This time it was a 111-victory regular season devalued by an ugly playoff defeat, this one to the rival Padres.
SAN DIEGO — At the risk of recency bias, this was the worst Dodgers collapse of them all.
“I mean, all the sacrifices you make during the course of the season, leaving your family and doing all that, and you have one goal in mind. You get to that chance, to be able to reach that goal, and you come up short. It’s disappointment. I don’t know what another word is. It’s just disappointed. We had a really good team. We just didn’t get it done.”
Yet they went to the bottom of the seventh inning Saturday with a 3-0 lead and nine outs to get to take this series back to Dodger Stadium for a fifth and deciding game on Sunday. Instead, it blew up in their faces before they got three of those precious outs, and again bullpen decisions were a factor, as they seemingly are every October. Even with the most dominant team in the game, gun-shy Dodger fans were probably right to worry going into the postseason.
And then Cronenworth struck the fatal blow, a two-run line single up the middle to turn that 3-0 deficit into a 5-3 lead. Well before then, the question arose:He’s been the Dodgers’ best relief pitcher for three months. The no-roles concept was designed to provide the flexibility for a Phillips to face the opposition’s key hitters in leverage situations.
“He gave up a ground ball that got by Max … Muncy could have fielded it, could have been a double play. It wasn’t to be, and that’s baseball.” on that October evening against the Washington Nationals in 2019 when another brilliant season came to an abrupt and early end?
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