Broiled and, that is, with the Dodgers down 0-2 in the World Series and the Red Sox unkind toward lapsesBy Yours Truly
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David Price, whose postseason resurrection is proving only one Dodger headacheThis wasn’t the script going into the World Series, was it? Even in a postseason in which the scripts got flipped like pancakes on the griddle? Weren’t these Dodgers and these Red Sox going to take it to the limit? Wasn’t the Series supposed to be tied at least after the first two games, even in frigid Fenway Park?
Nobody looking at the Red Sox’s grinding machinery or the Dodgers’s underdog overthrowing entering the Series, and seeing with eyes and not rooting, saw this set going less than seven games, all of which were likely to be thrillers.
It’s time for Dodger baseball, the two-years-retired Vin Scully crooned to start game broadcasts for six plus decades. Down 0-2 in this World Series, Game Three could well enough mean it’s time for Dodger basteball. Broiled and, that is.
You might be tempted overwhelmingly to think that the Red Sox now have a powerful chance of wrapping things up in five games. Maybe less. And they’re not exactly doing it with fancy stuff, even if Game One pinch hitter Eduardo Nunez rocked Fenway with a three-run blast into the lower section of the Green Monster seats.
They’ve out-hit, out-pitched, out-scored, out-played, and out-thought the Dodgers at just about every turn. They’re better than the Dodgers at overcoming mistakes or flicking them aside as though they were just hiccups in the moment right now. They’re using six parts analytics and half a dozen parts team character to play the kind of baseball that a lot of people thought was being shoved into the same place as the flannel uniform and the St. Louis Browns.
And they’re probably driving the Dodgers and their own long-enough suffering fans to drink. Especially when the Dodgers are being out-maneuvered by a guy who once electrified them, in their team’s uniform, when their team’s manager was one of the guy’s teammates, with a fourteen-foul, eighteen-pitch, two run homer in May 2004.
Even if the Series is moving from frigid Fenway Park to comfortable, spring-like Dodger Stadium for the weekend, the Dodgers right this moment look as though they’re destined for a two-day weekend with nothing to show for the hard, and almost impossible, work it took for them to get to the Series in the first place. The Beach Boys playing a concert in which they could be blown off the stage by a band of reptiles.
“You know you’re in a pit with a rattlesnake, and one bad move, and you’ll get bit,†said the Dodgers’ now-beleaguered relief pitcher Ryan Madson, whose zero Series ERA does a not so great job of covering for allowing all five of his inherited baserunners so far to score. He was talking specifically about striking out J.D. Martinez in Game One, hours before he’d face Martinez again in Game Two. But he could have been talking about the Dodgers as a whole facing the Red Sox as a whole.
The second time around, Madson had just walked Steve Pearce on five pitches with the bases loaded. With Dodgers right fielder Yasiel Puig—and, yes, Puig should have been the National League Championship Series’ Most Valuable Player—playing Martinez in something approaching a no-doubles defense somewhat unnecessarily, Martinez squirted a short liner landing about a mile in front of Puig for a two-run single.
And when Dodger manager Dave Roberts said of Madson that he’s “been our guy for quite some time†when it’s time to change pitchers with men on base, adding, “He’s done the job time and time again. The last couple of nights it hasn’t worked,†Dodger fans surely got more of a bitter taste of how Red Sox Nation felt for, oh, several generations before 2004.
Once upon a time, Red Sox baseball was summed up by Johnny Pesky holding the ball (it was actually a high throw in from the outfield), Joe McCarthy lifting Ellis Kinder, Darrell Johnson lifting Jim Willoughby, Bill Lee throwing a garbage curve to Tony Perez, B.F. Dent hitting the home run, Bill Buckner’s creaky ankles, and A.F. Boone hitting the pennant winner.
Since 2004 it’s been summed up by Roberts stealing second, Big Papi, Ol’ Blood and Sox Schilling, the Bellhorn tolling, Keith Foulke throwing Edgar Renteria out at first, thirteen runs in the first five innings (Game One, 2007 World Series), Riverdance Papelbon, Kolten Wong slamming his helmet after Koji Uehara picked him off, John Lackey’s six scoreless, and Shane Victorino hitting the three-run double. The Curse of the Whobino? And now you have a splendid chance of adding Nunez, Andrew Benintendi, David Price, J.D. Martinez, and even Cardiac Craig Kimbrel to the New Red Sox Canon.
Right now the Dodgers are trying to end what a lot of their fans think might be a curse, the first one inflicted upon the team since their Brooklyn generations when it seemed like they could win pennants as though they were about to become extinct but couldn’t get past those imperial Yankees—until October 1955, that is.
They haven’t won a World Series since the final year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency; they’re now on their sixth straight National League West championship threatening to have nothing to show for it, too. Nobody’s even found a name for it. And they’re waiting for the heroes of today to step up and be counted the way the heroes of their team’s legends once did.
They’re waiting for a Sandy Amoros, a Johnny Podres, a Larry Sherry, a Junior Gilliam, a Sandy Koufax, a Kirk Gibson, an Orel Hershiser. They might even settle for an Al Gionfriddo, a Cookie Lavagetto, a Frank Howard, a Bill Skowron, a Lou Johnson, a Mike Scioscia, a Mickey Hatcher.
They’ve had the next best thing to a Koufax in Clayton Kershaw for a decade. But Koufax, whose postseason life occurred in the pre-divisional era, was even deadlier in five World Series, with a 0.95 ERA despite his 4-3 won-lost record, than he was during his six-season in-season Hall of Fame peak. Kershaw’s seasonal, Hall of Fame-in-waiting brilliance has been fragmented by a postseasonal career in which he’s come up short enough, often by way of single devastating moments.
This postseason Kershaw, too, began to look like he was flipping the script. He pitched masterpieces twice before the World Series, but like Boston’s Chris Sale in Game One he barely had his C-plus game and was gone before getting even one out in the fifth inning.
And he knew it, even without using the frigid Boston temperature as an excuse. “My slider wasn’t very good tonight,†he said after the Red Sox banked the staggering 8-4 win. “Didn’t have a lot of depth on it. Yeah, I made some mistakes in the zone, too, that they made me pay for. Yeah, just all the way around, it wasn’t a great night.â€
They also raised too many eyebrows when Roberts, who’s been a solid bridge leader most of the time from the moment he was handed that bridge in the first place, spent the first two Series games keeping too many of his best hitters on the bench to start and didn’t find room to insert them until the games began getting just enough out of the Dodgers’ hands.
Yes, he wanted the right-versus-left matchups against the Red Sox’s two Series-opening lefthanded starters, Sale and Price. But somehow starting games with four of his leading home run hitters—Cody Bellinger, Yasmani Grandal, Max Muncy, and Joc Pederson—on the bench didn’t make a whole lot of sense, particularly considering Bellinger and Muncy tend to defy the customary platoon splits.
Grandal’s absence you could understand, considering his follies behind the plate in the NLCS, where he turned into a chain link fence ripped open in two significant enough places. But riding the pine seems to take something out of the others. Bellinger has three Series plate appearances without a hit after coming in midway through the first two games. Grandal has two such plate appearances with a walk and a strikeout. Muncy is 1-for-6 with a pair of strikeouts; Pederson is 0-for-3.
The Dodger bullpen that was supposed to be that much more serviceable than the once-suspect Red Sox bullpen has taken enough of the Red Sox’s destruction. The only reason Kershaw has five earned runs on his Game One jacket is because, with the game tied at three, Madson let the two runners Kershaw left behind in the bottom of the fifth score.
Alex Wood, moved to the pen for the postseason, hung two runs on the jackets of Julio Urias and Pedro Baez when he threw pinch hitter Nunez—who didn’t let riding the pine keep him off message or ready to go when needed—the three-run homer in the bottom of the Game One seventh.
And the Boston bulls did what the Dodger bulls couldn’t. Nathan Eovaldi, another starter (who might gave gotten the Game Three assignment otherwise), and Kimbrel, got rid of them in order over the last two innings. In both games.
The low score of Game Two’s Dodger loss, 4-2, felt more like a Red Sox blowout, everyone seemed to say after the game. Every idea Roberts had was countered by Red Sox manager Alex Cora and his charges doing just about the opposite of what Roberts must have expected.
If he thought Price was going to revert to his even sadder pre-2018 postseason form, he was disabused quickly enough in Game Two. If he thought the Red Sox would crumble under the thumbs of Kershaw and Game Two starter Hyun-Jin Ryu, he was disabused when it mattered. If he thought the Kimbrel who walked tightropes juggling live chainsaws earlier this postseason would be the one to show up, he got two rude surprises in two games.
These Rattlesnake Sox are a different kind of radical than the Brewers in the NLCS were. About the only way they can’t beat you is by sneaking into your clubhouse and injecting you with hepatitis. They hit as though avoiding strikes, going hit-and-run or run-and-hit (without quite phrasing it those ways), taking extra bases, going with the pitch, and using the entire field haven’t been declared unconstitutional. They pitch as though throwing strikes doesn’t mean disaster and who’s at the plate don’t mean a thing if he ain’t got that swing.
Dodger baseball is now only two rattlesnake pits shy of unfurling its own scroll of decades-long extraterrestrial disaster. A scroll whose first entry just might read Pedro Martinez being traded for Delino DeShields for 1995, while brother Ramon Martinez stayed a Dodger. That’s a lovely Red Sox cap atop Pedro’s pate on his Hall of Fame plaque, no?
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