Do you have a favorite flavor of baseball? Maybe you enjoy a crisp, clean pitching duel, or maybe you prefer the luxurious mouthfeel of a decadent slugfest. But if what your tastebuds really crave is yelling – the sharp, mouth-puckering tartness of unbridled emotion and constant, heartfelt screaming audible through the on-field microphones – then Game 3 of the National League Divisional Series between the Dodgers and Padres was the contest for you. The San Diego fans screamed pretty much all game long and the players screamed whenever anything big happened, which is to say often.
With the series tied at one coming into the game, drama was the watchword of the day. The Padres had roasted the Dodgers, 10-2, in Game 2 on Sunday. The fans threw things at the San Diego players. Manny Machado threw a ball into the Los Angeles dugout. Dave Roberts asked the league office to investigate the throw, which, he said, was directed at him with “something behind it.” When Zapruder-esque video of the toss surfaced online, that something was revealed to be petulant but ultimately harmless. Tensions were high enough that before the game, the Padres released a statement reminding their fans that throwing things at the Dodgers is frowned upon. So rather than throw, the fans just screamed. For hours.
The game featured plenty of action, all of it stuffed into the span of one inning. The teams combined for 10 runs in the bottom of the second and the top of the third, and then, when it looked like the onslaught might never stop, the bats went cold and the game turned into a one-run nailbiter headlined by unhittable bullpens. If you had Walker Buehler surrendering six runs on your bingo card, congratulations on having a bingo card full of extremely probable outcomes. If you had him getting through five innings, then you lucked out. But if you somehow had both of those outcomes, you should probably upgrade from bingo to the Mega Millions, because fortune is smiling upon you. Meanwhile, the Padres started Michael King, who ran a 2.95 ERA this season and threw seven scoreless innings in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series. What looked for all the world like the world’s most lopsided pitching matchup ended up as very nearly a draw.
In the end, the Padres pulled out a 6-5 victory, and they now have a chance to end the Dodgers’ season on Wednesday night. If they do, it will mark the third straight time that the Dodgers have won the division but failed to make it to the League Championship Series.
King started the game by striking out Ohtani swinging on a backfoot sweeper. Mookie Betts refused to follow suit, laying off a 2-2 sweeper outside. King tried another sweeper on the payoff pitch, but this one caught entirely too much of the plate, and Betts launched it into the left field corner, to the exact same spot as the home run that Jurickson Profar robbed on Sunday in Los Angeles. This time, when Profar reached into the stands, the ball just ticked off the top of his glove, but this time, the entire stadium was prepared for trickery. Profar was the boy who cried wolf. King stared blankly at him, refusing to react to the play until he was certain of what had actually happened.
Betts, who came into the game 0-for-6 in the series and hitless in his last 22 postseason at-bats, assumed the worst and started jogging back to the visitor’s dugout after rounding first. When he was informed that the ball had in fact made it into the stands, he awkwardly steered himself back into the base path and kept trotting around the bases. It would not be the most memorable deviation from the base paths in the game. King walked a batter before retiring the side, and the Dodgers had a 1-0 lead after half an inning of baseball.
Buehler worked a breezy bottom of the first, requiring just nine pitches to set the Padres down in order, and King worked his own three-up, three-down inning in the top of the second. Then all hell broke loose.
The crowd roared when Machado came to the plate to lead off the bottom half of the second inning. In fact, they roared so loudly that Buehler couldn’t hear the PitchCom and started the inning with a pitch clock violation and a 1-0 count. Machado sent a 2-1 cutter back up the middle for a single, and then Buehler did his job perfectly, inducing a double play ball: Jackson Merrill hit a sharp grounder to first and Freddie Freeman made a great backhand play to stop it, then unleashed a quick throw to second from his knees. Unfortunately for Freeman, Machado had taken a sharp left turn between first and second base, veering onto the infield grass from a starting point of several feet onto the infield dirt. Exactly as he planned, the throw clipped him and ended up in left field. The replay showed an egregious case of interference, but no one seemed to clock it in the moment. It wasn’t just that Machado ended up in the grass, it was that he deliberately deviated from his path for the express purpose of obstructing the throw, but even Roberts decided not to complain. Presumably, the fan holding the MANNY INNOCENT sign waved it even harder.
Yeah, Manny guilty. Machado advanced to third on the play, and the Padres had runners on the corners with no outs and Xander Bogaerts at the plate. The crowd roared louder, and in what would become a running theme, Buehler pressed his glove to his ear in a vain attempt to hear his PitchCom. Again, he did his job. Bogaerts hit a soft grounder to the left of second base, and shortstop Miguel Rojas decided to turn the double play himself rather than toss the ball to second baseman Gavin Lux. It was the wrong call. Merrill beat him to the bag by inches, and Bogaerts beat the throw to first, also by inches. Machado scored on the play, tying the ballgame at 1-1, and the Padres still had two on and no out. Two straight double play balls resulted in two fielder’s choices and zero outs. DH David Peralta ripped a grounder down the first base line just past a diving Freeman for a double, scoring Merill and Bogaerts to make it 3-1.
Once again, Buehler induced a groundball. Jake Cronenworth hit the ball to short, but Rojas was shaded all the way up the middle. Despite an impressive sliding pickup, he had no chance at an out. The Padres again had runners on the corners with no outs. It was the third time in four batters that the Dodgers had fielded a groundball cleanly but still had been unable to register an out. Kyle Higashioka made the first out of the inning, a sacrifice fly to deep center that scored Peralta, to make it 4-1 Padres. That turned over the lineup, and when Luis Arraez popped out to short, it looked like Buehler just might be able to make it out of the inning without suffering a knockout blow. Or at least, it looked that way if you’d forgotten about who was up next. Fernando Tatis Jr. came into the game with a 453 wRC+ in the postseason, and he did his best to keep that number outrageously high. Ahead 0-2, Buehler challenged Tatis with a fastball in the zone, and Tatis challenged the stitching on the baseball, launching a home run, his fourth in five postseason games, into left center to make the lead 6-1.
The back of Buehler’s jersey was completely soaked in sweat. He got Profar to hit a chopper down the third base line, but Max Muncy, playing off the line, had no shot at throwing it to first in time, making it the fourth cleanly fielded groudball of the inning that didn’t result in an out. Buehler finally made it out of the inning, and in the dugout, he centered himself the old-fashioned way: by dashing his hat against the wall and then picking up a large chest and slamming it onto the concrete steps.
The luck evened out in the top of the third. Rojas led off with a weak infield single, and Shohei Ohtani broke his bat on a soft line drive that just cleared the infield. Two soft-contact singles. Betts mixed things up by slicing a hard-hit line drive single into center. After Freeman lined out to left, Teoscar Hernández made it a game again. King left a sweeper over the middle of the plate, and Hernández hit a high, suspenseful fly ball to straightaway center. Merrill tracked the moonshot back to the warning track and then to the wall, but it landed just beyond his reach to make it a 6-5 game. Back in the dugout, Hernández unleashed a primal scream as he celebrated with his teammates.
King quickly settled down again, getting out of the inning and working a clean fourth and fifth. He ended the night with five innings pitched, five hits, and five earned runs, all of them on homers. Improbably, Buehler calmed down as well. He worked a 1-2-3 third inning, then faced the minimum in the fourth, thanks to a double play. Desperate for length, Roberts allowed Buehler to face the murderous top of the San Diego lineup for a third time, and the right-hander rewarded his manager with two quick outs in the fifth. Buehler then fooled Machado with a slider, but the veteran reached out and yanked a soft, looping single into left field. Somehow, that was still not the end of Buehler’s night. Roberts came out to the mound, covered his mouth, and presumably said, “How nuts would it be if I just left you in right now? Completely nuts, right?” And then he just walked away.
It was a one-run game. The back of Buehler’s jersey looked like a used dish towel after a dinner party, and he threw a wild pitch to Merrill, which moved Machado up to second. The Dodgers intentionally walked Merrill, bringing Bogaerts to the plate with two on, and still Buehler remained in the game. Whatever Roberts was thinking, his hunch worked out, as Bogaerts broke his bat on a weak chopper to short to end the threat. Buehler’s final line of five innings pitched, seven hits, and six earned runs was uglier than King’s, but it was a gutsy performance, especially from a player who ran a 5.38 ERA and put up negative WAR this season. It might have turned out very differently had any one of the several bad bounces – most notably the one engineered by Machado – gone his way. The Betts homer that just bounced off Profar’s glove, Rojas’s decision to turn the double play himself, and a foot or two of defensive positioning were all that kept Buehler from being the game’s hero.
Neither bullpen allowed a run. Anthony Banda, Daniel Hudson, and Michael Kopech combined to throw three perfect innings for the Dodgers. Jeremiah Estrada, Jason Adam, Tanner Scott, and Robert Suarez struck out six Dodgers and allowed just one hit, a line drive single from the irrepressible Freeman, over four innings. For the third time in three games, Scott struck out Ohtani. It was as if both teams suddenly ran out of powder, and the Padres just happened to be ahead when the music stopped.
The Dodgers have dropped two straight and are looking to extend their season with a bullpen game on Wednesday. The only real bright side they can fall back on is that after entering the game on a 1-for-18 slump that stretched back to September 27, Mookie Betts looks like Mookie Betts again. The Padres, smelling blood in the water, will start Dylan Cease on short rest. With the chance not only to advance to the NLCS for the second time in three years, but also to send the hated Dodgers packing, the crowd will probably be even louder.
