Copyright Los Angeles Times
You remember the stickers. You might even have one yourself. They were the stickers that reproduced the Fox Sports score box, showing the New York Yankees leading the Dodgers, 5-0, with two outs in the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series. The Dodgers would clinch the series that night, because the Yankees imploded in that inning: Aaron Judge dropped a fly ball, Anthony Volpe committed a throwing error, Gerrit Cole did not cover first base, and the Dodgers tied the score before the Yankees finally secured that third out. It wasn’t quite like that for the Dodgers on Wednesday, but it was uncomfortably close. The Dodgers’ mistakes were scattered over nine innings, not clustered in one. They were not eliminated from the World Series. If they play another defensive game like this one, they just might be. After a sluggish 6-1 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays in this year’s Game 5, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was asked what disappointed him the most about the game. It could have been his team’s disappearing offense. The Dodgers have scored three runs in their past two games, and they’re batting .201 in the series. On Wednesday, the top four batters — Shohei Ohtani, Will Smith, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman — went a combined 1 for 15 with eight strikeouts. It could have been his team’s bullpen, again. On a night Roberts chose not to use closer Roki Sasaki to try to hold the deficit at 3-1 in the seventh inning, Edgardo Henriquez and Anthony Banda exploded it to 6-1 within seven batters. Roberts had a different answer. “Just not playing a clean game,” he said. The Dodgers needed Blake Snell to go deep into the game, and he did. He threw 116 pitches, a total he has topped only twice in his 10-year career. With a cleaner defense, though, he could have made those 116 pitches last into the eighth, or maybe even the ninth, giving the Dodgers the opportunity to skip over that pesky non-closer part of their bullpen. In the third inning, Betts fielded what could have been an inning-ending double play ball, but his relay from shortstop was wide of second baseman Tommy Edman. The Dodgers had to settle for the force play, and Snell had to make an extra seven pitches to get out of the inning. Edman said such plays “just get magnified in situations like that.” In the next inning, right fielder Teoscar Hernández made another such play, charging toward the line and sliding to try to corral a drive hit by Daulton Varsho. “I just went to catch it and fell short,” Hernández said. “I tried to get there.” The ball skipped past Hernández, and so Varsho ended up with a triple. He scored on a sacrifice fly, a run the Blue Jays would not have scored had Hernández played it safe and played the ball on a hop. “Blake pitched a heck of a ball game,” Roberts said. “But, yeah, giving up bases and not converting outs when you have an opportunity to convert outs, that came back to bite us.” Said Smith, the catcher: “That happens. You can’t play perfect baseball all the time. I thought he did a really good job minimizing those opportunities for them.” Snell was not immune. The Dodgers threw four wild pitches, leading to this scoring account from the seventh inning: Addison Barger singled, took second on a wild pitch by Snell, took third on a wild pitch by Snell, and scored on a wild pitch by Henriquez. In the eighth, a wild pitch by Banda advanced Ernie Clement into scoring position, and then he scored on a subsequent single. The Dodgers, remember, are the team with all the postseason experience. The Blue Jays’ starting pitcher, Trey Yesavage, made his first major league appearance 45 days ago. Ohtani led off the bottom of the first inning with a comebacker. Yesavage bobbled the ball and then dropped it, but he had what you might call veteran poise, picking up the ball and throwing what Toronto manager John Schneider called “kind of a shovel pass” to first base for the out. “The fact that he kind of shoveled it the way he did and kind of had a little smile on his face,” Schneider said, “it actually gives you a little bit of confidence that he’s in the right frame of mind.” He was. He struck out 12. He gave up one run. The Jays had two runs after two batters. The Dodgers scored one, so you could say the poor defense ultimately did not impact the outcome. In the eighth inning, Ohtani hit a hard grounder toward first base, where Vladimir Guerrero Jr. snatched the ball in a position so awkward he fell to the ground. As he lay there, he slapped first base with his bare hand. Aesthetics be damned, he got the job done defensively. The Dodgers did not. In the aftermath, Smith exuded calm and confidence. “We trust each other,” he said. “We believe we’re the best team in baseball.”
