The Braves Walk Off. Twice.

What do the Dodgers think they’re doing – besides trying to lose the NLCS?

Losing Saturday’s game was okay, I reckon. If you’re gonna lose a game in a series, the first one is the best one to lose, although that gives the other team the momentum coming into the second game, which then becomes almost a must-win for your team.

Only the Dodgers dropped that one, too.

Ok, so y’all can probably tell I’m pissed off at the team. And at one person in particular. Game 2 of the NLCS was a great example of Dave Roberts overmanaging a game and making the team lose. He’s still a mess when it comes to clutch managing situations. This was 2017 World Series-type bad managing…which means pretty dang bad.

The mess he made goes back to Game 5 of the NLDS and bringing in Scherzer to get the save. Note to Dave Roberts: starters aren’t relievers and relievers aren’t starters. But, fine, that was an All Hands On Deck situation – we needed to win the game, and we needed to beat San Francisco (arguably beating San Francisco should be harder than beating Atlanta), so, fine, I’ll grant Roberts that drastic measures were required. And I’ll admit that having Scherzer come out and pitch the 9^th definitely energized the team.

The only problem is that it fucked his arm up for yesterday’s start. He admitted in post-game interviews that his arm was “dead” – because he wasn’t pitching on regular rest and bodies are used to routines, especially pitchers, who make their living doing an unnatural and very stressful motion 100 times in a row once every 5 days. Yeah, Scherzer got himself through 79 pitches, but that only meant 4 1/3 innings, and we were all expecting more from him than that.

You can say that maybe that was a trade-off worth taking, since Game 5 really was a must-win situation, and Scherzer was pretty decent as long as he was going yesterday. But Scherzer’s shortened outing set the stage for Dave Roberts’ boneheaded managing (if you can call that managing) of the bullpen and two incredibly bad decisions: bringing Urias out in the 8^th and then Jansen for…I can’t even think about that one.

So he brings out Urias, not on regular rest…and he sucks and basically loses the game for us. I admit it’s dramatic and can be highly effective when you drop starters into late-game situations. Remember the game when Kershaw came in and got the save against the Nats a few years back? But the price is that it fucks with their routine and their rest for their next start. It’s what happened with Scherzer…and we’re all afraid it’s gonna do it with Urias when it comes time for him to pitch on Wednesday.

And, like I said, don’t get me started in on the decision to bring in Jansen to get the last out when Graterol was still holding it together…and the having Jansen toss a perfect meatball to Rosario.

And, while I’m at it, why pull Kelly after he throws a perfect 5^th with only 12 pitches? He would have been good for another inning…which is one of many scenarios that could have spared us the Urias disaster.

I just don’t get it. And you have to lay the mess at Dave Roberts’ feet. I know he thought putting in Urias would energize the team or some shit like that, but that’s not what happened. And just because something worked with Scherzer in an elimination game doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to work with all your other starters in less critical game situations.

So the pitching disaster was Roberts’ fault.

On the other hand, you can’t fully blame him for the problem with the bats and…wait for it…stranding no less than 10 runners in scoring position. If they’d gotten in only 2 of them, we’d of won the game.

Instead, we found ourselves in exactly the same situation last night as we did the night before. And that’s not just lameass. It’s super fuckin lameass.

I don’t know that you can say that we should of won both games…but they were dang close…and we could of won them. But we lost them. That’s the thing that hurts. Atlanta didn’t really win as much as we lost…and that’s fuckin hard to swallow, especially two nights in a row.

Ok, so today’s a day off and the team gets a chance to (we hope) regroup and get their acts (and bats) together. Maybe they’ll come out tomorrow afternoon with more than just the Betts bloop single and Seager long ball, the things we thought were going to lead to big offense in Game 2…but didn’t.

Maybe the thing that drives me the most crazy about the team’s offense how streaky it is. Look at the NLDS: 2 shut outs and then we get 9 runs one night and 7 the other? The reason it drives me crazy is that is shows we can put together a pretty awesome offense when we’ve got our shit together…only for two super important nights in a row we haven’t.

Yeah, we came back from a 3-1 hole last year, but a 2-0 hole is only one loss away from a 3-0…and, if you’re down 3-0, you’re pretty much fucked.

I just googled it: there are 37 times that a team has been down 0-3 in 7 game postseason series. Wanna guess how many times they’ve come back to win?

Once.

Yep: once. The 2004 Red Sox.

Worse yet, 29 out of those 34 times, the team that was down didn’t even win a single game.

So tomorrow really is a must-win situation. Yeah, we’re back home, yeah, everyone’s gonna be equally rested and simultaneously out-of-sorts with the 2 PM start…and we’ll have Buehler on the hill. If we can’t win that…then we deserve to be as fucked as I feel we are. (Seriously: how many of us were saying yesterday morning that, if we can’t win with Scherzer on the mound, we can’t win anything… And look what happened.)

Ok y’all. Rant over. Time to cross our fingers and do whatever else we can to get the baseball gods back on our side.