Pitching, pitching, pitching. That was the storyline in baseball until the Dodger offense took the field and decided to show not why this team was favored to beat the Reds, but why it was widely considered the leading contender to win the World Series at the beginning of the year. Los Angeles faced one of the many aces that started a game this first day of the Wild Card round and simply ran Hunter Greene out of the building with a parade of long balls against him and the Reds’ bullpen.
In a short
series, time is not on your side as the superior team, but Shohei Ohtani got that memo, helping Los Angeles take a lead they’d never relinquish with a solo homer in the top of the first.
It was difficult even tracking a missile that left Ohtani’s bat at over 117 MPH before it went over the wall. It was the fourth-hardest-hit long ball in the postseason since the beginning of the Statcast era, trailing only Giancarlo Stanton, Kyle Schwarber, and a previous Ohtani homer. Further enhancing the absurdity of that homer, it came on a Hunter Greene fastball clocked at 100.4 MPH.
Greene never truly settled in, but after that Ohtani homer, there were a couple of moments in which it looked like the Dodgers would let him off the hook. This would have allowed for the game to carry on with a low score like every single other postseason matchup so far, with runners being stranded in both the first and second innings. Ultimately, the firepower of the Dodger offense prevailed, and Teoscar Hernández and Tommy Edman went back-to-back to already blow this game wide open in the third.
Something is intriguing about Hernández and Edman batting next to each other because. Although they’re completely different players, there is a parallel to make between them as noted X factors of the Dodgers’ offense. Partially due to injuries, but also some unexpected inconsistencies, both Edman and Hernández didn’t quite perform to the level expected from them throughout the year. Their performance in the previous postseason played a massive part in helping the Dodgers secure the World Series title, and if they are to go far this time around, they’ll need the likes of these two and other complementary quality players to step up as well. That will make the difference between this offense simply carrying its weight or being a full-on juggernaut.
Despite the 5-0 lead after three, the Dodgers’ offense never fully stopped, and it’s a good thing that it didn’t. Already having homered in this game, neither Ohtani nor Hernandez was done, and they went on to become only the fifth duo in the history of the sport to go deep for the same team in a postseason game. Interestingly enough, three of the previous four times came since 2020. Credit to Sarah Langs for the info.
It’s not always that the difference between two teams shows up quite so dramatically. However, having hit 77 more home runs than the Reds during the regular season, the Dodgers showed their superior power by outhomering Cincinnati five-to-zero in what was the only comfortable win of this first day of postseason play.
As it turns out, due to the bullpen struggles in the eighth inning, the Dodgers needed every bit of those 10 runs, not necessarily to win the game, but to avoid what was a sense of uneasiness from turning into genuine fear. At one point late in this one, the Reds managed to have the tying run on deck, but that was as close as it got in this 10-5 Dodger win, due in large part to the power of this outstanding lineup.
