OC Register: Alexander: The Dodgers’ 106 regular-season wins? They’re meaningless

[AngelsWin.com]

LOS ANGELES — What does the sudden irrelevance of 106 regular-season victories sound like?

Try stunned silence. Try the oof! of a punch to the gut.

Or try the sound of three devastating cracks of the bat.

It is the sound of a season in which the Dodgers ended well short of their ambition, disturbingly so. It is the sound of second-guessing, which was loud and angry in the ballpark on Wednesday night and will be constant in the days to come, the questions including why Manager Dave Roberts gave two pitchers, in particular, Clayton Kershaw and Joe Kelly, longer leashes than maybe they should have had.

But this is the beauty of baseball, and also its curse. This is not European soccer, where the team that finishes first in the regular season gets the trophy. This is where the format of a short series can skew the talent differences between teams, where matchups become critical and where the team that won 93 games and survived the wild-card round can take down the team that won its division by 21 games and didn’t play a game of extreme urgency from May until the very last night of its season.

Thanks for playing, Dodgers. See you at Camelback Ranch in February.

The faithful among the 54,159 who filled Dodger Stadium on Wednesday night felt anticipation, anxiety, hope and stress all at once throughout their team’s 7-4 Game 5 loss to the Washington Nationals, a night when the Dodgers had a 3-0 lead, got 6-2/3 strong innings from Walker Buehler – their best pitcher, and let there be no argument about it – but let him down.

It was a night when Clayton Kershaw’s agonizing postseason history added a chapter, with the back-to-back home runs he allowed to Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto on consecutive pitches in the eighth inning to fritter away a 3-1 lead. And it was a night when Joe Kelly, who seemed to have turned a corner after early-season inconsistency, joined the Dodgers legacy of Ralph Branca, Tom Niedenfuer and Jonathan Broxton when Howie Kendrick, a former Dodger, hit a grand slam over the center field fence in the 10th to break it open.

The early success – a two-run homer by Max Muncy and a solo shot by Kiké Hernández off nemesis Stephen Strasburg – turned out to be just a tease. The Nationals, the guys with the combustible bullpen and a pair of aces who needed to extend themselves to get their team through the wild-card game, stole the lunch money and then swiped the bike and rode away, laughing.

And in the sudden silence of The Ravine, all of those folks who had tried to convince themselves that this October would be different – even as they winced and flinched every time a Dodgers relief pitcher gave up a hit or a walk or a run for six months – might have been thinking the same thing: “Why us?”

Why? That’s baseball. It’s wonderful, but it can be so cruel.

“That’s how this game is,” Kenley Jansen said afterward. “Winning 90 games is hard. But winning 106, that’s amazing. We’ve got to just keep our heads up, man. Things happen in baseball. They played better today. They took advantage of situations, and here we are today standing here.”

Some numbers to chew on: Veteran scribe Joe Posnanski of The Athletic researched Game 5s since the division series format was born in 1995, and counting Wednesday’s games the visiting team is 20-11. Teams having to win a Game 4 to force a Game 5, which was the case in both the Dodgers-Nats and Atlanta-St. Louis series, are now 11-4.

(Maybe that means fans of the Houston Astros, who face their own Game 5 on Thursday against Tampa Bay, should be a little nervous, too.)

As for those second-guesses …

Kershaw got the last out of the seventh on three pitches, getting Adam Eaton on a half-swing to bail out Buehler. He then went back out to face Rendon (5 for 19 with no homers lifetime against him) and Soto (lefty vs. lefty, 0 for 1 lifetime).

“I felt good about Clayton right there,” Roberts said. “The success that Clayton’s had against Soto with the two-run lead, I’ll take Clayton any day in that situation.”

When it didn’t work, Roberts went to Kenta Maeda, who struck out the side. Roberts was booed as he came back to the dugout after replacing Kershaw.

He was booed louder two innings later. Kelly pitched a clean ninth inning but said that when he came back out for the 10th, “I didn’t have the command from inning one to inning two … I just wasn’t locating.”

A walk, a ground-rule double and an intentional walk set up Kendrick’s at-bat. Kelly tried to get a fastball inside to get weak contact and a ground ball. Instead, he left it over the plate.

And as Kelly joined Branca, Niedenfuer and Broxton (and, yes, Kershaw) in the ranks of Dodgers pitchers who gave up soul-crushing home runs, so did Kendrick join Bobby Thomson, Ozzie Smith, Jack Clark and Matt Stairs in the pantheon of hitters who ruined Dodgers seasons by hitting those homers.

Related Articles

• Whicker: Bullpen roulette backfires on Dodgers yet again
• Howie Kendrick’s return to Dodger Stadium ends better than it began
• Dodgers suffer more postseason frustration with NLDS loss to Nationals
• Whicker: The only thing that could beat the Dodgers did so in Game 5
• Alexander: Dodgers, Nationals roll anticipation, anxiety, hope and stress into one Game 5

Still, none of this should be surprising. October baseball is not like facing the Rockies and Padres 18 or 19 times a piece. For the fan, wrapped up in the day-to-day struggle, the postseason can be a very pure form of torture. And for every team but one, it will not end well.

Will the Dodgers ever be that one team?

“It will happen,” Jansen said. “Trust me. That’s how the game is. That’s the beauty of the game. You’ve got to keep your head up, work even harder. You can’t give up, man. You have to come with a mindset to win a championship. Like I say, it will happen one day.”

It might happen when their fans least expect it. After all, isn’t that how it went down in 1988?

jalexander@scng.com

@Jim_Alexander on Twitter

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[Claude]

This is very poor journalism. Was our 98 win 2014 season also meaningless?

[yk9001]

If Kenley Jansen was in a high leverage spot last night, and gave up a run, Dave Roberts would have been second guessed for that as well.

 

"Hey, you know that one thing the manager did, that turned out bad?  

I would have done the opposite."

[ten ocho recon scout]

27 minutes ago, Calzone 2 said:

This is very poor journalism. Was our 98 win 2014 season also meaningless?

To be fair....

In both cases, for hardcore baseball nerds like us, we can appreciate it. But its like any other good year.... it will be forgotten by most pretty soon.

And not to take anything away from what the dodgers did, but seattle still holds the record. It would be something different if the dogs broke that.

[ten ocho recon scout]

14 minutes ago, yk9001 said:

If Kenley Jansen was in a high leverage spot last night, and gave up a run, Dave Roberts would have been second guessed for that as well.

 

"Hey, you know that one thing the manager did, that turned out bad?  

I would have done the opposite."

Agree totally.

Yeah, roberts should have fill in the blank. That said, if he tried something else and that didnt work....

Lets say the nats still tie it, and the game goes longer than 10. Then it would be "Kershaw only threw 3 pitches!"

 

[tomsred]

I don't think they are meaningless, it solidifies that they will pick second from last in the draft order.  That's good, right?