NEW YORK – On the surface, the Los Angeles Dodgers intended to be aggressive with how they went about Friday night. Just one win separated them from punching a ticket to the World Series, and Dave Roberts did not appear inclined to wait.
“You can see from kind of my demeanor that we’re playing with urgency tonight,” the Dodgers manager said Friday afternoon. “I think you can see that things can happen when a team starts to build momentum. So, yeah, we want to kind of take our momentum and keep it going, put these guys away.”
The Dodgers deployed their key trade deadline acquisition, Jack Flaherty, on regular rest rather than go for another bullpen game with a potential day off behind it. Roberts urged the importance of an early lead, allowing the Dodgers to piece together the last of the puzzle with straightforward ease.
When neither happened, a dichotomy emerged: one team looked forward to tomorrow. The team that doesn’t have one took advantage.
“They’re in a situation where it’s do-or-die,” Mookie Betts said. “So we have to match that energy.”
The result in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series: New York Mets 12, Dodgers 6. This series goes back to Dodger Stadium, with a bullpen game looming and two more cracks at the pennant.
The Dodgers will need better pitching than they got Friday. Flaherty did not have it. His fastball velocity dropped nearly 2 mph from his season average to 91.4 mph. His command eluded him.
“He wasn’t sharp, clearly,” Roberts said.
Less than a week ago, Flaherty pitched seven scoreless innings against this same Mets lineup in Game 1 of the NLCS. Nearly half of the 32 pitches he’d throw in the first inning of Game 5 were balls. The strikes got hit hard. Francisco Lindor roped a leadoff single. When Brandon Nimmo followed with a walk, Pete Alonso golfed a breaking ball over the center-field fence for a 3-0 lead.
“I let the game speed up on me a little bit and I didn’t make the adjustments that I should have made,” Flaherty said.
He managed to get through trouble again in the second unscathed. But the difficulties added up.
With the Mets seemingly close to breaking things open again following Flaherty’s walks to Alonso and Jesse Winker to start the third inning, the bullpen phone rang. Left-hander Anthony Banda got up and began throwing. When Starling Marte scalded an 88 mph sinker down the line for a two-run double making it 5-1, Banda sat.
The Dodgers’ plan for Friday had a predicament. Removing Flaherty early would have left a pocket of the game that would have to be absorbed at some point by length, be it Brent Honeywell or Landon Knack with lower-leverage arms Ben Casparius and Edgardo Henriquez unavailable. Roberts said he only had five innings’ worth of outs out of his top leverage relievers. Deploying them immediately would’ve left a vulnerability to patch over.
Roberts chose none of the above.
“At 5-1 I’m not going to deploy our leverage guys knowing there’s a cost on the back end and appreciating the fact that there’s still more baseball to play in the series,” Roberts said. “So those are thoughts that went through my head. But I think for me, I have five leverage guys that I wanted to make sure that you gotta deploy at the right time.”
That left Flaherty to absorb the brunt. The right-hander continued to get hit in what would be a five-run third, expanding the Mets’ early lead to seven runs and turning what looked to be a gettable game — particularly with the at-bats the Dodgers were taking early against Mets lefty David Peterson — into a laugher for New York. Honeywell soaked up 4 2/3 innings of relief anyway, allowing four more runs to the tally as the Dodgers looked toward Game 6 on Sunday night.
“I told him in the dugout, ‘This is my game until it’s not,’” Honeywell said after throwing a career-high in innings. “We had a shot to win the game, I felt like. We made the turn a little bit. Battled our ass off here. We knew they were gonna fight tonight. That’s playoff baseball. Once you get in, save the dogs.”
Saving them came with a cost. Pitchers got hit hard. The Dodgers did not strike out a single Mets hitter.
Rather than push some of his relievers to close out the series, something Roberts suggested he could do leading up to the game, the Dodgers used their key bullpen arms for a grand total of one batter: Banda got the final out of the eighth.
That affords the Dodgers availability on Sunday. Michael Kopech has only pitched once this postseason, a one-inning, 12-pitch outing in Game 3 on Wednesday. Blake Treinen has combined for 2 2/3 innings and 34 pitches between Wednesday and Thursday. Ryan Brasier threw 38 pitches between Games 2 and 3 and will have had three days of rest. Daniel Hudson, who had a lower-body issue flare up after Game 1, still hasn’t pitched since but should be available. Banda had only pitched in Game 2 before his two-pitch outing Friday.
Those six arms get you most of the way through a bullpen game, even if that requires several of them going more than just one inning. This is still not the formidable group of seven arms that helped keep the Dodgers alive in Game 4 of the National League Division Series against the San Diego Padres.
The Dodgers have missed Alex Vesia. They still would have to extract length from elsewhere, just as they did in that game in San Diego. Casparius — who threw 31 pitches in relief in Game 3 and would be on three days’ rest — has thrown the ball well this October. There’s also Landon Knack, who imploded by giving up five runs in two innings in such a role in Game 2.
Allowing the series to extend brings additional risk. Dodgers officials pondered the potentially difficult matchup before the series that Mets left-hander Sean Manaea would bring in this series. The Dodgers pummeled Manaea for years but the left-hander, equipped with a new arm slot and attack plan, has been brutally effective for months including five innings with three runs allowed (two earned) in New York’s Game 2 win. It’ll be Manaea’s turn again in Game 6 to try to keep the Mets’ season alive.
Andy Pages, who homered twice as the Dodgers cut into the large deficit, is expected to be in the lineup. Roberts conceded Friday night there’s a chance that Freddie Freeman — 3-for-17 in the NLCS, with no extra-base hits this postseason while dealing with a painful sprained right ankle — is not in there to start against Manaea.
Different factors are at play now that there’s another NLCS game on the other end of Friday’s cross-country flight back to Los Angeles.
(Top photo of Jack Flaherty after Pete Alonso’s home run: Luke Hales / Getty Images)
