Orion’s Melt: A Hater’s Guide to Dodgers vs. Phillies NLDS Game 4

Man, am I tired of writing about the Dodgers and Phillies. I mean some of that narrowly – this is my second recap of these two financial juggernauts facing off in the past 24 hours, which means I’ve spent more time pondering these two teams than sleeping lately. I mostly mean it broadly, though. We get it, the Dodgers and Phillies are the best two teams in the NL every year. I hear you, they each have a slugging lefty DH who hit 50 homers and has a rabid following. It’s true, they have a former MVP lefty first baseman who departed his longtime NL East team and got a big sack of money for it. Oh, how original, a slight-of-stature righty shortstop who is a dynamic offensive player anyway. A slugging right-handed right fielder who honestly shouldn’t be playing defense? Yup. Endless stacks of pitchers? Sure thing, buddy, nothing but the best for these two.

Maybe it’s my lack of attachment to either team that makes me so tired of seeing them in October. Philadelphia’s “Oh, we’re a bunch of plucky underdogs” act? Exhausting. The Phillies have a $300 million payroll. Dodgers Baseball And Capital Appreciation Corporation employees executing carefully workshopped “dances” to simulate “fun” after base hits? No one’s buying it. But I don’t think it’s just the neutrals. My guess is that even fans of these clubs are sick of it at this point. Everything that annoys you about your opponent in this series is exactly what annoys the rest of us about your team. They even have obnoxious fanbases – not every fan, obviously, but come on, even Dodgers and Phillies partisans will agree with me on this one. Can’t we have someone else?

We can’t, of course. These teams have all the stars! Of course they’re always in the playoffs! And even more confusingly for me, you’re presumably here because you find this series interesting. If you just wanted to know the score, well, they publish those right away. So bear with me. The teams might be overexposed and easy to root against, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a good recap. Just follow Emperor Palpatine’s advice and let the hate flow through you.

The Dodgers won, 2-1, in 11 innings to knock out the Phillies and advance to the NLCS, but that final score in no way reveals anything about the game. That score implies a crisp, clean contest, and this one most certainly was not that.

The first four innings were a joy for offense haters. The two high-powered lineups combined for exactly two hits, neither exceeding 86 mph off the bat. Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Teoscar Hernández, Tommy Edman, Trea Turner, Bryce Harper, and Brandon Marsh all went 0-for-2 in that span. Kyle Schwarber struck out swinging on a fastball at chin level. Will Smith worked the count to 3-1, got the perfect pitch to hit, a lefty sinker right down the middle, and tapped into an easy double play. Just because you’ve heard of all the hitters doesn’t mean they’re going to succeed; cover the names up, and you might have difficulty telling the early innings from a spring training scrimmage.

Oh, you think it’s because the pitchers and defenses were great? They had their moments — how could they not in such a low-scoring affair? — but they also displayed some sloppiness. Tyler Glasnow walked Alec Bohm on four pitches in the first, and then he walked him again in the fourth. Cristopher Sánchez hit Alex Call, possibly the worst hitter on the Los Angeles roster, with an 0-2 fastball, and in fact didn’t retire Call all day. Bohm nearly broke a scoreless tie by taking his eyes off of the easiest groundball he’s seen all series, letting it scoot harmlessly under his glove to put a runner on third when he would have otherwise ended the inning. Luckily for him, as we already covered, the offenses were both doing nothing.

Let’s not leave Major League Baseball out of this, either. One reason that both hitters and pitchers looked off kilter is that no one could see. This was the first game at Dodger Stadium all year that started between 3 and 4 p.m. local time. The Dodgers haven’t scheduled any games for that hour because no one can see at that hour. Shadows are overblown as an excuse for bad hitting in general, but these shadows were extreme. Why, you might ask, did the league choose to play a strangely timed day game in Los Angeles and then a strangely late one in Milwaukee? You don’t have to be Bob Woodward to follow the money here; the league clearly thought this configuration was better for television ratings, and no one ever bothered to say, “Hey guys, no one can see at that time of day.”

Perhaps I’m too willing to believe the hype around the shadows, though. The fifth inning rolled around, with the sun finally low enough that it wasn’t casting the pitcher’s mound into incandescent invisibility, and the Phillies hitters responded by swinging through three middle-middle fastballs en route to a two-strikeout inning. The Dodgers at least managed to get a ball out of the infield in their half, for only the third hit all day, but Call was left stranded when a variety of far more famous Dodgers did flat out nothing to drive him in.

Ah! By now, you’re probably thinking that this much bad offense probably says more about how good the two pitchers were. To that I say: You’re not wrong. Look, being a hater is fun, but so is watching two of the best starters in the league go at it. Glasnow was in attack mode right from the start, mixing high-octane fastballs with a curveball that is nigh unhittable even if you can see it. He struck out eight Phillies over six innings without them ever looking close to figuring him out. The combination of his extreme release point, excellent velocity and pitch shape, and low visibility were an unsolvable combination.

On the other side, Sánchez barely broke a sweat before the sixth, when he allowed two straight one-out hits for the first real scoring chance all day. He escaped that threat with two weak grounders, though frankly, it never felt all that threatening. His sinker and changeup hardly need help, but when he’s on his game and it’s also hard to see, good luck. The closest thing he had to a weakness is that he had no feel at all for his rarely used slider, but it didn’t seem to matter; he hung a few, but the Dodgers just watched them fly by for strikes or put them into play feebly. His last pitch to escape the sixth, for example, was a cement mixer of a slider that hung up over the dead middle of the plate, only for Edman to wave at it for the groundout that closed the frame. Sánchez pitched like someone who knew that the other team couldn’t do anything with the ball even if he just poured it down the center. And you know what? He was right.

I’m sorry. That was too much positivity for this hater’s review. So let’s get right back to it: Glasnow left after six innings and only 83 pitches, perhaps because Dave Roberts loves torturing Dodgers fans with his bullpen management. OK, fine, it was probably workload-related, but that doesn’t make it a good decision. Glasnow had hit 100 pitches in four straight starts to end the regular season before a brief, season-ending tune up. He was phenomenally well-rested, with four days off since tossing 34 pitches out of the bullpen in Saturday’s Game 1. Roberts just didn’t want a tiring Glasnow over the mystery box that is the Dodgers bullpen.

Maybe Roberts is just a hater too. Emmet Sheehan came in and created some offense for the Phillies. After allowing a tough luck baserunner, a J.T. Realmuto flare single, Sheehan induced a perfect double play ball. He was responsible for the back half of the double play turn, though, and he first lost track of where first base was and then forgot to catch the ball, which put a runner in scoring position. Against the next batter, he made an even bigger error; he threw Nick Castellanos a fastball in the strike zone in a 1-2 count.

Why is that a bad decision? Well, Castellanos is one of the most aggressive swingers of the 21st century, and he’s particularly effective against hard stuff. He’s 90 runs above average against fastballs in his career, and below average against all other pitch types. Sheehan should have been bouncing sliders until there was at least a little reason to put a ball near the plate; instead, he extended Castellanos a cordial invitation to do some damage. Castellanos promptly accepted, ripping a double down the left field line and then tumbling into second base, wildly out of control, because that’s just how Castellanos slides. It was 1-0 Phillies, right at the first instant that Roberts chose to do anything other than let his highly compensated ace throw the ball past some dudes who absolutely could not solve him.

Phillies manager Rob Thomson wasn’t about to take that sitting down. The Dodgers put a bit of pressure on Sánchez in the bottom half of the inning, upping their hit count all the way to five singles, and Thomson decided that, with runners on first and second and one out, he too was done with his spectacular starter despite a manageable pitch count. He at least had a good reason to do that: Instead of a fifth starter working out of the bullpen, he could turn to one of the best closers in baseball, with Jhoan Duran fully warmed up. On the other hand, he made it as hard as possible on Duran.

You might think that the hardest part of a mid-inning entrance would be retiring two Dodgers without allowing a hit. But that wasn’t hard enough! After a groundout moved both runners into scoring position, Thomson wanted to up the pressure on Duran, so he intentionally walked Ohtani to load the bases. Ohtani, it should be noted, is about as cold as he’s ever been, 1-for-17 in the series at that point and looking completely out of sorts. Batting next, with the bases loaded and no margin for error? Oh, just Mookie Betts, a strike zone genius who could now tie the game simply by walking. Betts saw two strikes and swung at both of them, and he also saw four balls and took them all. Just like that, a walk tied the game, and Duran hadn’t so much as allowed a hit. I’ve heard of manufacturing runs, but usually you’re supposed to create them for your own team, not the other one. Write that down.

I was chortling at that incredible self-own through most of the next two innings, but in my defense, those two innings flew by. As you’ve no doubt gathered already, neither set of hitters had it tonight, and now the high-leverage relievers were in the game. Roki Sasaki carved through the top of the Philadelphia order in the eighth. Duran blew the Los Angeles batters away in the bottom half – again, absolutely hilarious that Thomson put him in a situation where a walk would tie the game when he’s so difficult to get a hit against. Sasaki kept it going with three quick outs in the ninth, and Matt Strahm followed suit in the bottom half, including a greatly amusing (to me at least) pinch-hitting appearance for lefty Max Muncy against one of the toughest lefty relievers on the planet. Talk about a tough way to get into a game. The 10th inning went even faster than the ninth, with Sasaki continuing to overawe the Phillies and Jesús Luzardo entering to face the top of the Dodgers lineup and blowing them away – two strikeouts in an 11-pitch inning.

Want a real hater’s take? This game needed the zombie runner. These two offenses looked as uninspired as it is possible to look while playing postseason baseball. The Phillies managed a “rally” in the top of the 11th when Harper walked and then advanced to second on a passed ball with two outs. That was the first baserunner since the eighth inning, believe it or not; the two teams had combined for 20 straight outs in the interim.

That Harper walk seemed to remind the Dodgers that they were allowed to put runners on base. They got to work against Luzardo in the bottom half of the inning, with Edman and Muncy hitting line drive singles to put runners on the corners with two out. That brought Thomson back into play, which has been an ominous sentence all series. He went to the bullpen for Orion Kerkering, playing for a righty/righty matchup against Enrique Hernández.

Let’s examine that one for a minute. Luzardo was absolutely rolling and had more innings left in the tank. The Phillies didn’t have much left in the bullpen; after Kerkering, the only available pitchers who had even appeared in this series were lefty specialist Tanner Banks and David Robertson. Kerkering has been uneven this postseason (he had a 6.75 ERA and a .141 BABIP coming into this game, which my brain simply can’t process), and he’s been a boom-or-bust player overall in his career; sometimes he comes in and just doesn’t have it. Even if he got through this inning unscathed, would you feel good running him out against Ohtani at the start of the next inning, even while Ohtani is struggling? One would assume not. I liked this decision about as much as I liked the decision to start the game at the perfect time of day to blind everyone.

Hey, what do you know? Kerkering walked Hernández on six pitches, with only one of them finding the strike zone. He took a number of deep breaths, centered himself, and missed about six inches inside with a fastball on his first pitch to Andy Pages. Luckily, Pages has been the worst hitter in the entire playoffs this year, with a gruesome .053/.100/.053 slash line. He swung wildly at the pitch, falling behind 0-1, and then hit a meek, inning-ending tapper right back to Kerkering on the next pitch.

Er, did I say inning-ending? I meant endless-slog-of-a-game ending, my mistake. Kerkering bobbled the ball slightly upon picking it up and then went into a full panic. He saw the runner coming home and decided to rush a wildly difficult off-balance throw in Realmuto’s general direction, while completely forgetting that he still had plenty of time to get Pages at first. The throw sailed wildly – how else can throws sail? – and just like that, the game was over. Call it Orion’s Melt.

I have to tell you: For a hater, this was a pretty great way to end the series. First, there aren’t any more games! The rest of our regularly scheduled Dodgers recaps this postseason will involve them playing scrappy underdogs, as is usually the case. I got to laugh at the ineptitude of these high-powered offenses, and just in case it wasn’t enough to chuckle at their misfortune for nine innings, I got to do it for 11. The league put the game in a weird, offense-suppressing time slot. Both managers made head-scratching moves. The runs scored exclusively on unforced errors – Sheehan’s fielding and pitch-selection blunders, Thomson’s decision to walk the bases loaded on purpose with Betts due up, and Kerkering misplaying an easy grounder. Best teams in baseball? These two?

For the record, I still do think these are the two best teams in baseball right now. I don’t actually think that either offense is bad. This game was mostly about two dominant pitchers taking advantage of the elements and locking down two very good lineups. But for neutral observers, what could be a better way to end a clash of titans than a series of pratfalls and slip-ups? Hate! Hate! Hate! And, of course, check out the Dodgers next week as they march inexorably toward the World Series, against the winner of the Cubs-Brewers throwdown. Oh, and Phillies fans, if you’re still reading, come join the vast array of neutral fans and partake in that sacred October tradition of rooting against the Yankees (check!) and Dodgers (TBD).