Stopping the Dodgers offense is one of the toughest tasks in baseball this October. A slew of great opposing pitchers, including plenty of Cy Young candidates, gave up 27 runs in their first four postseason games. Of course, the pitching in Los Angeles is great, too, but you can score runs with the Dodgers. The difficulty lies in stopping their endless base-sweeping ability.
The Phillies seemed perfectly suited to stop the Dodgers, but that was before Los Angeles won its first two games in Philadelphia. To make matters worse, the Dodgers put ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto on the mound, so limiting the offense became even more important than usual. That was too much work for one starter, so Rob Thomson turned to Aaron Nola and Ranger Suarez for tandem performance. As it turns out, the decision was inspired. Combined with two Schwab bombs, Nora Suarez’s carry lifted the Phillies to an 8-2 win at Dodger Stadium and delayed elimination for at least one night.
Nora has had a rough year. He missed three months due to injury, and when he did play, his ERA (6.01) and FIP (4.58) were the worst of his long and illustrious career. He hasn’t been in the game long, but he’s having a blast. He was outstanding, with two or three more seconds of speed and a knuckleball curveball that was reminiscent of where he was from a few years ago. Things didn’t happen right away — Shohei Ohtani scorched a line drive and then Mookie Betts tripled — but Nola went all out, hitting a nice curveball off Teoscar Hernández and escaping the inning unscathed. He held it perfectly for a second, perhaps as he intended.
While Nola is likely to start, Suarez is key to Philadelphia’s run defense scheme. Like Nola, Suarez’s performance at the beginning was not strong. His first pitch to famed left-handed hitman Tommy Edelman left the park, giving the Dodgers a 1-0 lead in the third inning. But, wouldn’t you give up a solo home run against the Dodgers? That’s unrealistic. Suarez doesn’t just have to deal with Edelman; He’s out there against Ohtani, Bates, Hernandez, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith… you get the idea – his job is to control the entire lineup. If he made sure it didn’t spread, this flaw wouldn’t be a problem.
After a sudden awakening, Suarez quickly locked the target. He retired those five guys I just named in order, and he wasn’t afraid to use his tricks to do it. Nola worked harder on his two best pitches, while Suarez doubled down on the thing that suits him best: variety. He threw sinkers against lefties, exploded with four-seamers and changeups against right-handers, and generally kept batters off-balance and kept his infielders on their toes with a steady stream of ground balls. He threw a six-pitch mix, his approach varying greatly depending on the batter he faced, and even though he was technically a reliever rather than a starter in this game, he stuck to the plan.
The best Suarez starts don’t always look pretty, but they sure look stylish. There is never the same course twice, nor the same spot twice. He’s twice as likely to knock you to the ground as he is to knock you down. But the Dodgers had turned great pitchers into dust all year long and couldn’t clock him. They hit the ball hard, but not in the air. Or they’ll hit the ball in the air, but not with much force. They appear small in large places and large in small places. This is exactly what Suarez does at his best. By the time he got through five innings, it always felt like he was one bad pitch away from collapse, but that wasn’t the case.
Yamamoto, meanwhile, did the opposite. He had the ball on the string in all three innings, and his formidable arsenal meant it felt like no one could score when he was in charge. The separatists of the late 90s? certainly. The cutter approaches this speed and moves like gravity doesn’t exist? He has them. A curveball that’s 20 mph slower than the rest of his pitch mix and seems to swerve sharply in mid-air? Absolutely. But he couldn’t sustain his sharp positioning, and it doesn’t matter how good your fastball is when you leave a center fielder to Kyle Schwarber, who hit a ridiculous 450-foot solo shot in the fourth inning to tie the game at 1-1.
Suddenly, it was like the Phillies had broken a curse. Bryce Harper hit a sharp single to left. Alec Bohm followed with a grounding single to center field. After some defensive hijinks and a sacrifice fly, JT Realmuto sliced a ground-rule double to right. Even escaping a round couldn’t cure Yamamoto’s sudden ineffectiveness. Philadelphia started the game in the fifth inning and once again gave him the ball. Bryson Stott breaks 101 mph single. Trea Turner was not far behind with 104 mph. The Phillies were getting the snot out of the ball, while the Dodgers had to head to the bullpen with just three outs after their ace looked to be on his way to another big game. Ultimately, Yamamoto threw as many pitches as Suarez and missed fewer bats, although you’d never know that from watching their pitches.
The Phillies didn’t score any runs in the inning chasing Yamamoto. Even after sending out their first two runners, they were scoreless in the seventh inning. Despite the offensive explosion and a big game from Suarez, the game was still only a two-run game at the end of the eighth inning. But if you’ve followed the Dodgers this year, you know their biggest weakness is the bullpen, and Yamamoto’s weak performance combined with a quiet night on offense meant manager Dave Roberts decided to go for the middle of the bullpen instead of the top, and it cost him.
First up was Anthony Banda, who got one out in the fifth inning for Yamamoto. Then there’s Jack Drell, who may have been unknown in the playoffs, but he also did his job, pitching a scoreless sixth. Clayton Kershaw is the next guy in the mix, though, and he doesn’t have it, to put it mildly.
The only reason the Phillies didn’t score in the seventh inning, Kershaw’s first, was that Schwarber was tipped over by a ball that had sailed away from Smith (Smith’s first catch in a month because of a hairline fracture in his right hand), which left Schwarber standing still as Smith retrieved the ball and fired it to first for an easy out. Even so, the other two outs of the inning were line drives that found the glove. The Phillies are all over Kershaw. Realmuto led off the eighth with a solo shot. Turner drove home two more Phillies on a trumpet single. Schwarber hit his second home run of the night to make the game 8-1 and keep the heat going.
Now that the game is truly over, each team begins their symbolic mop-up. The Dodgers added one more run in the ninth and managed to get Ohtani to load again, prompting an extremely rare two-out, six-run lead pitching change. But he flew out safely and prepared for Game 4 in Los Angeles on Thursday. It wasn’t always pretty, including some ugly baserunning and some questionable decision-making, but it ultimately worked for the Phillies. In a way, maybe that’s what the Phillies are – the embodiment of the Rangers Suarez starter. The look certainly suited them on Wednesday night.
odds and ends
• This is Kershaw’s first postseason start as a reliever since the decisive Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS against the Nationals. After hitting the bottom of the seventh, he returned in the eighth as the Dodgers held on to a two-run lead and immediately gave up back-to-back homers to Juan Soto and Anthony Rendon. The Nationals won in the playoffs and were on course to win the World Series.
• Brandon Marsh had a rough night. The Phillies were unable to line up Marsh due to Harrison Bader being sidelined with an injury. The Dodgers definitely had a lot of left-handed relievers in the bullpen, so they twice intentionally walked Boehm to Marsh, who went 0-for-4, and also turned Betts’ first-inning hit into a triple. On an opportunity after a walk, he was too slow to get into the zone, resulting in a game-clock violation, and then he quickly pitched in the zone and swung to a pitch outside the zone, striking out and demoralizing.
• Ohtani also had a rough night. He went 0-for-5 from the field, which made him 1-for-14 in the series. Los Angeles’ offense is so deep that they can still score consecutive runs when their best hitters aren’t playing well, but that will certainly put more pressure on others in the lineup. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything predictable about this, and he still looks like the same Shohei Ohtani as always, but now, he can use a one-shot.
• Rob Thomson should buy Schwarber a nice gift because the manager made some strange decisions in this game that will get more scrutiny if the Phillies don’t win easily. The announcers specifically noted that Thomson planned Nola’s outing extensively, deciding in advance which batter would signal his departure and thus which one Suarez would face first. He chose Edman, who was dangerous with his right and relatively punchless with his left, and Edman made him pay.
Late in the game, Thomson called for a sacrifice bunt, marking the second straight game he had done so. It didn’t result in a disastrous out on the basepaths, but it did create an easy out and the Phillies didn’t score in that inning.
Marsh had such a rough day, in part because the Dodgers brought in tough lefties to attack the top of Philly’s lineup and then left them there to face Marsh, who was protected by a platoon pairing during the regular season but is now hanging out to dry. I thought he was batting fifth because he batted a lot in the regular season, but back then Thomson used to bat for him in tough games, but that’s not the case now. It all feels weird and disjointed – but of course, when you win 8-2, no one cares.
