One Ohtani, Two Hernándezes Lead Dodgers to Game 1 Win

PHILADELPHIA – It’s dangerous to draw conclusions from one game of a playoff series, but after Game 1 of the NLDS, you can take this lesson to the bank: Nobody’s perfect.

Cristopher Sánchez was on the verge of completing six imperious innings, until the last three batters he faced — the last pitch he threw, really — sent the Phillies into a spiral. Teoscar Hernández committed a borderline-unforgivable defensive gaffe, then atoned with interest by the end of the night with a game-winning three-run homer.

Shohei Ohtani, making history by leading off a playoff game as a starting pitcher, looked not just like a two-way player but like two different people. Ohtani has seldom looked so hapless at the plate, striking out in each of his first four plate appearances. He made a slightly less glorious brand of history, becoming the sixth player in the pitch tracking era to strike out looking three times in a playoff game.

But on the other hand. Ohtani came out the winning pitcher: nine strikeouts in six innings, with just four baserunners allowed. Hernández’s seventh-inning homer off Matt Strahm made the difference in a 5-3 Dodger win.

This was the Phillies’ fourth postseason home opener of the Bryce Harper era, and as stable as the core of the team has been over the past four seasons, you can detect markers of the passage of time. The kids of 2022 are now established veterans, and there are more than a few completely new faces.

The crowd is different. The tireless, lusty, deafening clamor that defined the 2022 postseason has been chastened by a blown 2-0 lead in the 2023 NLCS and an embarrassing no-show against a division rival last year. This is now a crowd burdened by the knowledge that not everything is going to go the Phillies’ way. In the quiet moments, which exist now, the aggressive roar recedes into an anxious silence.

But when presented such an inviting target as Ohtani, they still have that top gear. I’d never seen the most popular athlete in North American sports get booed so loud you couldn’t hear the public address system. Who made up the bottom half of the Dodgers’ order? I had to check the scorecard — an ear-splitting wave of “Let’s Go Phillies” chants drowned out every name from Tommy Edman on down.

The first two innings of the game did little to calm the atmosphere. In this matchup of heavyweight starting pitchers, it was Ohtani who hit the canvas first. He walked Alec Bohm to lead off the second, then left a 100 mph four-seamer right where Brandon Marsh could get it. With two runners on and nobody out, J.T. Realmuto scalded another middle-middle triple-digit heater into the right center field gap. What should’ve been a single and maybe driven in a single run turned into a two-run triple when the ball escaped first Hernández and then Andy Pages.

“I was playing straight in,” Hernández said after the game. “I didn’t get a good angle. He hit it pretty good. I tried to get it, so he can’t go all the way to third or they can score two runs in that situation. It went by me.”

The two Dodgers outfielders watched the ball roll to the wall, like two cats standing over a column of marching ants. And by the time they returned the ball to the infield, two runs had scored and Realmuto was standing on third. He’d score on a Harrison Bader sacrifice fly to stretch the Phillies’ lead to 3-0.

That was all the Phillies got. Ohtani kept the top three hitters in the order — Trea Turner, Kyle Schwarber, and Harper — off the bases their first three times through the lineup.

“I thought we just missed some pitches over the plate that we could’ve done damage on,” said Harper. “We just didn’t get it done.”

For the next five innings, though, it looked like the Phillies wouldn’t need their stars’ help.

Sánchez made his first postseason start during that 2023 NLCS loss, a token 11-batter effort at the head of a de facto bullpen game. In just 24 months, by a combination Sánchez’s own spectacular self-improvement and attrition to Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola, he’s become the Phillies’ ace. With the Dodgers’ nine-deep-with-room-to-spare lineup, headed by a trio of MVPs, Sánchez had little room for error. Perfection was the ask, and he’s one of only a very few starters in baseball capable of providing it.

I didn’t have the sense watching Sánchez live that we were seeing perfection. He ran too many deep counts, and he departed the strike zone by too much when ahead — especially against the bottom of the Dodgers’ order. He needed Bader to bail him out with a spectacular diving catch. And yet, after 5 2/3 innings, there he was, up 3-0 in the game, with eight strikeouts and only three baserunners allowed.

The key to Sánchez’s game is a mystifying two-pitch combination: a sinker and changeup, both with hard downward and arm-side movement but with a nine mile-an-hour discrepancy in speed.

For most pitchers, a changeup is an emergency barrier to protect against opposite-handed batters. For Sánchez, it’s the very rock upon which his church is built. In the very first at-bat of the game, he threw two left-on-left changeups in a row to finish a three-pitch strikeout of Ohtani. His biggest highlight of the night came in the fifth inning against the same batter.

Ohtani swung through a 1-0 slider, then swung over a changeup, and then — presumably expecting another change — sat there and watched a sinker straight down the middle for strike three. In three at-bats, off Sánchez, Ohtani saw 14 pitches, whiffed on six, and took two others for strike three:

The best baseball player on the planet, maybe the best who ever lived. And Sánchez tied him in knots. It didn’t matter.

“Even if I perform well, whatever I do, if we lose the game then I don’t feel good,” said Sánchez through an interpreter. “We’re a team. If we win, we win together, and if we lose, we lose together.”

So, about what happened after that superb first 5 2/3 innings. The last three Dodgers who faced Sánchez reached: First, Freddie Freeman on a walk, then Edman on a single, and finally Enrique Hernández.

Sánchez’s last pitch of the game might have been his worst, or at least his most ill-conceived: A 1-0 breaking ball in the zone to a righty with a massive platoon split. Hernández laced it into the corner to plate two runs. In came David Robertson, who looked for all the world like he was determined to walk Max Muncy, but baseball’s choosiest hitter chased at least twice, maybe three times, at pitches out of the zone and grounded out weakly to end the inning.

Robertson then started the next frame by putting the first two men he faced on base, leaving Strahm with the impossible task of protecting a one-run lead with two men on, no one out, and the top of the Dodgers’ order coming up.

He came within about 15 feet of pulling it off. Strahm struck out Ohtani and got Mookie Betts to pop out, but Teoscar poked a fly ball to the opposite field. Bader quickly drew a bead on it and would’ve run it down, had it not cleared the big fence in right center and landed about four rows deep in the seats. Adding injury to insult: That futile pursuit was Bader’s last involvement in the game. The punchy center fielder, whose trade deadline acquisition revitalized the Phillies’ offense, and whose diving grab in center field stanched a potential fifth inning rally, tweaked his hamstring.

His participation in the rest of the series remains in doubt.

From that point, everything that ailed the Dodgers before could be forgotten. Teoscar had more than atoned for his baffling play in right field earlier.

“For me, anything that happened before a big moment like that, it’s in the past,” he said.

The Phillies had gotten to Ohtani early, but he kept the game close and ultimately outlasted Sánchez. The importance of that last bit is hard to overstate.

“It was huge,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “He’s not always going to be perfect. But I do feel that him giving up the three and to still go out there and give us six innings — so, five innings tonight he threw shutout baseball — was huge. So it’s a quality start for him. He gets the win.”

In the month of September, the Dodgers had the second-worst bullpen in the majors, and the squishier parts of said bullpen came closer to giving away both games in the Reds series than the final scores would indicate.

The hope for Roberts was this: With only three starters required for the best-of-five NLDS, he suddenly had a surfeit of big arms from the rotation that could be repurposed in relief. Had Ohtani been chased early, or in the middle of an inning, the Phillies could’ve teed off on the same relievers they torched in a September series at Dodger Stadium. Instead, Roberts was able to hand the ball to Tyler Glasnow, who likely would’ve finished the game with a three-inning save if he’d kept the bases clean.

Even this strained the limits of the Dodger bullpen. Glasnow, in his second inning of work, walked Turner and let Harper poke a seeing-eye single through the right side. Bohm walked to load the bases with two out, and both managers traded pawns: Alex Vesia came in to face Marsh, who was promptly lifted for Edmundo Sosa.

Sosa packs more punch than your average utility infielder. He played a decent amount while Turner and Bohm were hurt, slugged .469 overall and hit .318/.362/.533 against lefties. He also had a three-homer game against the Marlins a week and a half ago. Vesia gave him something to hit — a 92.6 mph fastball up and over the plate — but Sosa hit it to center field, where hitting the ball 361 feet gets you a routine fly out, not a game-winning home run.

In came Roki Sasaki for the ninth. The rookie lived up to his billing, establishing himself with 100-plus heat in the zone early in the count, and counterpunching with his splitter. But not in the dirt, where you’d expect him to throw it, where hitters could swing over it. Rather, Sasaki dropped his splitter onto the top third of the strike zone, like a stone off a railroad bridge over a river. Realmuto, trying to start a game-saving rally, took what looked like a hit-the-bull fastball, only to watch it dip into the zone for strike three.

The Phillies did bring the tying run to the plate. Max Kepler somehow tagged an outside splitter and yanked it down the line, but Sasaki recovered quickly. After just four batters and 11 pitches, he got Bryson Stott to pop out to Muncy, just past the third base bag.

The crowd, three hours removed from baying for blood, dispersed quietly, with scattered boos tinkling around the stadium.