LOS ANGELES — Saturday afternoon at Dodger Stadium starts the 29th postseason series for the Dodgers during their record-tying 14 consecutive seasons making the playoffs. It’s the 23rd postseason series for manager Dave Roberts, who is in his 11th season at the helm in Los Angeles.
“It’s important. Just to hold serve at home I think is important. To take on a team that’s coming out of a series with momentum and then to kind of gain the momentum by winning Game 1, very important,” Roberts said Friday.
“Maybe not as important as a three-game series, like we’ve been in before, but Game 1 is important. I think it just certainly sets the tone and gives you a lot of momentum.”
Since 2013, the Dodgers have played in two best-of-3 wild card series (I did not count their 2021 National League wild card game win over St. Louis as a Game 1), 13 best-of-5 NL Division Series, and 13 best-of-7 series (eight NLCS trips, five World Series). That’s 28 total series for the Dodgers in 13 years, and those series saw the Game 1 winner also capture the series 21 times, or 75 percent of the time.
Winning the first game of a postseason series doesn’t guarantee anything, nor does losing Game 1. After all, the Dodgers under Roberts are 15-7 (.682) when facing elimination in the postseason since 2016, while the rest of MLB is 80-100 (.444) in such games.
But it certainly helps getting a leg up by winning Game 1.
“Setting the tone, getting the win in that first game is very important. I think one thing we do very special here is we play today, we’re not worried about tomorrow or what we did yesterday.” said Alex Vesia, who is in his sixth postseason in his six years in Los Angeles. “Taking it one game at a time, we just want to win today. That’s something you hear, and then actually going through it, there’s a difference.”
Here’s how the numbers look over the previous 13 postseasons, in all series best-of-five or longer.
The Dodgers’ series since 2013 in which the Game 1 winner did not win the series were the 2017 World Series, 2018 NLCS, 2019 NLDS, 2020 NLCS, 2021 NLDS, 2022 NLDS, and the 2025 World Series.
In this particular NLDS against a Braves team that is running a bullpen game on Saturday after a taxing three-game wild card series, a Dodgers win in Game 1 (and perhaps Game 2) has a particular chance in potential reverberating throughout the Division Series.
“The advantage for us is we have an opportunity to not let their pitching staff come up for air, and how do you do that? You have to exhaust the starter,” Roberts said Friday. “You have to get in their pen, and you have to have them deploy arms as soon as possible and get that carousel going and continue to beat starters. Then you can suffocate them.
“But if you sit back and let that starter go six or seven innings, that now resets pen, and it changes the dynamic of a series. So yeah, we have an opportunity to really expose them if we take the right at-bats and the right approach.”
