LOS ANGELES — Before the descent into chaos and trash littered the field, before Jurickson Profar deked Dodger Stadium into a frenzy and before the invective spewed over the course of nine innings, the Dodgers entered October with this reality.
If they were going to go anywhere, they would have to slug their way through it. Twice in two nights, they’ve been handed three-run deficits and an opportunity to prove that truism.
Then came a 10-2 battering in Game 2 that was as ugly as the scoreboard. Flashbacks of last October were delayed by a day before crashing back Sunday night.
“We were s—,” Max Muncy put bluntly.
The beatdown came with an extra sting. Freddie Freeman’s ankle became too much, forcing him out of action in the sixth inning. His status remains uncertain, manager Dave Roberts said Sunday night.
What’s more: A lineup stirred to life in Game 1 went dormant a night later, floundering in early opportunities against San Diego Padres starter Yu Darvish before allowing the right-hander to complete seven innings of one-run ball. San Diego’s stars have performed: Fernando Tatis Jr. has homered twice, improving to 9-for-14 to start his postseason, and standout rookie Jackson Merrill and $280 million shortstop Xander Bogaerts connected on back-to-back home runs for good measure.
The Dodgers drop Game 2, 10-2. The NLDS is tied, 1-1.
The Padres outslugged, outpitched and out-defensed the Dodgers. Freddie Freeman exited with ankle discomfort. The Dodgers will need to win at least one at Petco Park to play another game here this year.
— Fabian Ardaya (@FabianArdaya) October 7, 2024
They head to Petco Park with an opportunity squandered. Rather than seize their home-field advantage, they’ll travel down Interstate 5 with a measly split. Getting back to Dodger Stadium — be it in the NLCS or a potential Game 5 — will require extracting more out of a lineup that produced the second-most runs in baseball this season.
Doing so, potentially without Freeman, brings a different challenge.
It will require superhuman feats from Shohei Ohtani, who swung Game 1 with one ferocious swing. It will require more out of Mookie Betts, who is now hitless through his past 22 at-bats. It will require an encore ensemble performance of what the Dodgers got in the series opener, where the club flexed the length of its lineup and twice rallied for explosive innings.
It’ll also require something the Dodgers have hardly afforded themselves each of these last three postseason appearances: a chance to build momentum by scoring first.
“It certainly puts a little bit on the offense,” Roberts said. “They played better, but we’ve got to catch a lead too.”
So dire is the Dodgers’ recent run of starting pitching performances that Jack Flaherty’s night could count as progress. He left a fastball to the second batter he faced that Fernando Tatis Jr. pummeled for a home run.
“I missed in the first inning and I threw the ball over the middle,” Flaherty said.
An inning later David Peralta — whose painful right elbow prevented him from slugging a homer after July a year ago for the Dodgers — struck against his former club for a two-run homer, clubbing a slider over the plate over the center-field fence for a 3-0 lead.
Flaherty settled in, but the damage was largely done. The prized deadline acquisition allowed four runs in 5 1/3 innings, which qualified as the longest postseason start for a Dodger in three years. A bullpen that combined for a yeoman’s effort in Game 1 could not duct tape together another tight ballgame, allowing four more home runs as the beatdown commenced.
The Dodgers’ pitching was always going to be an issue. They conceded that much in the run-up to this postseason. The next, more glaring issue: Will this Dodgers club slug enough to dig out of it?
The Dodgers appeared primed to do so in the first inning when Betts connected on a hanging breaking ball from Darvish, lofting a ball toward the seats for what looked to be a home run. Then Profar drifted over, reached his glove out and caught the ball — which he revealed only after a pause long enough to convince the Dodger Stadium sound system and Betts that it was a home run, trolling the fans seated nearby in the process.
It continued a miserable stretch of postseason baseball for Betts, who went 0-for-10 last October and has not recorded a postseason hit since leading off Game 3 of the 2022 NLDS with a single. The former MVP reached three times — twice on intentional walks — in Game 1 but has yet to make his presence known.
“They’re all outs,” Betts said of his at-bats. “So they’re all terrible. I don’t know really what to say about it. I’m giving my best, doing my best. Obviously it’s not good enough right now.”
The Dodgers mustered another prime chance an inning later, loading the bases with no outs against Darvish with an opportunity to chew off at least a chunk of their three-run deficit. Gavin Lux hit a sacrifice fly. Tommy Edman lined a ball right to Padres first baseman Luis Arraez for an inning-ending double play.
Roberts called the sequence “deflating.”
The at-bats that followed showed it. The Dodgers had just two runners in scoring position the rest of the night. They didn’t record their first extra-base hit until Muncy’s solo home run with two outs in the ninth inning cut the deficit to eight.
“We have to continue to stay on the attack,” Miguel Rojas said. “There are going to be days that are going to be harder than others. Unfortunately tonight we didn’t get the hits when we needed them. But we were really close right there.”
“That’s not us as a group,” Muncy said. “We’ve been good all year. We’ve come back from games before.”
Losing Freeman didn’t help. Roberts said the first baseman “just couldn’t keep going” after playing the early innings with discomfort. His severely sprained ankle remains a long-term issue that the Dodgers will treat as day to day. It took plenty just to get Freeman in the lineup for Game 1, when he collected a pair of hits and even stole a base.
If Freeman can’t go, the Dodgers will likely move Muncy to first base, with Kiké Hernández playing third. A lineup built around three former MVPs loses some of its luster when one of them isn’t available.
“It’s not ideal,” Roberts said.
Nor is the performance his club provided in a game marred by a seventh inning that saw a 10-minute delay after a baseball appeared to be thrown in Profar’s direction and trash thrown at Tatis. The scene was jarring even in a rivalry between division rivals squaring off in their third postseason series in five years.
If the Dodgers are to get out of this, it’ll be with their bats. Not barbs.
“We just got to be better at hitting and defense and pitching,” Rojas said. “It’s baseball. It’s not boxing.”
(Photo of Max Muncy: Orlando Ramirez / Getty Images)
