NEW YORK – One of the elements that makes post-season baseball so complicated is the way a sport that requires large samples for proper evaluation gets distilled down into small chunks where randomness can, and does, create chaos. Take these weird Shohei Ohtani splits debated ad nauseum heading into Game 3 of the National League Championship Series in which the superstar was 0-for-19 with the bases empty, but 6-for-8 with men on base through his first seven playoff games, prompting conversation around whether he should be shifted from leadoff to a production spot in the order.
Doing so would be a drastic move and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts wasn’t having any of it.
“To think that I’m going to move Shohei to the four or the three, that’s just not going to happen,” he said bluntly.
Understandably so, as the obvious goal should be to have Ohtani take more, not less at-bats, but there’s also an element of meaningful-sample thinking there, too. Over an extended period, such oddities are mere statistical blips that teams and players know will eventually normalize, but the post-season demands more urgency. “There are not very many tomorrows — they run out pretty quick,” Mookie Betts, Ohtani’s slumping teammate, noted astutely in explaining why he’s taking hours of batting practice every day.
“That’s the point of the 500 swings … I’m trying to figure out which one it is and hopefully something sticks,” Betts continued. “You’re not going to find it not hitting. I’ve got to look for it somehow in those couple hundred. It will be in there.”
To survive such playoff randomness and the searches for a path out of it then, production needs to come from multiple sources, the way it did for the Dodgers early in an 8-0 Game 3 thumping of the New York Mets on Wednesday. Struggling Will Smith delivered an RBI single and Tommy Edman a sacrifice fly during a two-run second built around a walk, 36-feet of groundball by three batters and a Tommy Edman sacrifice fly, while No. 9 hitter Kiké Hernández added a two-run shot in the sixth, his second homer of the post-season.
L.A. pitchers held that lead until Ohtani, incredibly staying true to his bizarre splits, broke things open in the eighth with a three-run shot after he’d gone 0-for-3 with a walk, each of those plate appearances coming with the bases empty. Max Muncy added a solo shot in the ninth to cap the scoring.
Walker Buehler, still seeking consistency in his first season back from reconstructive elbow surgery, used six strikeouts to navigate early traffic over four shutout innings before the Dodgers bullpen finished the job in securing a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven series.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto starts Game 4 against Jose Quintana, who will try to pull the Mets back level Thursday.
That the Dodgers are in this spot amid the extended dry spells for both Ohtani and Betts speaks to the constant pressure created by their lineup.
“When everybody is contributing a little bit, it’s hard for the other manager to think about any strategy,” said Teoscar Hernandez, who reached on a fielder’s choice and scored in that pivotal second. “And it just makes us our jobs not easier, but it’s good when you have nine hitters doing a little bit when we need it.”
Roberts did make a notable change to the order Wednesday, pushing Max Muncy up to four which slid Teoscar Hernandez to five, a decision made to better pressure Luis Severino.
That paid off in the second when Muncy opened the inning with a walk before Teoscar Hernandez followed with a two-foot grounder that Francisco Alvarez fielded but relayed poorly to second, putting two aboard. Gavin Lux followed with a 21-foot comebacker to Severino that could have been a double-play ball had it been fielded cleanly, but instead turned into an out at first that advanced both runners. Then came a 13-foot grounder by Smith that went off Severino’s glove, scoring Muncy.
The only solid contact the Dodgers made in the inning, Edman’s 378-foot drive to right-centre, required a diving Tyrone Taylor catch and hold after his glove hand slammed into Starling Marte’s leg, bringing home Teoscar Hernandez for a 2-0 edge.
“When you’re giving a team like this extra outs, extra bases,” said Mets manager Carlos Mendoza, “they’re going to make you pay.”
That was all the damage against Severino, who came out with two on and two out in the fifth, and Edman then got things started again in the sixth with a leadoff single off Reed Garrett, which was followed by Kiké Hernández’s drive to left-centre.
The Mets’ best chance to score came in the bottom half of the second when they loaded the bases with one out, but Buehler caught Alvarez looking before he got Francisco Lindor to swing atop a gorgeous 78 m.p.h. curve, ending the threat.
A Citi Field crowd of 43,883 also got riled up in the third when Pete Alonso yanked a sweeper to deep left, but with the wind blowing in it died on track, nestling into Teoscar Hernandez’s glove.
Betts went 1-for-4 with a walk while Ohtani’s night before the homer included an especially miserable at-bat in the sixth, when he fouled Garrett’s first pitch off his right toe before driving the second into the ground and back up into his delicates. Unsurprisingly, he meekly waved over a cutter on the next pitch.
Ohtani, doing a rare media availability during Tuesday’s workouts, said he feels “OK at the plate” right now but added that he “should recall back to the times when I feel good and perhaps incorporate that into it.”
“If I’m feeling good and the results aren’t there, then I’m not too concerned because there’s luck involved,” Ohtani, speaking through interpreter Will Ireton, added. “Now, if there’s a situation where I don’t feel good at the plate and I’m not doing well, or it’s not leading to good results, then it’s something that I look into to make sure physically, mechanically, making sure that that’s all fine-tuned.”
In contextualizing his cold-spell when asked if he, like other superstars that have struggled in the playoffs such as Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Aaron Judge, put too much pressure on themselves, Ohtani shrugged that off, noting this is his first time in the post-season.
“What I do know is that we’ve been playing against good teams, better teams, with their best pitchers,” he said. “So being able to get base hits, put up results isn’t as easy maybe as it could be.”
After he homered in the eighth, a towering drive at 115.9 m.p.h off the bat that sailed 397 feet over the right-field foul pole and survived a replay review, Ohtani pointed to the Dodgers dugout, as if to say that had been coming.
“It doesn’t matter if he would not hit that homer or if he hits two, three homers, you’re going to get the same emotion from him,” said Teoscar Hernandez. “But it’s a breather for him. And for the team.”
If Ohtani and Betts get going the way they can, combined with contributions from the rest of the lineup, the Dodgers will keep earning themselves more tomorrows, a resource becoming increasingly scarce for the Mets.