Mortar, meet pestle. The New York Mets are feeling the full grinding power of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Hitters who refuse to chase. One reliever after another after another with double-encrypted security when it comes to protecting a lead.
The Dodgers are so good they are extracting drama out of the postseason. For the fourth time in five games, they gave their opponent nothing. They took NLCS Game 3 on Wednesday by another shutout, 8–0.
They are the eighth team to throw four shutouts in a postseason, but the first to win three of them by eight runs or more. They invented a new way to win: the blowout shutout.
“We are deep,” Dodgers infielder Max Muncy said. “The front office did a really great job giving us a great team.”
The Dodgers come at you in waves. They tied a record set by the 2018 Milwaukee Brewers with their third shutout of the postseason using five or more pitchers. Manager Dave Roberts has so many good options and deployed them so expertly (holding big leads helps) that Mets star Francisco Lindor has seen 10 pitchers in 13 plate appearances in this series—never seeing the same reliever twice.
The offense is no less relentless. It has grinded Mets pitching for 22 walks in three games. Muncy, with the eye of a jeweler, saw 23 pitches Wednesday and not once chased a pitch out of the zone.
That Max bat drop. 😮💨 pic.twitter.com/UgQhWnBpkK
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) October 17, 2024
Muncy had just about as perfect a night as a hitter can have. He became just the second player in postseason history to go five-for-five reaching base with at least three walks and a home run. The other was Babe Ruth in Game 7 of the 1926 World Series.
“We've got to not only get ahead, but we've got to continue to stay on the attack and execute pitches,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “If we get behind in counts, they're going to make us pay.”
This isn’t the way October is supposed to play out. October is for biting lips and biting nails. It is for hanging on by threads and by hope. It is for that feeling in your gut that is approximated elsewhere in life only as your roller-coaster car clanks to the crest of the first drop: a cocktail in your gut of thrill and fright. The Dodgers are ruining all the fun. They are October’s spoiler alert.
All you need to know about the Dodgers is what happens when they score first. They are 72–16 when they score first, the best record in baseball. That means they are an 88% lock when they play from ahead. No matter how early. Now matter how little. In Game 3 it was 2–0 in the second inning when Los Angeles declared the game theirs by eminent domain.
Next it falls to Jose Quintana, the Mets’ Game 4 pitcher Thursday, to keep the Dodgers from scoring first. Quintana throws 58.7% of his pitches out of the zone, more than any starting pitcher in MLB. Quintana makes a living getting hitters to chase, which makes the Dodgers his nightmare matchup. They do not chase.
“We have a bunch of guys,” Muncy said, “who are built for the moment.”
Over here was Enrique Hernández, who smoked a two-run homer in the fifth, who hits a home run every 29 at bats in the regular season but every 13 at bats in the postseason.
Over there was Shohei Ohtani, who is so good he is making MLB ballparks obsolete. He crushed a three-run homer in the eighth that was hit so high down the line that Mendoza asked the umpires to check the replay to see if it was foul. The call to the International Space Station, which would have been the only worthwhile vantage point, did not go through.
Shotime! pic.twitter.com/rchO0XctdN
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) October 17, 2024
“There was no way they could overturn it,” Muncy said. “That was like 100 feet over the foul pole.”
Ohtani is the outlier of outliers. The home run extended his ridiculous run of success with runners in scoring position to 17 hits in his last 20 at bats. No one has ever put together a streak like that.
The home run left his bat at 115.9 mph and with a launch angle of 37 degrees. There have been 5,515 home runs hit this year. This was the only one that was hit that hard and that high. Here is your entire list of the highest launched home runs hit at least 115 mph:
Oh, and let’s not forget over there is Walker Buehler, who after an injury-plagued blah season put on his superhero cape and in four innings racked up his most swings and misses for him in four years.
“He is a different animal in the postseason,” Muncy said.
If there is one pitch in an 8–0 game that can be circled as a turning point, it was the one Buehler threw to Lindor with two outs and the bases loaded in the second inning. The Dodgers held a 2–0 lead, which at that time seemed less secure. The Mets had the right guy at the plate and the Citi Field crowd going bonkers. Lindor had just looked at a high fastball to push the count to 3-and-2.
Buehler had thrown 74 full-count pitches all year. Only nine of them were knuckle curveballs. Only one out of the 74 was a knuckle curve for a strikeout. Catcher Will Smith called for the curve. Buehler did not shake him all night and would not here. Back in the day, before his second Tommy John surgery, there would be no doubt what was coming.
“Oh, in 2018, 2019, 2020, I would have thrown a fastball, yeah,” he said.
Roberts called him “a bully” with the way he could intimidate hitters with his fastball back then. The surgeries have robbed Buehler of that extra hop on his heater, at least for now, so the tight spot called for something else. Credit to Smith for reading the room.
Buehler nodded and reached deep into his bag of tricks and pulled out the knuckle curve. It was smack in the middle of the zone, but Lindor, dumbfounded, swung right through it. It was a big moment in the game and Buehler’s post-surgical journey.
BUETANE. pic.twitter.com/brX00gV4Ee
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) October 17, 2024
“Yeah, I think when you talk about the surgeries and the road and all of that stuff, I think being able to make a big pitch in a big spot is kind of the last thing you check off, but the one thing you want to check off more than anything,” he said. “And tonight that was a big deal for me.”
Buehler has pitched 148 games in his major league career. On Wednesday he threw a greater percentage of breaking balls—45.6%—than in all of them but one (55.6% in 2019 NLDS Game 5). Whatever it takes.
Much praise has been given to the Mets about how as the last team into the playoffs they have galvanized over comeback wins and an exhaustive road schedule. But in their own way, the mighty, star-sudden Dodgers are acquiring a similar patina of grinders. To get to New York, for instance, they took a players-only flight from Los Angeles. Roberts and the rest of the staff were left to fly with families, including crying little ones, on a separate charter. The players then went to a players-only dinner.
“They are making sacrifices when it comes to family time for an even stronger team mindset,” Roberts said. “If it means bonding together even more, I’m all for it.”
When Roberts kept his best relievers out of a Game 2 loss, he looked at the rest of the NLCS as a five-game series with a fully rested bullpen in which the Mets had not gotten a look at his high-leverage arms. The advantage Roberts envisioned suddenly grew even larger with how Game 3 played out. The late home run by Ohtani, for instance, meant he didn’t have to use Daniel Hudson or Evan Phillips.
Roberts has Yoshinobu Yamamoto (five shutout innings in his last start) and Jack Flaherty (coming off seven shutout innings) lined up for the next two games with a fully stocked bullpen behind them. Batter after batter, reliever after reliever, the Dodgers are all about the daily grind. By now New York knows what it must do to survive the Dodgers’ stone-upon-stone willfulness: don’t let them score first.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Dodgers Are Grinding Mets Into Submission in NLCS.
