Who would you pitch in a pivotal Game 4? Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that your best starter is available on three days’ rest, and he didn’t throw a full complement of pitches in his last start. He could pitch tonight’s game – or he could pitch a potential fifth and deciding game on full rest. But if resting him and letting him go in the next one seems like the obvious answer, let’s add another wrinkle: There’s no one else available to start. If your ace doesn’t go, it’s all bullpen, all the way.
The Padres and Dodgers both faced that decision Wednesday. They chose differently – the Padres sent Dylan Cease to the mound, while the Dodgers countered with reliever Ryan Brasier. The decision wasn’t exactly identical, but it was nearly so. The Dodgers used three relievers in Game 3, while the Padres used four. The relievers San Diego used were better – but then, their bullpen is better overall. Both teams had good full-rest options for Game 5 even if they opted to use their aces on Wednesday, with Yu Darvish set to take the ball for the Padres and Jack Flaherty available to do so for the Dodgers if Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitched Game 4 on short rest.
Cease came out with what seemed like the kind of adrenaline you’d expect from a guy trying to knock the Dodgers out of the playoffs. His first fastball to Shohei Ohtani was 99.6 mph. The slowest fastball he threw in the first inning was 97.5 mph, half a tick faster than his average fastball this year. His slider had more hop. His sweeper had more sweep. Oh yeah – he also hung a fastball middle-middle that Mookie Betts launched for a solo home run. That’s what you get with Cease – sometimes he’s completely untouchable, and sometimes he throws meatballs. But tonight wasn’t vintage Cease, and the reason seems fairly clear: When he came back out for the second inning, the adrenaline didn’t appear to come out with him. His fastest fastball was 97.5. He labored with location, walking Gavin Lux and then throwing five straight pitches outside the strike zone before he looped in a lazy curve down main street that Enrique Hernández laced to center for a single. When Ohtani lined a first-pitch sweeper to right to score a run, Mike Shildt had seen enough.
The Padres, too, were bullpenning, even if they didn’t want to. Betts followed with a single to make the score 3-0, and then Will Smith blasted a two-run shot to make it 5-0 in the third. What could the Padres do but keep plugging, though? Adrian Morejon followed homer victim Bryan Hoeing with two scoreless innings. Jeremiah Estrada relieved Morejon and got four more outs. Mike Shildt wasn’t shy with the high-leverage arms, even down five runs and with a 2-1 lead in the series. The day off helped. So did the fact that the Dodgers were going with a bullpen game, and if you’ve followed baseball in the last 10 years, you have a pretty good idea of how poorly that tends to go for them.
Brasier started off sharp. He faced four batters and retired them all. Anthony Banda, meanwhile, nearly fell apart in the second – two of the first three batters he faced reached, and the ghosts of Octobers past goosed the San Diego crowd to a raucous roar. But Jake Cronenworth flied out lazily to end the rally, and the Dodgers continued to stack up relievers and outs in large numbers. Closer Michael Kopech came in for the third inning. Why not? He’d pitched Tuesday, but with an off day Thursday, he was obviously going to be part of the plan. Every out has roughly equal leverage when you’re going to empty out the bullpen regardless of score, and the top of the San Diego order was due up. Fernando Tatis Jr. nearly beat LA’s best, with a 112-mph cannonball that one-hopped the wall for a double. Kopech recovered to get Jurickson Profar, though, and yet again, the roaring crowd was left wanting.
Alex Vesia pitched a scoreless fourth, but he ran into trouble in the fifth: first and second with no one out, with Kyle Higashioka and then the top of the Padres order due up. But Higashioka struck out, Luis Arraez flew out harmlessly, and Evan Phillips came in to get Tatis – just barely, on a hard-hit ball to center that feels like it always goes out against the Dodgers in October. On the one hand, the Padres just weren’t scoring. A 5-0 deficit after three sounds doable — after six, not so much. On the other hand, the Dodgers were running out of arms – Daniel Hudson and Blake Treinen were the only relievers left in the ‘pen who Dave Roberts had any desire to use. Nine outs for those two guys? Seems dicey. Not five runs dicey, but “this is why bullpen games never work out” was right on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
But that pile of zeroes stacked up by LA relievers changed the game. With time running down and the chances of a comeback dwindling, Shildt finally started dipping into the low-leverage side of his bullpen. Wandy Peralta’s first game of the postseason was nasty, brutish, and short: He came in to try to clean up a mess that had already given the Dodgers a run and put a man on second with two outs, and he promptly gave up a two-run homer to Lux. It was 8-0 Dodgers, squarely into the realm of a blowout, and the San Diego crowd finally seemed to realize it. The balance of the game was quiet, with Hudson and Treinen each taking their turn before Landon Knack closed things out. The Padres managed to put one more rally together, but it came to nothing; Treinen got Machado with a gorgeous sweeping slider before a bowling ball sinker to Jackson Merrill ended the inning with a groundout.
Even when Knack allowed a leadoff baserunner, the writing was on the wall in Sharpie, and the Padres went quietly from there. I’m not sure the Cease decision mattered much. If the Padres had skipped the preamble and started with their bullpen, they surely still would have used Hoeing. They likely would have used Alek Jacob, who was charged with two runs, one on a squeeze bunt and one that scored on that Lux homer. The Dodgers have Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts. What, you’re going to hold them scoreless for nine innings? Cease is better than Darvish at this point in their respective careers, but not by a ton, so the knock-on effects aren’t even particularly onerous. The Padres are still going to send an awesome starter out for the elimination game, and their bullpen will be fairly rested either way. Heck, Wednesday might even have been an advantage; Shildt stayed away from his top three relief arms, who had combined for six appearances in the first three games of the series. The way the game played out, he never had a spot to use them, so they’ll get extra rest, and the Dodgers won’t get to see them more times in short succession.
On the other hand, I think the Dodgers’ decision was a no-brainer. Yamamoto is already pitching more frequently than ever before thanks to the transition to MLB. The Dodgers have more guys I think of as able to get four or five outs when necessary in their bullpen. They’re also more experienced at deciding how to stack their pitchers when they’re going to use a ton; maybe it hasn’t always worked, but no one can top the Dodgers’ sheer volume of need-based October bullpen games. San Diego’s top hitters faced Brasier, Kopech, Phillips, and Treinen – the latter three are the best relievers on the team. The cluster of lefties at the bottom of the lineup got the Dodgers’ lefties when the game was still close. The normal hierarchy of seventh-inning guy/setup man/closer just didn’t make any sense today, and the Dodgers smartly…
