Before the sun set on Queens on Friday night, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts faced a dilemma.
It was the third inning of Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. His club faced an early but hardly insurmountable deficit of two points. And with pitcher Jack Flaherty lacking both command and speed, Roberts had three loaded options in front of him.
1. Stick with Flaherty and hope he can settle down.
2. Draft a lower-leverage arm like Brent Honeywell or Landon Knack and hope they can hold the deficit.
3. Bring in a high-leverage reliever and risk wasting a valuable arm with a likely bullpen game looming in Game 6.
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If a team doesn’t have reliable starting pitching in the playoffs, these could be the unfavorable choices a manager has to make.
“It’s not always fun when you’re going through it,” Roberts said. “Certainly from someone’s chair. Definitely my seat.”
As in the Dodgers’ Game 2 loss, Roberts chose the conservative path. He left Flaherty in the game and then watched in horror as what unfolded.
In a six-batter series, the Mets exploded for a five-run rally, opening a seven-run lead en route to a 12–6 victory.
“All I have to do is be average,” a frustrated Flaherty said afterward, “and we’re in this game.”
On a night when the Dodgers could have ended the NLCS and booked a berth in next week’s World Series, they sent this best-of-seven back to Los Angeles.
The Dodgers still have the inside track to reach the World Series. They lead this series 3-2 and only need one more win with two home tries to get it.
However, the plastic sheeting taped to the ceiling of the visiting clubhouse at Citi Field remained rolled up. The Dodgers came and went without any festive unfolding.
What was clear from the start on Friday was Flaherty’s lack of stuff. In a three-run first inning, his fastball was around 90 mph, well below his season average of 93.3. His command wasn’t there either, leading to two walks in an inning, punctuated by Pete Alonso’s three-run homer, his first of the series.
“He obviously wasn’t on his toes,” Roberts said, noting that Flaherty was “a little confused;” not the only one in a snorting Dodgers clubhouse.
“I feel like it was the first time in a while that I made the game go a little faster,” Flaherty added. “I didn’t make the adjustments I should have made in the game after the first inning when they gave me some good swings.”
Flaherty made it through the second inning unscathed, despite a leadoff double by Francisco Alvarez and two near-homers by Francisco Lindor (one just went wrong, the other died on the warning track). The Dodgers, meanwhile, got a run back against Mets left-hander David Peterson, making the score 3-1 entering the third.
Thus Roberts was confronted with his fateful decision.
Since the Dodgers acquired Flaherty at the trade deadline, the veteran right-hander has been their de facto asset — or at least by default.
It’s not what the Dodgers envisioned at the start of this season, when they thought Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto could take over their rotation. But it’s the position they find themselves in, as Glasnow suffered a season-ending elbow injury and Yamamoto, who entered the playoffs just weeks removed from a shoulder injury, is unlikely to pitch again in this series after starting Game 4.
And with Roberts noting that he only had “five leverage innings” from the core of his bullpen, he decided to roll the dice and try to get Flaherty deeper into the game.
“You’ve got to be a little steadfast in the way you use your pitchers,” Roberts said. “Because at the end of the day it’s about winning four games in a seven-game series.”
Flaherty started the third with two quick hits to Alonso, but then missed the zone four times in a row for a walk. Four more straight balls to Jesse Winker put another runner on base and brought pitching coach Mark Prior out of the dugout.
In the bullpen, left-hander Anthony Banda started to heat up. Before the Dodgers could reach him, however, the inning spiraled out of control.
Starling Marte doubled down the stretch to drive in two runs. Alvarez, Lindor and Brandon Nimmo recorded three more RBIs on two-out hits.
In the midst of all this, Banda sat down again. Instead of getting aggressive with his all-important bullpen – which will play a crucial role in the rest of this series – Roberts felt like he had no choice but to let Flaherty carry him.
“At 5-1, I’m not going to use our leverage guys,” Roberts said, “knowing there’s a cost on the back end and appreciating the fact that there’s still more baseball to be played in the series.”
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The Dodgers didn’t turn around. Andy Pages hit home runs in the fourth (a solo shot) and fifth (a three-run explosion) to keep the Dodgers within striking distance. Mookie Betts then went deep in the sixth, making the score 10-6.
But the Dodgers squandered other opportunities along the way, most notably a bases-loaded strikeout in the fourth inning by Freddie Freeman, part of an 0-for-5 performance that could cause Roberts to reconsider his place in the lineup. Game 6 as he remains limited by a sprained ankle.
And any traction the Dodgers gained was negated by Honeywell, who bailed out the rest of the bullpen with 4⅔ valiant innings but gave up four comeback-squelching insurance runs.
“We can’t start crying, it is what it is,” Betts said. “I have to turn the page and get ready for the next one.”
That not only means preparing for a likely bullpen game in Game 6, but also cleaning up some of the troubling abuses that plagued the Dodgers on Friday.
Shohei Ohtani suffered a “brain spasm” on the bases in the first inning, as Roberts told the Fox broadcast, and failed to score from third base on a groundball by Teoscar Hernández.
Betts looked uncharacteristically shaky in right field, including a bobbled ball that allowed Alvarez to score all the way from first on a Lindor double-turned-triple.
The lineup was also just one of seven with runners in scoring position, a big change from the .329 batting average the Dodgers had in such spots this postseason early in the evening.
The Mets, meanwhile, played their best game of the series, collecting 14 hits without a strikeout.
“They did a better job today,” said Hernández, who has walked seven but zero hits in 18 at-bats this series. “That’s the game. You have to keep going.”
The Dodgers still spoke confidently about their position in the postgame clubhouse.
When Max Muncy was asked early in the season if he would have played Games 6 and 7 of an NLCS at home, he replied, “Uh, yeah. Absolute.”
Still, the chance to end the series early evaporated in Friday’s five-run third inning, with Roberts opting to save his bullpen rather than chase a low-probability, come-from-behind victory.
“It’s hard,” Roberts said. “But if you can think through the game like I do… I think these are the bets I should make.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
