SAN DIEGO — It’s October, time for chills and frights.
And the Dodgers are experiencing deja boo.
A third consecutive first-round exit could be one day away after the San Diego Padres scored six times in the second inning against Walker Buehler – aided and abetted by poor defense by the Dodgers – then held on to their advantage to beat the Dodgers, 6-5, in Game 3 of their National League Division Series on Tuesday night.
The Padres lead the best-of-five series, two games to one, and will have a chance to close out the Dodgers at Petco Park for the second time in the past three Octobers.
“What’s done is done now,” Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani said through his interpreter. “So at this point it’s really very simple. It’s to win two games.”
The Dodgers are 1-3 in their past four elimination games, having staved it off in Game 5 of the 2021 NL Championship Series before losing the next game. They will need back-to-back wins to advance out of this NLDS. They haven’t won back-to-back postseason games since Games 4 and 5 of the 2021 NLDS against the San Francisco Giants.
“We can’t look at the mountain. We have to just look at the task at hand and that’s one pitch at a time,” All-Star Mookie Betts said.
“It’s going to be obviously a lot more pressure. Each at-bat is going to matter exponentially more, and so figure out a way to get it done.”
Game 3 was fought on a razor’s edge. The Dodgers made it a one-run game in the third inning with a grand slam by Teoscar Hernandez. But the Padres used their store-bought (through trade deadline acquisitions) bullpen to hold the Dodgers to just one baserunner over the final six innings.
“I liked how we fought,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said. “We came back after that six-run inning. I know Dodger fans don’t want to hear about fighting and stuff, but take the positive and come out here tomorrow.”
The memory of Jurickson Profar’s home run robbery in Game 2 still fresh in his mind, Betts couldn’t believe his 0-for-22 postseason slump was over when he sent a fly ball into the left field seats in the first inning. Profar leaped and reached over the wall but this time the ball went off his glove and he came up empty.
Betts had peeled off near second base and was heading back to the dugout when third-base coach Dino Ebel and the umpires convinced Betts he really had hit a home run.
“The first game he kind of robbed it and acted like he didn’t catch it, so I kind of thought it was the same thing,” Betts said.
That sent Buehler to the mound with a 1-0 lead – making him the first Dodgers starting pitcher to take the mound with a lead at any point in a postseason game since Tyler Anderson in Game 4 of the 2022 NLDS against the Padres.
It didn’t last. The Dodgers’ defense collapsed around Buehler in the second inning.
After a Manny Machado single, Freeman went to his knees to stop Jackson Merrill’s hard ground ball to his right. But he tried to throw from his knees and hit Machado in the back of his shoulder.
Machado was running on the infield grass when he was hit, and the Dodgers wanted an interference call.
“I mean, both feet are on the grass. I don’t think that’s part of the baseline,” Buehler said. “But I’m not an umpire.”
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said there was nothing he could do because “it’s not a replay-able challenge play.”
“You can create your own base path if you’re not avoiding a tag,” Roberts said. “It was a heady play.”
Freeman thought interference could have been called but admitted “I would have done the same thing as a base runner, to banana it” – meaning run wide to get into the throwing lane of the first baseman.
“But usually you’re supposed to do it after one or two steps in the dirt and go,” Freeman said. “I’m really far in the grass, and he got really far in the grass. … That’s what we’re taught as base runners, to get into the line, and he did it there.”
Padres manager Mike Shildt echoed Roberts’ understanding of the baserunning rule – “the base runner can create his own baseline until there’s an actual attempted play on him,” he said.
Fernando Tatis Jr. called it a “huge” moment in the game for the Padres.
“That’s the highest IQ in baseball,” Tatis said of Machado. “When you see plays like that … that’s why Manny’s Manny. This rally wouldn’t have started probably if he hadn’t made that play.”
It wouldn’t have happened without some more help from the Dodgers.
With runners at the corners now, Xander Bogaerts hit a slow ground ball near second base. Shortstop Miguel Rojas fielded it and made an uncharacteristically poor decision, trying to skip over to second base and turn a double play. He didn’t get either out and a run scored.
“That play has happened to me in my career a bunch of times and more times than not, I think 99 percent, today was the only time that I haven’t gotten the runner at least at second base,” Rojas said. “I felt like I was playing not all the way in the hole. I was playing in straight-up position and I was moving to my left already. I felt like the best way for us to get two outs there was that.
“But at the end of the day, you rethink about it and revisit the play, and all we needed was one out. I didn’t know that the whole thing was going to happen after obviously, but getting one out there probably was the best option and I made a bad decision.”
David Peralta followed with a two-run double. Kyle Higashioka drove in another run with a sacrifice fly and Tatis landed the big blow – a two-out, two-run home run.
Tatis’ homer (his third in the past two games) was one of five balls Padres hitters put in play after Buehler got two strikes in the count. Buehler’s inability to finish off hitters has been an issue throughout his comeback from Tommy John surgery.
“I’m not a 10, 11, 12 punchout per nine (innings) guy like I used to be,” said Buehler, who didn’t strike out anyone Tuesday. “I think going forward in my career, there’s certainly some things that makes me feel like I can do that. But at this point in this year, I’m trying to get people to put the ball on the ground. And I felt pretty good about a lot of the things that I did. Obviously, the ones you’re talking about, not a ton of them were hit 110 right? So, you know, they found spots and created momentum. I’ve talked ad nauseam about momentum in the playoffs, and I just couldn’t make the one pitch to kind of stop it.”
A Petco Park record crowd of 47,744 could be heard in Tijuana at that point and cameras caught Buehler venting his frustrations in the dugout, throwing his glove into the bench and giving a trash can a WWE-worthy body slam.
The therapy session worked. Buehler stayed in and put up zeroes over the next three innings.
And all the loud noises might have inspired the offense. Rojas, Ohtani and Betts led off the third inning with consecutive singles – although Rojas had to leave the game after aggravating the adductor strain he has been playing with.
After Freeman flew out, Hernandez got a hanging slider from Padres starter Michael King and sent it over the center field wall for a grand slam (only the sixth postseason grand slam in franchise history).
The next 16 Dodgers went down in order against King, Jeremiah Estrada, Jason Adam and Tanner Scott – who faced Ohtani for the third time in the three NLDS games in the eighth inning and struck him out for the third time.
Since his home run and single in Game 1, Ohtani has gone 1 for 10 with six strikeouts.
“Overall, I’m grateful that I’m even here, healthy and able to be in the postseason,” Ohtani said. “So tomorrow I’m going to go out and do my best.”
