Dodgers defy ‘experts,’ quiet Padres to reach NLCS

LOS ANGELES — They had all the money, all the stars and all the hype, but what these Dodgers needed most, they learned, was an edge.

They found it during the stretch run of their season, when injuries piled up and doubt crept in. It coalesced around a short, cutting message that littered their group chat throughout September and became their rallying cry after falling to the brink of elimination against their bitter rivals.

Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy was among the many who shared it Friday night, after overcoming the San Diego Padres in the National League Division Series: “F— them all.”

The Dodgers rode five innings from an effective Yoshinobu Yamamoto, home runs from Kiké Hernández and Teoscar Hernández and another run of dominant relief work to beat the Padres 2-0 at an electric Dodger Stadium in a winner-take-all Game 5.

Their postseason rotation is down to three members, and their No. 3 hitter, Freddie Freeman, continues to be bothered by a badly sprained right ankle. But the Dodgers will nonetheless move on to face the upstart New York Mets in the NL Championship Series, with Game 1 scheduled for Sunday.

Dave Roberts, winding down his ninth season as Dodgers manager, compared the achievement to his Boston Red Sox overcoming a 3-0 series deficit against the New York Yankees in 2004 and his Dodgers overcoming a 3-1 deficit against the Atlanta Braves in 2020. It’s because of recent history, which has seen the Dodgers get trounced by division rivals in the NLDS each of the past two years. And it’s because of the opponent.

“I wanted to beat those guys,” Roberts said. “We all wanted to beat those guys really bad.”

Roberts awoke Friday morning to manage his eighth winner-take-all game and felt a certain calmness about it. He didn’t know what to expect from Yamamoto and had no idea which other obstacles would present themselves, but he took solace in the identity of a team he considered uniquely relentless and resilient.

Said Roberts: “I believe in this team more than any team I’ve had.”

The Dodgers splurged more than $1 billion this offseason, adding Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow and Teoscar Hernández, among others. They outlasted the Padres and won 98 regular-season games to capture their 11th division title in 12 years. But many saw them as underdogs in this NLDS. The Padres were healthier, more complete, with an offense that was humming, a rotation that had been dominant and a bullpen that stood among the deepest in the sport. The Dodgers rallied around that.

“What was it, 80% of the f—ing experts said we were going to lose?” Muncy said. “F— those guys. We know who we are. We’re the f—ing best team in baseball, and we’re out there to prove it.”

When the Dodgers lost Game 4 to the Braves in the 2020 NLCS, requiring three consecutive victories to reach the World Series, a players-only group chat began to populate with positive messages. It helped lift the team to a championship. Something similar occurred recently, after Game 3, with the Dodgers down 2-1 in the series and requiring a bullpen game to survive Game 4. Kiké Hernández, a longtime spark plug in Los Angeles, was among the most vocal.

One message in particular resonated with Dodgers second baseman Gavin Lux.

“He said, ‘F— everybody,'” Lux recalled. “‘Everyone that’s not in this clubhouse.'”

When Kiké Hernández was placed in the starting lineup for Game 4 — a by-product of Freeman and shortstop Miguel Rojas being too injured to play — he told Teoscar Hernández that two Hernándezes had never homered in the same postseason game. That Wednesday night, Kiké Hernández told him, they would be the first. When it didn’t happen, he told him they would do it in Friday’s Game 5. Then they did.

“I believe in him, he believe in me, I believe in myself, and we enjoyed today,” Teoscar Hernández said.

Seven years ago, in 2017, Kiké Hernández got into the habit of visualizing success going into postseason games. Lying in bed the night before, he would picture himself hitting a home run, rounding the bases, conducting postgame interviews. It helped make him one of the sport’s most productive postseason performers. He did the same thing before Game 5 then got a first-pitch fastball in the second inning and clobbered it 428 feet to left-center field to give the Dodgers a 1-0 lead. Five innings later, against a continually effective Yu Darvish, the other Hernández got a 2-1 slider that leaked out over the plate and sent it 420 feet to the same vicinity.

Teoscar Hernández has been a fixture in the middle of the Dodgers’ lineup all year. Kiké Hernández was brought back for his eighth year with the Dodgers to serve as a versatile bench player, but also to star in October. His latest home run was his 14th in 75 career postseason games.

“I kept telling myself, ‘They brought you here for a reason. They brought you here to play in October,'” Kiké Hernández said. “I wanted to come back to make a run with this team, because I really want to have a parade. I knew that whether it was going to be on defense or at the plate, I was going to find a way to win this game for us.”

“I wanted to beat those guys. We all wanted to beat those guys really bad.”

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts

Yamamoto did something similar, while working to sync up his delivery going into the biggest start of his major league career. The Dodgers made Yamamoto the highest-paid pitcher in baseball history this offseason, signing him to a 12-year, $325 million contract. He struggled in his Dodgers debut against the Padres in March and struggled in his postseason debut against the Padres in Game 1.

But the Dodgers had also seen him shine under Major League Baseball’s brightest lights, dominating at Yankee Stadium on June 7 and stifling the Chicago Cubs — in a matchup against countrymen Shota Imanaga and Seiya Suzuki — when he returned from a three-month absence on Sept. 10. The Dodgers hoped that version would present itself when it mattered most — then they saw him commanding a fastball that sat consistently at 97 mph in the first inning and knew it would.

“In talking to him,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said, “you can get the sense that he wanted the ball.”

The ball went from Yamamoto to Evan Phillips to Alex Vesia to Michael Kopech to, in the end, Blake Treinen. Together, they held the Padres to zero runs and three baserunners. They and many others combined to hold the Padres scoreless over the final 24 innings of this NLDS, the third-longest streak to close a series in postseason history. The Padres’ offense wasn’t supposed to be tamed like this. Their depth and their talent were supposed to overcome even the best relievers.

The Dodgers didn’t care for any of that, and Kiké Hernández summed up why:

“We have a lot of ‘F U’ in us.”