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Tarik Skubal, the crown jewel of the trade deadline. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the biggest of big-game pitchers in two countries.
The Dodgers mapped out their National League Championship Series rotation before they even started the division series: Skubal in Game 1, Yamamoto in Game 2, and the World Series on deck.
You can call it logic or you can call it hubris, but reality bites.
The Milwaukee Brewers dumped the Dodgers in the first two games of the NLCS, and now the Dodgers might not need to map out a World Series rotation. If the Dodgers lose the next two games, Skubal and Yamamoto each have already made their final start this season.
Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow, Dodger Nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
“It’s certainly a challenge,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Some aces are portrayed as more equal than others. For two months, the Dodgers have talked about their four aces, but the headliners have been Skubal and Yamamoto, even with Snell a two-time Cy Young winner.
Glasnow stood at his locker late Monday night and pronounced himself “very excited” for the challenge. He’ll start Game 4, following Snell’s start in Game 3.
“We’re down two, but none of us have lost the faith,” he said. “We’re a confident group of people. We’re ready to go.”
In fairness, the Dodgers cannot win on pitching alone.
Yamamoto’s performance was catastrophic. He got as many outs as he did pitching in relief in Game 7 of last year’s World Series, but he threw more than twice as many pitches. He pitched back-to-back complete games last October, but the Dodgers needed seven relievers behind him on Monday.
“He’s a human being too,” Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts said. “I think everyone is so used to him being a robot that if he didn’t go eight innings with no hits or whatever, then it wasn’t Yamamoto.”
Skubal’s performance in Game 1 was satisfactory, but neither him nor Yamamoto would have had much chance of winning with whatever passes for offense among the Dodgers this October.
The Dodgers are batting .193, the lowest of any of the nine postseason entrants to play at least three games. The on-base percentages, compared: .363 for the Brewers, .263 for the Dodgers.
On Monday, the Dodgers had three hits. So did the Milwaukee catcher.
From the No. 2 through the No. 7 spots in the batting order, the Dodgers went 0 for 20.
The star attraction and current cleanup batter, Shohei Ohtani, is compromised by injuries. He is batting .150 this postseason, with no extra-base hits and seven strikeouts in 20 at-bats. The Dodgers are not committed to starting him in Game 3.
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“Everybody knows he is struggling right now,” Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernández said. “They’re being careful the same way as if he was doing an MVP season. It’s not like he has been getting pitches to hit.
“It’s going be even tougher, especially when you are in a slump like that, to come through, because they are not going to let you get hot.”
The absence of hitting puts the pressure squarely on the shoulders of Snell and Glasnow. The last thing a starting pitcher needs is to worry that he might get no more than a run or two of support and, well, here we are.
In his lone start in the NLDS, Snell lasted 3 2/3 innings and walked five.
“You need Snell to go out there and give us some length,” Roberts said, “give us a typical Blake Snell outing and let us deploy guys with a lead.
“I know Blake has a bad taste in his mouth from that last outing against the Braves. So you’re going to see a locked-in, focused Snell.”
In his lone start in the NLDS, Glasnow lasted 4 2/3 innings and walked five.
The Dodgers started this NLCS with Skubal and Yamamoto, lost both games, and now?
“Now we’ve got Blake and Glasnow,” Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman said. “Still a pretty good scenario we’re in. We’ve just [got] to get better on Wednesday.”
Hernández pronounced the state of his team as “still good,” even as Snell and Glasnow can determine the fate of the season.
“If you put them on any other team, they’re going to be No. 1,” Hernández said. “We’ve got a lot of trust in those guys and our team. I think we’re going to be OK.”
Maybe. No team since the 1923 New York Yankees has been swept by a postseason opponent one year and beaten that same opponent the next October, and those Yankees had Babe Ruth.
In the seventh inning of games here in Milwaukee, after “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” the Brewers and their fans sing the “Beer Barrel Polka,” better known as “Roll Out the Barrel.”
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The line that stood out: “We’ve got the blues on the run.”
The Brewers certainly do. It will be up to Snell and Glasnow to stop them.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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