Dodger fans, whatever happens over the next few weeks – and several nervous breakdowns are predicted, regardless of however long the postseason journey might go – you should consider the alternative.
You’re not a New York Mets fan, on a day when owner Steve Cohen felt compelled to apologize to his fan base for his team’s total collapse and slugger Pete Alonso announced that he would test free agency this offseason.
Or you could be a Detroit Tigers fan, your team facing a Wild Card Series on the road in Cleveland after blowing a 14½-game division lead in 82 days.
See? The Dodgers’ own midsummer swoon wasn’t such a killer after all. Up to now, anyway.
And consider: The Houston Astros are out of the postseason. I can’t imagine a Dodger fan with a grudge going back to 2017 who wouldn’t be celebrating.
But one last reminder before we get to present-day stress: The Dodgers were 56-32 and led San Diego by nine games on July 3, the night after they celebrated Clayton Kershaw’s 3,000th strikeout. They lost seven straight and 10 of 12 to lose 5½ games off that lead in less than two weeks. They actually lost that lead for a day in late August, had five straight losses at the start of September, and have had everyone howling about their bullpen woes for 2½ months, for good reason.
But they’re here, and it’s easy to forget through the nightly angst but they’ve won 15 of their last 20. Tuesday night they begin the best-of-three Wild Card Series (or, as we call it, the Edge Of The Cliff Round) against a Cincinnati Reds club that lost five of the teams’ six meetings this season, including a three-game Dodgers sweep in The Ravine in August.
It’s also a Cincinnati club that won nine of its last 13 to grab that last wild-card spot and almost certainly earn Terry Francona some NL Manager of the Year votes. (And a reminder: The 1988 Dodgers, who shocked the baseball world by winning it all, lost 10 of 11 regular-season meetings to the Mets, their NLCS foe, with one rainout. By the end of October, few remembered and fewer cared.)
I don’t expect this series will invite comparisons to those fun ’70s battles between the Dodgers and Reds, then two division rivals loaded with superstars and featuring managers Tom Lasorda and Sparky Anderson exchanging barbs. Cincinnati won the most recent of its five World Series championships in 1990, and its last postseason series victory was an NL Division Series against the Dodgers in 1995, a three-game sweep.
These Reds come in with a 2.5% chance of winning the World Series, according to Baseball Reference. For what it’s worth, the defending champions have a 4.4% chance; those particular probability projections favor a Milwaukee (21.6) vs. Toronto (13.4) Fall Classic.
But feel free to be frightened. A Game 1 loss, and the possibility of a season’s sudden end becomes all too haunting.
Is there, ahem, a wild card on the Reds’ roster for this series? There might be three. Shortstop Elly De La Cruz is a dynamic player, capable of beating you with power or speed. Gavin Lux, once considered a jewel of the Dodgers’ farm system, never fulfilled that potential on L.A.’s roster but brings postseason experience, and he’s played left field, second base and third base as well as DH-ing for the Reds this year.
And the biggest X-factor might be Hunter Greene, pride of Notre Dame High in Sherman Oaks, No. 2 pick in the 2017 MLB Draft, and the Reds’ starting pitcher in Game 1. Greene, a product of the MLB’s Urban Youth Academy in Compton, was 7-4 this year with a 2.76 ERA and 132 strikeouts in 107⅔ innings. He was limited to 19 starts, missing most of June and July with a groin injury.
The raw stats say he’s 1-3 with a 4.55 ERA lifetime against his hometown team. In his last outing against the Dodgers, Aug. 25 in L.A., he gave up five runs (three earned) in five innings, including two home runs by Andy Pages, in a 7-0 Dodgers victory.
But he made some adjustments following that outing, moving from the middle of the rubber to the left and tweaking his arm angle. In five starts in September following that Dodger Stadium start, he was 2-0 with a 2.73 ERA and 38 strikeouts in 29⅔ innings, and opponents hit .152 and slugged .305 against him.
So in a best-of-three series where one loss can put you on the edge of that proverbial cliff, Greene can cause the Dodgers a lot of problems. At the very least, he’s capable of matching zeroes with Blake Snell. And if the Reds are at least close when the home bullpen gate swings open … well, Dodger fans, how confident are you really?
Most observers expect the champs to establish their dominance, flex the might that comes from a massive payroll, find their relief pitching mojo again and make quick work of the team that had to hustle just to get in.
But the bullpen remains scary for all the wrong reasons. You can make the case that Tanner Scott has six scoreless outings in his last seven appearances, and it’s true that Blake Treinen hasn’t blown a save in more than a week. But the margin for error is frightfully small in a short series, even smaller in a best-of-three, and at this point it’s hard to really trust this relief corps.
The clear-eyed, if wary, prediction here? They’ll eliminate the Reds, but the quest to repeat will end against Philadelphia in the Division Series.
But I’d be happy to be wrong, and how’s this for an alternate scenario? The Dodgers find that bullpen shutdown mojo, subdue the Reds, Phillies, Cubs (who knock off the Brewers) and Mariners and become MLB’s first repeaters since the 1998-2000 Yankees won three in a row. And new closer Roki Sasaki is the World Series MVP.
Stranger things have happened, right?
jalexander@scng.com