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MILWAUKEE – One by one, their advantages are vanishing.
Their edge in starting pitching?
Marginalized by the Brewers’ lineup.
Their superior offensive firepower?
Held without a home run in the first two games of this National League Championship Series.
Shohei Ohtani?
Reduced to being blown away by mid-90s fastballs.
The Dodgers are behind by two games in this race to four wins, and in the wake of their 7-4 defeat in Game 2 at American Family Field, they have to be praying for the Brewers to run out of gas before they reach the finish line.
“It’s certainly a challenge,” manager Dave Roberts said.
Before the Dodgers can win this series, they will have to get back into it first. They will play at home over the next three games. They have Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow lined up to pitch in Games 3 and 4, respectively.
“Still a pretty good scenario we’re in,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said.
Sending Snell and Glasnow to the mound won’t mean anything, however, if the Dodgers don’t start hitting. An error or wild pitch by the Brewers played a role in every run scored by the Dodgers, who collected only three hits, all of them coming against starter Logan Henderson. The four relievers deployed by Brewers manager Pat Murphy combined to pitch five no-hit innings.
The Dodgers will have to jumpstart their offense with a version of Shohei Ohtani who remains physically diminished.
Ohtani was 0 for 4 in Game 2, failing to reach base in a game for the first time this postseason. Pitching as if they didn’t think that Ohtani couldn’t hurt them, the Brewers attacked the four-time Most Valuable Player, leading to a couple of strikeouts in which he looked completely overmatched.
Henderson struck him out with three fastballs in the first inning. Left-hander Jojo Romero tricked him into waving at a sweeper that ended up in the batter’s box on the other side of home plate in the fifth.
Ohtani is batting .150 in the playoffs without a single run batted in. He’s struck out seven times in 20 at-bats. His last home run was on Aug. 18.
“It’s hard to see,” Betts said. “We know he’s working and hopefully he gets out of it. We need him. We need him for sure.”
Ohtani alone couldn’t take down the Brewers, regardless how well he was playing. In addition to a relentless bullpen, they have an unspectacular but industrious offense. They have the kind of edge that makes it obvious they believe they can take down the two-time defending World Series champions.
Game 2 was a prime example of that. If there was a game the Brewers were expected to drop, it was this one. Yoshinobu Yamamoto was pitching for the Dodgers.
The Brewers didn’t just beat Yamamoto. They wore him down, pushed him out of the game after only 2 ⅔ innings and forced Roberts to empty his bullpen. Tarik Skubal lasted only five innings against them in Game 1.
The result was an unmitigated disaster for the Dodgers, who have made it an annual tradition to have the Japanese right-hander bail them out of trouble at this time of the year.
The Dodgers were intimately familiar with the script from which the Brewers read.
Run up the pitch count of the starter.
Force him out of the game early.
Get into the other team’s bullpen.
Only this time, the Dodgers weren’t the team executing the game plan. They were the team against which the plan was being executed, and Yamamoto was the target of the attack.
Once the game morphed into a battle of the bullpens, the game was decided. The Brewers were able to play to their greatest strength. The Dodgers had to expose their greatest weakness.
To win the World Series last year, the Dodgers had to overcome a three-games-to-two deficit against the Toronto Blue Jays. Their title run the previous year started with them reversing a two-games-to-one deficit against the San Diego Padres.
The Dodgers have overcome deficits before.
But the Brewers are presenting them with the sort of problems they might not even be able to solve.
