The on-field celebration was so brief you could have missed it, as appropriate for Game 62 in Phoenix as a clinching Game 4 of the National League Division Series. The clubhouse histrionics were soggy, the words from Miguel Rojas and Dave Roberts poignant as ever, befitting a journey that’s now reached 166 games. Yet the booze fountain slowed after a 10-minute burst.
When you win your eighth consecutive postseason series, are aiming for your third consecutive World Series championship, all part of 14 consecutive trips to the playoffs, there’s a certain mastery in toeing the fine line between “act like you’ve been there” and appreciating just how very hard it is.
The Dodgers know. And this particular romp through October is about to get much more
difficult.
The Atlanta Braves made the Dodgers aware of their own mortality for about 36 hours of this National League Division Series. And then a Braves team that was outmanned in the best of times but significantly diminished after surviving a wild card series folded in the face of all that deluxe Dodgers depth.
This NLDS ended Wednesday, Oct. 7, when the Dodgers pushed across three runs in the final three innings to register a 4-1 victory and eliminate Atlanta in four games.
It was workmanlike, “grindy,” as they like to say, in some ways an ideal level of rigor to begin this playoff run. Yet the Braves’ ample resistance was, due to their three-game survival of their wild-card series against Philadelphia, compromised.
To steal a metaphor from Atlanta’s exurban ballpark, the Dodgers Beat the Freeze. But in the National League Championship Series and, perhaps, World Series to come, they’ll no longer have a head start.
“We understand that the job’s not done. We have eight more wins. Stay focused,” Roberts told his team. “There’s no more talented team than the Los Angeles Dodgers. We’re smarter, we’re better and we’re tougher.”
Probably all true. Yet it’s fair to wonder if “better” applies when it matters most – right now.
The Dodgers won 100 games, yet a bevy of injuries and ailments that dogged them in the latter portion of the season seemed evident against Atlanta.
Will Smith, their backbone of a catcher who received all 73 innings of their seven-game World Series triumph in 2025 and never really seemed to recover, went 1-for-16.
Blake Snell, dogged by shoulder and groin woes all season, did not get out of the fourth inning of his Game 2 start. Tyler Glasnow was good for four innings in Game 4.
And of course, Shohei Ohtani was nowhere to be seen on the mound – and virtually invisible in the batter’s box.
The two-way superstar reduced to an ailing DH had two singles in 15 at-bats, struck out four times and had Roberts searching for hope before Game 4, noting his at-bats were better, and that his “misses are better because they are to the big part of the field versus hitting the ball on the ground, to the right side of the infield.”
Well, in his final at-bat of the NLDS, Ohtani hit the ball on the ground, to the right side of the infield, just 85 mph off the bat against a fading Tyler Mahle in the seventh inning.
An hour later, the champagne flying, Roberts told Fox Sports in a clubhouse interview: “If we’re going to win eight more games, we’re going to need Shohei.”
Of course, these are the Dodgers, and the sky will be blue tomorrow. Max Muncy and Kiké Hernandez are forever, the former slamming three home runs and the latter playing the joker role perfectly against Chris Sale, crushing his 17th career postseason homer off the 6-6 ace.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto is on a historic run, ever the unicorn in this postseason of openers and four-and-poor starters. And relievers Edwín Diaz and Tanner Scott, signed for $69 million and $72 million the past two seasons, are both healthy and locking down the eighth and ninth innings, with Edgardo Henriquez’s heat a nice middle-inning bridge.
Playing a seven-inning game against this collection of talent is daunting. But the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees are complete teams, blessed with either real postseason rotations or a force of nature like Jacob Misiorowski.
They’re the type of teams that expose opponents’ weaknesses, that will make Teoscar Hernández’s left field adventures prove far more penal, that will grind the Snells and Glasnows into early showers, and, in the case of the Brewers, have come back to October baseball again and again and again.
One of these times, they will break through. One of these times, the Dodgers won’t survive that moment that, a few weeks later, might cause them to wonder, “How did we pull that off?”
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Or maybe they will. Appropriately, this Dodgers run is shaping up a little bit like the 2000 Yankees. The last team to threepeat survived an 87-win campaign to win their division, survived plucky Oakland and potent Seattle to reach a World Series where they steamrolled the Mets.
Eventually, all that Yankee experience mattered.
These Dodgers know their gravitas matters, too. And heck, they won 100 games, easily winning their division, and seven innings of Yamamoto.
So come Wednesday night, they celebrated again, not too hard but also soaking up every drop. A core that took nearly a decade to win its first World Series knows how fragile all this is.
Fortunately, they ran into a Braves team ready to crack. Now, the true tests await, the Dodgers’ greatness – and deficiencies – about ready to go under the microscope.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Dodgers survive Atlanta. Their greatness - and flaws - will be for all to see in NLCS
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