LOS ANGELES — The killer feature of a pitcher like Sean Manaea, circa October 2024, is the capacity to deceive. As has been documented at length, Manaea changed his arm angle midseason, dropping down from 28 degrees in April to 15 degrees by September. That move paid immediate dividends; Manaea dominated for the New York Mets down the stretch and excelled in the postseason. Because Manaea now throws from an arm angle so low to the ground, his high fastballs come in at an extremely flat vertical approach angle. A flat VAA distorts the hitter’s perception, creating the illusion of “rise.”
Squaring up a high fastball thrown from that angle with a flat swing requires incredible precision. If the bat is a few millimeters high, the hitter will drive the ball into the ground; a few millimeters low, and you’ve got a harmless popup.
No matter for Tommy Edman. In the third inning of Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, Manaea whipped a four-seamer with a -3.78 degree VAA to the tippy top of the zone; Edman ripped it into the left field bleachers for a two-run home run, effectively knocking Manaea out of the game. Edman racked up four RBI on Sunday, powering the Los Angeles Dodgers to a 10-5 victory and sending them to face the New York Yankees in the World Series.
The “familiarity effect” is well-known and has loomed over significant moments in this postseason, most recently in Hunter Gaddis‘ third encounter with Juan Soto. For a pitcher like Manaea who relies on a deceptive look, the familiarity effect must be even more devastating. It stands to reason that multiple encounters with the same pitcher over the course of a week will disproportionately impact one who owes much of their success to an unusual look.
“It’s just a different look, that the more familiar you get with it, the better you have a chance,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts prior to Game 6.
Roberts, not for the first time in this series, anticipated the events to come. Manaea was in trouble from the get-go; the tall lefty allowed six hits, two walks, and five runs across two innings, putting the Mets in a hole they couldn’t climb out of.
Meanwhile, the Dodgers bullpen, deployed in lieu of a starter to take care of all nine innings, did just enough. The Mets constantly threatened, putting 16 runners on base. But their big breakthrough never came, and resident sweeper wizard Blake Treinen shut the door, recording the last six outs to send the Dodgers to the Fall Classic.
From the start, Game 6 mirrored Game 2, when the Mets started Manaea and the Dodgers countered with a bullpen game. The Dodgers did not enjoy their initial encounter with Manaea; before running out of steam in the sixth, he held them scoreless for five dominant innings, striking out seven. Notably, he dominated Shohei Ohtani, flustering the titanic left-hander with a steady diet of sinkers in on his hands. Ohtani’s swing looked uncertain, tentative, like he couldn’t get a good look at where the ball might be coming from. Meanwhile, the Dodgers’ bullpen effort blew up almost immediately; Roberts opted to go to Landon Knack in the second inning, and Knack proceeded to give up five runs and effectively put the game out of reach.
No such experimental managing was on deck for Game 6. Roberts kept things simple, opting to start things off with flamethrower Michael Kopech, acquired in a deadline deal with the White Sox. Kopech was available for a relatively cheap price because of his command issues. While these improved in Los Angeles, they returned with a vengeance in the top of the first. Kopech walked Francisco Lindor on four pitches, none particularly close to the zone. With Brandon Nimmo in an 0-1 count, Kopech sailed a fastball to the backstop, allowing Lindor to advance to second. After Nimmo pushed Lindor to third on a groundball to second base, Kopech nearly clocked Mark Vientos in the head with another wild miss on the heater. The crowd was eerily quiet, visibly nervous.
Kopech buckled down, jamming Vientos on a 3-1 fastball for a foul ball and then striking him out with a gutsy 3-2 slider, his first breaking ball of the game. He got to 0-2 on Pete Alonso and ultimately won the at-bat, but the BABIP gods were cruel: Alonso got super jammed on a 100-mph fastball in on his hands, producing a bizarre, floating infield blooper that the official scorer determined was a single; it had a 40.8-mph exit velocity and a 43 degree launch angle. It landed just in front of the shortstop Edman, who tried to barehand it and sling it across the diamond. The throw had Alonso beat, but first baseman Max Muncy couldn’t quite corral it, and Lindor walked home for the first run, giving the Mets an early edge.
The Dodgers struck back right away. In the highly anticipated Manaea-Ohtani rematch in Game 6, Ohtani came out on top. Whether it was due to some reps on the Trajekt machine or simply familiarity from their last confrontation, Ohtani looked much more comfortable this time around. He ripped two foul balls on monstrous swings; in a two-strike hole, he flexed his hit tool, waiting on a sinker and rolling it through the hole between the middle infielders. Two batters later, Teoscar Hernández crushed a middle-middle sinker to center field. Evidently, Hernández thought the ball was gone — he did a slow trot off the bat, but it bounced off the fence 404 feet away. Hernández settled for a single; Ohtani moved from first to third.
The baserunning mistake was soon forgotten. On a 1-2 count, Edman reached out and hooked a sweeper down the left field line. Nimmo, not moving well in left field due to plantar fasciitis, struggled to dig it out of the corner. Hernández, surely motivated to rectify his oopsie, hoofed it around the bases, giving the Dodgers a 2-1 lead. The moribund Dodgers crowd, tasting a World Series, was as loud as it had been in this championship series.
After Enrique Hernández worked an eight-pitch walk, pitching coach Jeremy Hefner came out for a quick chat. At 28 pitches and with only two outs recorded, Manaea did not appear long for the game. Phil Maton started throwing in the Mets bullpen, ready to take over in a do-or-die game. But Alonso bailed Manaea and the Mets out, acrobatically snagging a foul pop with a nifty over-the-shoulder grab.
One inning was it for Kopech. Ben Casparius, the young reliever summoned from Oklahoma City in the waning days of September, was brought in to hold the lead in the second. It was a tense start — Tyrone Taylor worked a full count and pulled a fly ball on the eighth pitch, but it settled harmlessly in Teoscar Hernández’s glove. Casparius retired McNeil, but then walked Francisco Alvarez, bringing Lindor to the plate.
Here was the first clench moment for Roberts: The young and untested Casparius against the superstar in a high-leverage spot. Lindor casually lined a 1-0 fastball to right field, bringing up Nimmo with two on and two out. Casparius landed a first-pitch curveball: strike one. Another curveball floated arm side: ball one. On 1-1, Casparius challenged the left-hander, throwing his fastball through the heart of the zone. The challenge was a success: Nimmo skied a popup, and the crowd audibly exhaled, cheering even before the ball plopped into Edman’s glove.
After escaping the jam in the first, Mets manager Carlos Mendoza appeared to momentarily regain his faith in Manaea. Maton sat down, and Manaea navigated around a Chris Taylor single to throw up a zero in the second.
Casparius, somewhat surprisingly, stayed on the mound to take on Vientos and Alonso in the top of the third. He got Vientos to roll over to short on an 0-1 curveball. He also kept Alonso on the ground, but Alonso’s groundball had eyes, finding a hole between Edman and Enrique Hernández and putting the lumbering first baseman on first base with another flukey single. That was the end of Casparius’s outing; Anthony Banda came on to deal with the lefty Jesse Winker.
It was a rude introduction. Banda, with the platoon advantage, missed badly with his first two sliders, getting in a 2-0 hole while allowing the patient Winker to eliminate the slider from his mental checklist of potential pitches. Three pitches later, Winker walked, setting up a showdown with Starling Marte with runners on first and second with one out.
Banda’s slider command came and went. He threw a beauty for a first-pitch swing-and-miss to Marte; Marte popped up an 0-2 slider to bring the Mets to two outs. But he plunked Tyrone Taylor on a 2-2 count with a literal back-foot breaker, loading the bases for McNeil.
McNeil swung through the first pitch, a high four-seam fastball at the top of the zone. Banda went back up there again on 0-1 and McNeil could only foul it off. On 0-2, McNeil flailed at a slider off the outside corner, ending the threat.
Teoscar Hernández welcomed Manaea back to the mound in the bottom of the third with an opposite-field frozen rope single, bringing up Edman, who has (perhaps surprisingly) slugged over .500 against lefties in his career. Edman met Manaea’s flat fastball with an even flatter swing; the ball backspun all the way into the left-center field bleachers, giving the Dodgers a 4-1 lead. A subsequent walk of Muncy was all Mendoza could take; perhaps two innings too late, the manager yanked his lefty, bringing in Maton for some cleanup work.
No such cleanup was in store. After his first pitch swept away from the catcher Alvarez and rolled to the backstop, Maton recorded two quick outs. But he couldn’t quite pull off the escape: Will Smith punished a poorly located 89 mph sinker, blasting it into center field and lending the Dodgers a comfortable 6-1 lead alongside a 93.1% win probability.
Banda held it down against the Mets’ heavy hitters in the fourth, allowing a leadoff single to Alvarez before retiring Lindor and striking out Nimmo. Roberts offered an affectionate hug; Banda strutted off and gave way to Ryan Brasier, who had the platoon advantage against Vientos. That didn’t matter; Vientos continued his scorching postseason, drilling a Brasier fastball over the center field wall just out of the reach of Andy Pages, driving home Alvarez and bringing the Mets within three.
Mendoza, reacting to the stakes, uncorked an unorthodox move, bringing in Edwin Díaz to take on the Dodgers’ big bats to start off the fourth inning. The move paid off: Díaz worked around a Betts walk and steal to retire Ohtani, Teoscar Hernández, and Edman. After Brasier put up a zero in the fifth, Díaz logged another scoreless inning to keep the game within striking distance.
It wasn’t the smoothest of paths to the destination, but as Alvarez stepped into the box to start the top of the sixth inning, with the game in the hands of Evan Phillips and a three-run lead, Roberts must have been happy with the state of affairs. But things didn’t work out as exactly as planned. Phillips sandwiched two outs between an Alvarez single and a Vientos walk, bringing the powerful Alonso to the plate as the tying run. Phillips walked him on four pitches, refusing to challenge him with anything in the zone. The crowd grew restless, anxious. Mark Prior strolled to the mound.
Up came Winker. Phillips started him off with a ball before finally finding the zone with a fastball painted on the corner. Emboldened, Phillips challenged Winker with another heater, this time a foul ball back behind the backstop. Now on the front foot, he backdoored a sweeper; Winker was late, lifting a weak fly ball to Teoscar Hernández in left field to dodge yet another jam.
The Dodgers threatened to put the game away for good against Ryne Stanek in the bottom of the sixth. After a leadoff walk to Smith, Chris Taylor squared to bunt. Perhaps on tilt due to the shifting fortunes of his team, Alonso fielded and spun toward second to nab the lead runner. From my vantage, the play was never there; Smith slid in safely, putting runners on first and second with no outs and the mighty Ohtani coming to bat.
Nothing mighty happened, but something productive did: Ohtani hit a single into center, bringing Smith home to extend the Dodgers lead to four. Stanek was replaced by Reed Garrett.
The Mets made a couple great defensive plays to keep the game close. First, Vientos smothered a Betts liner, slinging it to second base to record the first out. Lindor backed that up with a sweet catch of a Teoscar Hernández liner up the middle. After Edman tapped weakly to McNeil at second, the lead was locked at four. Nine outs remained.
Prior to the game, Roberts intimated that Phillips and Treinen might take this all the way home. Asked how willing he was to push some of his pitchers for multiple innings, Roberts replied, “That’s something that we’re all going to have to wait and see how the game plays out, and that will dictate that. But that’s something that certainly has to be in my mind as well, for sure.”
But the rocky middle interrupted those plans. Daniel Hudson entered to take on the bottom of the lineup in the seventh, and once again the Dodgers bullpen ran into trouble. Two runners reached; Alvarez lifted a sac fly to the warning track to make the score 7-4. Suddenly, Lindor was at the plate in a three-run game, with the Mets threatening to tighten things up. But Hudson got Lindor to whiff on a nasty slider, and any major damage was averted.
Kodai Senga, last seen exiting early in Game 1, emerged to pitch the bottom of the seventh. He coasted through, taking care of the bottom of the order.
For the final six outs, Roberts turned to Treinen; he struck out Nimmo, Vientos, and Alonso in the eighth.
The Dodgers tacked on some insurance runs for good measure in the bottom of the eighth. Chris Taylor got things started with a leadoff single; Ohtani walked, and Betts drove a Senga cutter to the base of the left field wall to drive in Taylor. Teoscar Hernández drove home Ohtani on a sacrifice fly to right field. As Tommy Edman came to the plate, the crowd chanted “MVP”; he reached on a fielder’s choice. Enrique Hernández tacked on the last run with a single to right field, extending the Dodgers’ lead to six.
Treinen stayed on for the final three outs. He struck out Winker and induced a comebacker from Marte. Two outs. The fans pulled out their phones, pressed record on the camera app. Tyrone Taylor looped a single to center. The crowd moaned. The phones stayed out. McNeil came to the plate; Treinen poured in strike one. McNeil pulled a liner into right. Taylor scurried home. There was a mound conference; Treinen stayed in the game. Alvarez came up, and tapped the first pitch to second base. The stadium shook, literally shook. Fireworks blasted and the lights went out. A dozen dudes pushed a podium onto the dirt of the infield.
The Dodgers are going to the World Series.
