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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — The Dodgers ended a lethargic, inconsistent regular season in dominant fashion, reeling off 15 wins in a stretch of 20 games. All told, they finished with 93 victories, their lowest total in seven years and a far cry from the wins record so many outsiders pegged them for at the outset. It forced them to play in the wild-card round for the first time since Major League Baseball’s postseason format expanded. But they believed they had found their best selves heading into the playoffs.
Then — for seven innings, at least — it showed up.
The Dodgers chased young Cincinnati Reds fireballer Hunter Greene after just three innings in Tuesday night’s Game 1 of their National League Wild Card Series. Teoscar Hernandez and Shohei Ohtani each homered twice for L.A., five different hitters collected multiple hits and Blake Snell dominated in his Dodgers postseason debut, allowing just two runs in seven innings. If not for a faulty bullpen, the Dodgers’ introduction to the 2025 postseason would have been a laugher. They nonetheless settled for a 10-5 victory, putting them one win away from advancing to the NL Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies.
“We’ve been playing pretty good baseball the last two weeks, three weeks,” Hernandez said. “We know the things that we can do, especially in big moments like this.”
Ohtani started the scoring with a 117.7 mph line-drive home run to lead off the bottom of the first, prompting flashbacks of the shot he hit off Dylan Cease in his second career postseason at-bat last fall. In the fourth, Ohtani tacked on a 454-foot homer, becoming the first player in the Statcast era (since 2015) to hit home runs of 450-plus feet and 115-plus mph in the same playoff game.
In between, the Dodgers put together a four-run third inning with the middle of their order. Freddie Freeman and Max Muncy worked walks against Greene. Hernandez then turned on a 1-0 slider that hung up in the zone for a three-run homer. Tommy Edman followed with another homer off another slider, this one on the edge of the inside corner.
“That was definitely a huge moment in the game — really pushed momentum out and really made them start to make the decision to get Hunter Greene out of the game,” Muncy said of that third inning. “Anytime you can do that, that puts you in a very good spot. Because Hunter Greene’s a very good pitcher. I know we got to him tonight, but that’s still not the guy you want to have in the game for a long time.”
Snell, meanwhile, pitched longer than he ever has in October. The 32-year-old left-hander — famously removed after giving up his first hit in the sixth inning of Game 6 of the 2020 World Series, a decision that propelled the Dodgers to a championship — breezed past the Reds in the first six innings and wound up tying a postseason career high with nine strikeouts. Five of those came on his changeup, a pitch that drew 15 swing-and-misses from a young, eager group of Reds hitters, the most of any start in Snell’s career. Varying the speed of that pitch was key.
“He’d throw one that was 87 [mph] and one that was 82,” Reds manager Terry Francona said. “And he threw multiple — like two, three, four in a row at times and all different speeds. And then you throw a 97 [mph fastball] in there and it becomes difficult.”
The Reds trailed 10-2 after seven innings. In the 164 instances a team faced a deficit of eight-plus runs in the postseason, only one had come back to win. It happened all the way back in 1929, during Game 4 of the World Series. The then-Philadelphia Athletics trailed the Chicago Cubs 8-0 in the seventh inning and rallied to pull out a 10-8 victory. The Reds came close to joining them. At least that’s what 50,555 increasingly tense Dodger Stadium fans began to feel as the eighth inning prolonged.
L.A.’s Alex Vesia faced three batters, allowed two of them to reach and exited. Edgardo Henriquez, who possesses overpowering stuff but often lacks control of it, issued back-to-back walks and a single. Jack Dreyer, a rookie left-hander coming off a breakthrough season, followed with another walk to trim the Dodgers’ lead to five. But Dreyer retired Tyler Stephenson to end an 11-pitch at-bat then got Ke’Bryan Hayes to ground out, stranding the bases loaded. Blake Treinen followed with a much easier ninth inning, allowing a sold-out crowd to exhale.
Dodgers relievers threw 59 pitches in that anxiety-inducing top of the eighth, the most in a single playoff inning since at least 1988, according to ESPN Research.
But the Dodgers got the win, and history is on their side:
Of the previous four editions of the wild-card series, the Game 1 winner has advanced 18 of 20 times.
“You can’t make it more than what it is,” Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts said of potentially closing out the Reds on Wednesday. “It’s just a game. It’s still a game. Still got to go do the same thing. We’re not going to all of a sudden become Superman, do different things. Just have to play the same game.”
