By Yours Truly
They started Game Seven of this National League Championship Series the same way they ended Game Seven of last year’s World Series, with a ground out to a second baseman in shallow right on an infield shift on the first pitch of the top of the first. They surrendered a first-inning solo home run in the bottom of the first.
The omens did not look good for the Dodgers. But the final score looked better than that. There was never a change that Game Seven of this NLCS wouldn’t be a classic, at least for one combatants. But in a postseason of script flipping, the Dodgers didn’t just flip the script to beat the Brewers, 5-1, they took a match to it and left it in the ash can.
“They woke up and smelled the coffee,†said a Dodger fan of my acquaintance midway through the game. All things considered, compared to the way they sleepwalked through losing Game Six, it was more like they woke up and smelled the raw uncut espresso shots.
And the Dodgers could say very honestly that they certainly would get back to the World Series when Puigs fly. Especially after Yasiel Puig’s three-run homer off Brewers reliever Jeremy Jeffress in the sixth flew to push the game just enough out of the game Brewers to matter in the end.
Awaiting them to open the Series in Fenway Park: the Red Sox. Whom the Dodgers as a franchise hadn’t faced in a World Series since Babe Ruth was a full-time member of the Red Sox pitching staff, the Dodgers were known as the Robins, Casey Stengel was one of their outfielders, and Ruth pitched fourteen innings to beat the Bums-to-be 2-1 in Game Two.
“We know what it’s like there,†said Clayton Kershaw, who closed out Game Seven with three swift enough outs including the final two on strikeouts, making him the first man in divisional play history to throw both his team’s first pitch of the season and its last pitch to win that season’s pennant. “We’ve heard about it. We’ll be ready.â€
They certainly got a somewhat better battle testing from the Brewers than the Red Sox got from the Astros in their ALCS. The Dodgers didn’t just flip the scripts against these plucky, determined enough Brewers in Game Seven, they incinerated them. And to think there was once a point during the season when nobody would have expected the Dodgers even to show up in the postseason, never mind go to the World Series.
They lost infield star Corey Seager for the season to Tommy John surgery (it happens to position fielders, too) after 26 games. They lost Kershaw twice to back trouble. Third baseman Justin Turner was a wrist injury casualty who didn’t begin his season until May and didn’t begin finding his sea legs until August. Matt Kemp, their prodigal son brought back in a deal with the Braves, faded in the second half after a splendid comeback of a first half. And closer Kenley Jansen dealt with a recurring irregular heartbeat down the stretch.
That turned out to be the only thing irregular about the Dodgers’ heartbeat. And they needed every beat of their collective heart to get through these Brewers, who’d had the National League’s best regular-season record to win the Central before dumping the Rockies in three straight in the division series.
Weren’t the Brewers’ bats finally awakening after they spanked the Dodgers 7-2 in Game Six? Didn’t they shake off David Freese’s game-opening home run to slap Dodgers starter Hyun-Jin Ryu silly in the first two innings and send them the message,
You won’t get rid of us that
easily? Wasn’t that shutdown, impenetrable Brewers bullpen supposed to continue turning Dodger bats into papier mache?
And wouldn’t they have Josh Hader for full duty out of the pen in Game Seven after they didn’t need him in Game Six? Wasn’t Walker Buehler, the Dodgers’ Game Seven starter, showing his inexperience just enough that the Brewers’ mix of veterans and youth and managerial heterodoxy would send him to bed without his supper for the winter?
Not to mention that no National League team had repeated as World Series entrants since the 2008-2009 Phillies, and no team, period, since the 1992 Braves, had ever come back from a League Championship Series Game Six loss by five runs or more to win a seventh game.
Oops.
Manny Machado pulled out the book of matches by which the script would die when he led off the top of the second with a full-count bunt single—the first time anyone in baseball bunted on 3-2 at all, never mind for a hit, since 2014. Then Cody Bellinger took out a match and lit it immediately, when Brewers starter Jhoulys Chacin threw him a fastball right down the chute on 2-2 and Bellinger drove it into the second deck above right field.
Just like that, likely National League Most Valuable Player Christian Yelich sneaking a high liner past a jumping Yasiel Puig and over the right center field fence in the bottom of the first seemed like ancient history.
But Puig had his own way of getting even with the Brewers for that when he batted in the top of the sixth and with the Dodgers having managed to keep things at 2-1 while Hader was urged into the game for early enough duty and kept them quiet for three innings including four strikeouts and one measly hit—a base hit up the pipe by Machado in the fourth.
The bad news there was Puig dialing Area Code 5-4-3 for the side. But the good news in the sixth was Hader out, Xavier Cedeno in for the Brewers, and Max Muncy shooting one through the left side for a leadoff single. Out came Cedeno and in came Jeremy Jeffress—the Brewers’ customary closer, and the same man who’d tried trolling the Dodgers for being “lucky†to win Game Two.
Just as rudely, Justin Turner lined Jeffress’s first service to left for a base hit. Machado flied out to right but Bellinger grounded one to second weakly enough that the only out the Brewers would get was Turner at second. Up stepped Puig. Down to second stealing went Bellinger on ball one.
Then Jeffress threw Puig a curve ball that sailed in down and away, which is right where Puig’s swing went to meet and greet it. Screw the matches, Puig threw a blow torch at that pitch, driving it just over the center field fence after the ball nicked the rear top of it on its way out. Who’s lucky
now, Mr. Jeffress?
Actually, the Dodgers got a little lucky in the previous half inning, when—with the still-swift Lorenzo Cain on second with a line double that sailed just over left field insertion Chris Taylor’s head with two out—Yelich sent one sailing on a high line to left that traveled far enough for Taylor to have to run back toward the track and hit the track sliding just after he reached beyond his head to catch it. It highlighted Julio Urias’s single inning of work a day after the husky lefthander learned his beloved grandmother died.
Taylor’s catch may not have had quite the zing of the Red Sox’s Andrew Beninendi running in to catch Alex Bregman’s almost-three-run Game Six-ending hit in the ALCS, but to the Dodgers it might as well have been just as
shazam! “Let’s go!†Taylor hollered when he returned to the dugout. Puig wasn’t about to disobey that order.
Nothing else mattered in the long run. The Brewers managed seven hits all night, six of which came off Buehler, the rookie, who scattered the hits effectively enough while striking out seven and walking nobody. "We had Buehler on the mound today, who has nasty stuff, who loves the big game," said Bellinger, who was named the first 23-year-old to win the NLCS Most Valuable Player award since the Cubs' co-winner Javier Baez in 2016. "Once we gave him the lead, we really liked our chances."
The Brewers’ bullpen may have gotten all the notices coming in and through most of the set, but in the end it was the Dodgers’ bullpen that dominated—that pen got the final seven strikeouts and surrendered only one hit.
And two of those strikeouts came through the courtesy of Kershaw, the Dodgers’ Game Five conqueror, after Dodgers manager Dave Roberts handed him the ninth following four crucial outs from Jansen that began when Jansen was brought in to face pinch hitter Curtis Granderson with one on and two out in the seventh and struck him out swinging on four pitches.
Roberts and Brewers manager Craig Counsell entered Game Seven knowing they’d have to become combinations of Dwight Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery, Curtis LeMay, and Don Vito Corleone to win. In the end, it was Roberts who out-thought Counsell and Counsell who was forced to spend his best pen men early and often.
In one way the Brewers made it a little easier for Roberts. They didn’t have any substantial starting pitchers other than Chacin and Wade Miley. Their offense was a little on the top heavy side, and Jeffress—the closer who’d been deadly in the regular season—picked the wrong time to implode, allowing three Game One inherited runners to score, serving Turner that “lucky†two-run homer, and finally throwing Puig the curve ball that couldn’t miss Puig’s bat with a hard left toin at Albuquoique.
But the Miller Park audience appreciated the effort, deservedly. Unlike other entrants dispatched early in this postseason, with this the only postseason set this year to go the absolute distance, they stayed aboard and kept their faith right down to the moment Kershaw struck out Mike Moustakas swinging on a pitch off the middle of the plate to finish. These Brewers have an excellent chance of trying it again next postseason.
These Dodgers, however, are a little tired of hearing about the franchise’s last World Series triumph thirty years ago. “We need to create some of our own history, for sure,†said Kershaw. “I think it stands as a testament to this organisation that they have such great history, that they take a lot of pride in their history, which I’m thankful for. I’m thankful to be part of that . . . But at the same time if we win one, we might not have to hear about it anymore, which would be awesome.â€
Imagine how their manager felt as a member of a 2004 Red Sox team who’d probably gotten sick to death about reminders of their own franchise’s storied but too often star-crossed history. And Roberts actually helped do something about that. It was his stolen base with the Red Sox one out from being swept out of the 2004 American League Championship Series that started that surrealistic Red Sox overthrow and eventual World Series triumph.
He gets to manage a World Series against a still young fellow, Alex Cora, whose signature moment as a player was in a Dodger uniform—ending an epic, eighteen-pitch at-bat against the Cubs in May 2004 with a two-run homer.
Roberts versus Cora. The Dodgers versus the Red Sox. Wherever they are in the Elysian Fields now, Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel must be sharing a hearty guffaw and no few belts between them.
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