How Far Can These Dodgers Go?
Injury ravaged and coming off an emotional series win over the Padres, does LA have enough left to beat the Mets?
Hi friends-
Well, this is just how we drew it up when we decided to do our first-ever Long Game meet up at Citi Field for the Mets vs. Dodgers game on Memorial Day.
Except that game got rained out as we were all on separate trains to the stadium, and I had a low grade 60 minute panic attack when I realized that not only did I have no way of reaching the few dozen people in our group, I also had no idea where to send everyone to hang out in a monsoon on a national holiday.
Then the “Seaver Five” took over and directed us all to a Colombian restaurant/bar in Jackson Heights that was better than any stadium.
And now here we are nearly five months later and the Dodgers and Mets are meeting in the NLCS, beginning tonight.
Both teams have taken uh, the same kind of wild detour to get here that our little group did to get to Jackson Heights back in May.
The Mets stunk for half the season, got booed often at home, then called in Grimace to throw out the first pitch. Francisco Lindor moved to the lead-off spot and changed his walk-up song to “My Girl” by the Temptations. Jose Iglesias started a music career.
All of it worked.
New York started played terrific ball in July, August, and September and somehow clawed their way into the National League’s final playoff spot on the last day of the season.
Meanwhile, the Dodgers body blowed their way to the best regular season record of any team in MLB despite losing eight starting pitchers plus Mookie Betts and Max Muncy to longterm injuries
On Friday, they came back and won a thrilling playoff series against a tough Padres team despite fielding a first baseman who could not walk and a shortstop who could not throw.
(I said yesterday in our Zoom chat that I think the best four teams in MLB are—for once!— the four teams that are still standing, except that the Padres might be better than all of them. But we’ll never know if San Diego could have won its first-ever championship because AJ Preller and Mike Shildt panicked and decided to start Dylan Cease on short rest after Joe Musgrove went down, and it nuked their season.)
Anyway, an unstoppable force (the Mets’ vibes) will now meet an immovable object (the Dodgers’ bullpen). The winner will go to the World Series.
Here are the three keys to Game 1 I’ll be looking at tonight:
Can Jack Flaherty give the Dodgers five to six innings?
Nine Dodger pitchers have combined to throw 24 consecutive scoreless innings.
This is the longest postseason streak since the 2000 Mets tossed 26 innings of shutout ball.
It’s an incredible achievement, and there’s no denying the Dodgers’ bullpen is on a heater. However, relying on your relievers is much easier when trying to win a five game series versus a seven game tilt. The Dodgers only have three proper starting pitchers right now, and one of those guys (Yoshinobu Yamamoto) will pitch just once this series because he just won Game 5 of the NLDS and his arm requires five days’ rest. This means that if the NLCS goes seven games, the Dodgers will have to throw at least two bullpen games.
The Dodgers don’t *need* Flaherty to go five or six innings tonight to win Game 1. But, they might need to him take down as many outs as possible tonight to win Games 2 and 3.
How much does Flaherty going deep tonight matter? Well, manager Dave Roberts hinted before earlier today that if Flaherty can give the relief corps a little bit of a break tonight by throwing six-or-more innings, the Dodgers might throw a bullpen game tomorrow. But if Flaherty gets knocked out early, the Dodgers are likely to start Walker Buehler in Game 2.
A bullpen Game 2 would help the Dodgers for a few reasons. The first is that it would give Buehler two more days extra rest before going in Game 3 on Tuesday. The second is that if the Dodgers try to throw a bullpen game for Game 3, they’ll be using Blake Treinen, Michael Kopech, Evan Phillips, Daniel Hudson, Ryan Brasier, etc. on the first day of a three game stretch with no off-days. That’s pretty brutal, as I can’t think of one reliever from any team in recent memory who pitched a clean inning three days in a row. Even the finest arms are just not built to do that.
Win or lose tonight, Flaherty getting 18 outs would be enormous as long as he keeps them in the game.
Can the Dodgers stop Francisco Lindor from crushing them?
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