dodgers lineup spectacularly.

I would’ve tried to push Yamamoto further. Instead, Roberts went to Evan Phillips. Don’t get me wrong – I like Evan Phillips! He’s one of the best relievers in baseball. He looked untouchable for a five-batter burst; three strikeouts sandwiched around a groundout and a line drive that Teoscar Hernández flagged down (look, Fernando Tatis Jr. is good).

But Phillips has a limit – 25 pitches, to be specific. And the Padres had a bunch of lefties due up, starting with Jackson Merrill and proceeding from there. Roberts turned to Alex Vesia, a solid reliever who gets even better with the platoon matchup. He and Merrill engaged in a long duel that ended with a beautiful up-and-in fastball for a strikeout. Right around here, my first-guessing of Roberts started to look kind of silly. The Padres were down to their last six outs, and the Dodgers had the platoon edge lined up.

Things got better for Los Angeles in the bottom of the seventh. Teoscar Hernández came up with a great plan against Darvish: wait for something bendy in the strike zone and unload. He took a few fastballs and a slider, got into a 2-1 count, and tattooed a low-and-inside slider 420 feet to left. That was the last batter Darvish faced, but to be clear, he pitched well enough to win. Those two homers, a single, and a walk were the only blemishes on his record.

The promise of going to the bullpen early is that you can carefully select your matchups and line up the best of your relievers exactly where you want them. The peril is that if one thing goes wrong, that carefully selected matchup plan goes right out the window, and now someone else has to face the batter you had a completely different plan for.

That drawback jumped to the forefront for the Dodgers in the top of the eighth inning. Vesia grabbed at his side after his last warmup pitch and then waved to the dugout. Roberts and a trainer came out to talk with him briefly, and then Vesia trudged off the mound. Whoops! Instead of all the matchups they wanted, the Dodgers had to call in Michael Kopech, a fire-breathing righty, to face the lefty cluster Roberts had so carefully handed to Vesia.

Kopech came out sluggish. His first fastball was a mere 97 mph. His location was scattershot. Xander Bogaerts, the only righty that Kopech would get to face and thus theoretically a good matchup, hit a bullet up the middle on the third pitch of the inning. But Gavin Lux snared it, and Kopech settled down quickly. He coaxed a quick popup out of David Peralta, and then Kopech really hit his groove; he went 99, 100, 102 to absolutely steamroll Jake Cronenworth. Maybe things were gonna work out after all.

The Padres had one last gasp, but Blake Treinen set them down in order. The last pitch of the game was a middle-middle sweeper to Tatis, the kind of pitch that you might regret for weeks if he’d launched it 700 feet to center. But he rolled it over, and even though he hit the ball hard (106 off the bat), it was right to third, and the game ended in a shutout victory for LA.

In the end, I suppose my questioning of Roberts’ decision-making looks silly. Even without his preferred plan available, the bullpen didn’t allow a baserunner in their four innings of work. The Padres just weren’t up to it on Friday. It can happen to anyone. Los Angeles’ bullpen can shut down anyone on any given night, too. In fact, they were up to it for two straight games, after the Game 4 bullpen victory.

It’s easy to imagine how this could have gone differently. But look at it this way: The best Dodgers starter this postseason has been “bullpen game.” The relief corps has been comically good; the starters were terrible until Yamamoto’s brief gem to close the series out. If the point of managing is to use your best players as often as you can, maybe Roberts did the right thing all along. It doesn’t match the conventional wisdom of how to do things, but boy, the results looked pretty stellar.

In the coming days, Roberts is likely to face a similar decision again. The Mets wear pitching staffs down and score in bunches. The Dodgers are going to have a stressed bullpen, and they’ll have to figure out when they can afford to stretch their starters and when they need to pull them early. But for now, you have to hand it to them. I would have loved to see a classic Game 5 pitching duel between two on-form aces. But winning is what counts, not aesthetics, and well, the Dodgers won more games than the Padres in the series. I guess that’s why the Dodgers employ Roberts instead of me – well, okay, there are a million reasons, but that’s one of them.