This time they didn’t choke.
This time they did the choking.
On a glorious night amid a swirling sea of cheerful blue, the Dodgers wrapped their weathered arms around the San Diego Padres on Friday and crushed those brown jerseys like an empty paper bag, ultimately exhaling with redemption, relief and a coveted spot on only four wins from the World Series.
In the winner-take-all Game 5 of the National League Division Series, the Dodgers put all the criticism of the past two postseason collapses under the microscope under a barrage of fastballs and long balls in a near-perfect 2 -0 win over the Padres in a shamelessly cheerful Dodger Stadium.
Buried were the sins of their predecessors, the shortcomings of previous seasons, the rut of post-season humiliation.
Read more: Dodgers overcome recent postseason frustrations in NLDS Game 5 win over Padres
Buried, from here to Chula Vista.
It was the first postseason series win at Chavez Ravine with fans in attendance in 11 years, and man, it was a sight to behold.
When Kiké Hernández threw the last ground ball to Max Muncy, the roofs of the pavilion came loose, 50,000 fans jumped and roared in unison, Blake Treinen stood in the middle of it all on the mound and raised both hands to the sky as if in shock . The Dodgers team surrounded him and hugged and bounced like they were crying out two years of October pain.
“I Love LA” has rarely sounded louder, lasted so long, or been so full of hope.
Later, in a Dodgers clubhouse full of bubbly, Miguel Rojas held up a shot glass and shouted to the group that had shut out the Padres in the final thirteen innings, “Hey bullpen! This photo is for you guys!”
Dave Roberts then urged his team to keep pushing as the manager shouted: ‘Eight more wins! And I’m telling you now, guys, I’ve never believed in a group of men more than I believe in you. And most importantly, you all believed in each other.”
The Dodgers now host the upstart New York Mets in the National League Championship starting here Sunday, a seven-game matchup with the winner advancing to the World Series.
It will feel anticlimactic, and for good reason. The Dodgers should dominate. The outgunned Mets have advanced this postseason thanks to small miracles. The superior Dodgers are all muscular.
They proved it once and for all Friday night against a Padres team that was likely their biggest hurdle in their pursuit of their first full-season World Series championship in 36 years.
This first series was the most difficult. This was the one the Dodgers really needed. They entered the tense evening amid the memories of first-round exits in the past two postseasons, including a 2022 humiliation at the hands of these Padres.
Can they shake off the demons from their history? Can they erase the memories of their failures?
Could they ever do that?
“We didn’t come here to win the NL West; we came to win the World Series… we have to do that, or we go home and think about it in the offseason, and this team goes to spring training to think about the failures of the last few years, blah, blah, blah. Hernández said.
They indeed avoided the blah, blah, blah.
They did it with wow, wow, wow.
It started with the surprise starter putting in a shocking performance, with the struggling Yoshinobu Yamamoto ultimately earning a portion of his record-setting $325 million contract by shutting out the Padres with two hits in five innings.
It continued with the Dodgers’ own Señor October, Hernández, a productive October hitter who sent Yu Darvish’s first pitch into the left field stands in the second inning. Hernández has an impressive 14 home runs and 29 RBIs in 188 postseason at-bats, including three home runs against the Chicago Cubs in Game 5 of the 2017 NLCS.
“You have to have the right mentality, the right mentality, to come here and just find a way to dominate the day,” he said, noting that he visualizes success after the season. “You just find a way, whatever you have to find, so that when the moment comes, when the big moment happens and you step up to the plate or whatever it is, you don’t let the moment go. If you get too big, you have you feel like you are bigger than the moment and there is no moment that is too big for you.”
His moment was followed five innings later by a similar shot into the left field stands by Teoscar Hernández, the underrated offseason steal of Andrew Friedman, the MVP not named Ohtani.
The game ended with the Dodger bullpen that had been so brilliant in a do-or-die victory in Game 4, this time four relievers holding the Padres hitless through the final four innings. The Padres finished the series without scoring a run in the final 24 innings, with Dodger pitching retiring the final 19 batters.
The crowd roared with every throw and kept the water bottles to themselves, a worthy accompaniment to a team flirting with greatness.
“If there’s one thing this crowd has, it’s hunger,” Kiké Hernández said. “They want a championship. They want one more. The city could not celebrate the one from a few years ago due to obvious circumstances. We know how bad they want it… we just know our fans are behind us and we’re ready to rock with them.”
They rocked, the Padres were rolled, one October chapter ended, two more remained, a once dreaded journey danced on.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
