Philadelphia – It’s dangerous to draw conclusions from a game in the playoff series, but after the first game of the NLDS, you can take this course to the bank: No one is perfect.
Cristopher Sánchez is on the verge of completing six innings until the last three batsmen he faces (the last court he does throw) brings the Phillies to the spiral. Teoscar Hernández committed an ineffective defensive defensive type and then, late at night, won a winning three-inning home run.
Shohei Ohtani made history by using the playoffs as the starting pitcher, looking not only like a two-way player, but like two different people. Ohtani rarely looks so unfortunate on the plate, hitting all of his first four plates. His historical brand has become less glorious, becoming the sixth player in the stadium tracking era, looking three times in the playoffs.
But on the other hand. Ohtani showed up with the winning pitcher: strikeouts nine times in six innings, allowing only four basemen. Hernández stood out in a 5-3 Dodge victory with a seventh inning home run on Matt Strahm.
It’s the Phillies’ season four season season opener in the Bryce Harper era, just as stable as the team’s core has been in the past four seasons, and you can detect markers of time passing. The 2022 kids have now formed veterans and have some brand new faces.
The crowd is different. The 2022 playoffs was clearly relentless, depressing, and deafening hustle and bustle were reprimanded for the 2023 NLC’s 2-0 lead and was unpredictable for the embarrassment of the division rivals last year. Now, it’s a crowd because knowledge isn’t everything going to go the Phillies way. In the quiet moment of now, the aggressive roar exits the anxious silence.
But when tempting targets like Ohtani appear, they still have top-notch gear. I’ve never seen the most popular athlete in North American sports boo so loudly that you can’t hear the public broadcast system. Who forms the second half of the Dodgers’ order? I had to check the scorecard – the “Let’s Go to Phyllis” wave of earplugs flooded all Tommy Edman’s name.
There was almost no calm atmosphere in the first two games of the game. It was Ohtani who hit the canvas first in this heavyweight starting pitcher game. He led second place along Alec Bohm and then got four Seamers at 100 mph at Brandon Marsh. JT Realmuto had two runners and no one appeared, scalding another middle triple-digit heater to the right midfield gap. When the ball escaped Hernández first, then the Andy page, it was supposed to be a single, maybe three times as powerful as being driven in a run.
“I’ve been playing all the time,” Hernandez said after the game. “I don’t have a good angle. He’s playing very well. I’m trying to get it, so he can’t keep going into third or they can score twice in this case. That’s mine.”
Two Dodgers outfielders watched the ball rolling onto the wall, like two cats standing on a row of marching ants. When they returned the ball to the infield, two runs had already scored, while Realmuto stood in third. He scored Harrison Bader’s Sacrifice Fly to extend the Phillies’ lead to 3-0.
That’s what all Phillies get. Ohtani kept the top three in the orders – Trea Turner, Kyle Schwarber and Harper – shooting down their first three times through the lineup.
“I thought we were just missing out on some of the stadiums that we could cause damage,” Harper said. “We just didn’t finish.”
But, over the next five innings, it seems that the Phillies don’t need the help of their stars.
Sanchez starts the first playoffs in 2023 NLCS loss In fact Bullpen game. In just 24 months, Sánchez’s own spectacular self-improvement and consumption of Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola, he became the Philadelphian’s ace. With a three-man MVP, a Dodgers lineup of nine depth spans, and headed by three MVPs, Sánchez has almost no room for error. Perfect is asking, he is one of the few engines in baseball that can provide it.
I didn’t feel like watching Sánchez live, we saw perfection. He ran too much and, while leading, he left the strike zone too much, especially at the bottom of the Dodgers’ orders. He needs bad people to rescue him with spectacular dive captures. However, after 5 2/3 innings, he rose 3-0 in the game, with only eight strikeouts and only three basemen allowed.
The key to the Sánchez game is a mysterious bipod combination: sinker and variation, both downward and arm side movements, and a 9-mile speed difference.
For most pitchers, replacement is an emergency obstacle to preventing counterattackers. For Sánchez, it was the rock built by his church. In the first bat of the game, he turned left and left twice in a row to complete Ohtani’s 3-pointer. His biggest highlight of the night was against the same batsman in the fifth inning.
Ohtani waved on the 1-0 slider and then swayed on the change, and then – presumably expecting another change – sat there watching the middle sinker hit the three in the middle. Of the three hits near Sánchez, Ohtani saw 14 balls, six hits, and two other strike threes:
The best baseball player on earth, perhaps the best baseball player ever. Sánchez tied him together. It doesn’t matter.
“Even if I perform well, no matter what I do, if we lose the game, I don’t feel good,” Sanchez said through an interpreter. “We are a team. If we win, we win together, and if we lose, we lose.”
So, about what happened after the first 5 2/3 innings. The last three Dodgers facing Sanchez reached: First, Freddie Freeman took a walk, then Edman singles, and finally Enrique Hernández.
Sánchez’s last game was probably his worst case, or at least his worst idea: a 1-0 break in the area, right row, one right row, respectively. Hernández tied it to the corner for two runs. David Robertson appeared in the scene, looking for Max Munchy around the world, but baseball’s most discerning batsman ran at least twice, perhaps three times, and landed weakly on the game to end the game.
Robertson then put the first two men he faced on the base and started the next frame, which gave Strahm’s mission to protect a runner’s lead, with two, none, and the top of the Dodgers’ orders appearing.
He was within about 15 feet of pulling it apart. Strahm eliminated Ohtani and let Mookie Betts pop up, but Teoscar poked the fly ball into the opposite territory. The Bader quickly attracted a bead, and if it didn’t clear the large fence in the middle of the right and landed about four rows deep in the seat, it would knock it down. Increase damage: The futile pursuit is Bader’s last involvement. The powerful midfielder’s trade deadline acquisition revitalized the Phillies’ offense, and his dive grabbed a potential fifth-inning rally to tweak his hamstrings.
His involvement in the rest of the series remains doubtful.
From then on, it may be forgotten that everything that had eliminated the Dodgers before. Teoscar suffered from an inexplicable pain in the right field earlier.
“For me, everything that happened before those important moments like this is the past,” he said.
The Phillies arrived at Ohtani very early, but he kept the game close and eventually surpassed Sánchez. The importance of the last point is hard to exaggerate.
“It’s big,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “He doesn’t always get perfect. But I do feel like he gave up on three and still went there to give us six innings, so, tonight he threw five innings, he threw baseball-so it was a good start for him. He got the win.”
In September, the Dodgers finished second in the Grand Slam, and the clumsy part of the so-called bullpen was close to abandoning both games in the Reds Series than the final score indicated.
Roberts’ hope is: five NLDs only require three starters, and he suddenly gets a bunch of big arms from the rotation that can relieve reuse. If Ohtani was chased early, or was hunted in the middle of an inning, the Phillies could have suffered the same relief players in the September series at Dodger Stadium in September. Instead, Roberts was able to hand the ball over to Tyler Glasnow, who would likely finish with three innings if he kept the base clean.
Even this has made the Dodge Bullpen restrictive. Glasnow walked through his second inning work and had Harper poke a visionary single on the right. Bohm walked two and both managers traded pieces: Alex Vesia came in to face Marsh, who quickly fired Edmundo Sosa.
SOSA has more punches than your average utility infielder. When Turner and Baum were injured, he scored a good number, lost .469 overall, hitting .318/.362/.533 against the lefty. He also played three games with the Marlins a week and a half ago. Vesia gave him some hits – a 92.6 mph fastball up and down the plate – but Sosa hit the ball in the midfield, where it hits the 361-foot ball that allows you to fly regularly instead of winning the game’s home run.
Roki Sasaki made it to ninth place. The rookie failed his billing, established his bill with more than 100 calories in the early days of the quantity and fought back with his separator. But not in the dirt, you expect him to throw it away, and the batsman can swing. Instead, Sasaki placed the separator one-third of the top of the strike zone, like a stone on a river on a railway. Realmuto tried to start saving the game rallies, which looked like a hot fast ball, just watched it dip into the strike three areas.
The Phillies did bring the bundled run to the plate. Max Kepler somehow marked the outer part of the outlet and pulled it off, but Sasaki recovered quickly. After only four batsmen and 11 courts, he lets Bryson Stott pop up to Munchy in the third benchmark bag.
The crowd bleeded from Baying for three hours, quietly dispersing, with scattered booing jingling around the stadium.
