LOS ANGELES — The last one – the last out of a game, say, or the last victory in a playoff series – is considered the hardest one to achieve, if old adages and the like are to be believed.
But when your team is absolutely rolling in the postseason, with timely hitting, dominant starting pitching and a bullpen that might have found its second wind, is it really going to be that big a hurdle?
The Dodgers, swept by the Milwaukee Brewers in the regular season series, are poised to reverse that with one more swipe of the broom on Friday night. Their 3-1 victory over the Brewers on Thursday, in a game that felt more comfortable than the score might have indicated, put them in position to get back to the World Series for the second year in a row, third time in six years and fifth time in the last nine.
Which means the vagaries of late October are pretty familiar for this franchise and the bulk of these players. And a team that is now 8-1 in this postseason doesn’t figure to take anything for granted Friday night, when Shohei Ohtani goes to the mound in Game 4.
After all, there is the big picture.
“Just because we’re one win away from the next series, you got to keep in mind we’re five wins away from what we really want,” Mookie Betts said afterward.
Milwaukee does the little things, and is opportunistic and fundamentally sound. But their series sweeps of the Dodgers came during a July stretch when L.A. was 2-10. Max Muncy had just hurt his knee and would be out for a month, a 9-14 stretch when the team lost the bulk of what had been a nine-game division lead.
How important is Muncy to this club? Even Thursday, when he was 0 for 3 and had to face Brewers’ hard-throwing right-hander Jacob Misiorowski in the late afternoon shadows, he made the defensive play of the day by ranging to his left to snag Joey Ortiz’s ground ball and fired a strike to home plate to cut down Jake Bauers trying to score. Potential big inning snuffed out, and Milwaukee got two baserunners the rest of the way against starter Tyler Glasnow.
“Kind of a big moment,” Muncy said. “At that time in the game, trying to limit the damage there … for me it was just try to get a clean throw to Will (Smith), knowing the guy’s probably gonna (establish his baserunning lane) on the grass. So I got to get rid of it quick to give him time to make a tag. And, you know, that kind of changed the game for us.”
And here is something that should give Dodger fans reason to at least exhale: The bullpen issues of the second half of the season might at last be behind them. (But feel free to keep your fingers crossed.)
After starter Tyler Glasnow gave the Dodgers 5⅔ strong innings, with eight strikeouts and 99 pitches, Alex Vesia got the final out of the sixth with a strikeout of Sal Frelick, and left with one out and a man on second in the seventh.
Blake Treinen got a pop-up and a strikeout to get out of that inning and now has had five effective outings in his six postseason appearances, after a miserable September. Anthony Banda took care of the eighth, and Roki Sasaki regained his mojo, after a shaky outing in Game 1 in Milwaukee, with a 1-2-3 ninth.
“My mechanics (were) unconsciously off” in Game 1, Sasaki said through an interpreter afterward. “I wasn’t really aware of what was going on, which I think affected my command and my velo. … In between today’s outing and the last outing, we just really worked with the pitching coach and just did a lot of work to make sure my mechanics (were) in the right place.”
So, are the bullpen woes history? Was it just a phase? Is it safe to open your eyes during the eighth inning again?
Or is it still too soon?
“I think the thing about our guys is they’re battle-tested, and they know that I’ve never lost faith in them,” Manager Dave Roberts said. “They’ve never lost confidence in each other. So to see what they’re doing right now, I’m not surprised.
“We knew all along we were going to need these guys. And these guys are delivering, which is huge. We’re doing a great job of preventing runs. And the bullpen deserves a lot of credit.”
Banda, whose only appearance prior to Thursday’s 1-2-3 inning was a scoreless fifth in what turned out to be the Dodgers’ only loss in these playoffs, the 8-2 Game 3 debacle against Philadelphia, said it’s not a matter of relievers rebuilding confidence.
“I think the bullpen has had confidence,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a building time right now. I think it’s something that we established even with the rough stretches. We all believe in each other. So we’re just getting on point at the right time. And everybody knows the job that needs to be done. And so we’re just going out there executing pitches and just passing it on.”
Vesia pointed to the leadership of a clubhouse of veterans and a culture that prioritizes winning, maybe even more than most.
“You can go to one through nine of how many leaders we have on the team, and we’re all pulling on that same rope,” Vesia said. “And you know, that’s contagious. … We’re definitely leaning on one another, and I think that that kind of just keeps the ball rolling, even in a 1-1 ballgame. I come in, it was like, all right, first pitch strike. And then, you know, just get out of the inning.”
It was, indeed, 1-1 when Vesia entered Thursday’s game. After he got the final out in the sixth, the Dodgers got the go-ahead runs against Misiorowski in the bottom of the inning on a Smith single, a walk to Freddie Freeman, Tommy Edman’s RBI single to score Smith and, after Abner Uribe came on in relief, a throwing error on a pickoff attempt that allowed Freeman to score.
There’s one more task. Ohtani stroked a triple into the right field corner in his first at-bat Thursday and scored on Mookie Betts’ double. But from there he grounded out and struck out twice, and is now 6 for 38 for the postseason, a .157 average.
If the three-time league MVP gets on the type of heater of which he’s capable, getting those five remaining victories might just be a matter of time.
jalexander@scng.com