The four remaining NL teams take center stage tonight, and they won’t have to battle Monday Night Football for the sporting world’s attention like their junior circuit counterparts had to last night.
We are treated to quite a tasty matchup between the Dodgers and Braves to get things started, while the Brewers will try to sweep away the Padres in the nightcap. If I had to put money down on how many innings I end up watching in the late window, I would bet two innings or fewer. Gotta get my beauty
rest.
Dodgers at Braves, 6:00 p.m., FS1
Series tied 1-1
RHP Yoshinobu Yamamoto (14-9, 2.53 ERA) vs. LHP Chris Sale (14-9, 2.16 ERA)
The NL Cy Young Award is probably going to Jacob Misiorowski or Cristopher Sánchez, but these two starters featured in Game 3 are sure to get some consideration.
Yamamoto is only in his third big league season, but we already how good he can be, particularly in the playoffs. He had a 1.02 ERA over 17.2 innings in last year’s World Series, taking home MVP honors for the set. Sale owns a career 5.83 ERA as a pitcher in the playoffs, but he has been better than that this fall, already tossing 7.2 innings for the Braves in the Wild Card round.
Dave Roberts has deployed a lineup for this game that sees Shohei Ohtani hitting out of the fifth spot in the order. That is the lowest he has hit in a starting lineup since 2020. The future Hall of Fame is in a legitimate slump right now. He missed most of September, and had a .567 OPS when he did play. That was after a pedestrian .795 OPS in August. He’s 2-for-8 with two strikeouts, no walks, and no extra base hits so far in this series.
Brewers at Padres, 9:30 p.m., FS1
Brewers lead series 2-0
RHP Dustin May (7-9, 4.70 ERA) vs. RHP Nick Pivetta (3-2, 2.86 ERA)
It will be interesting to see how this game flows early on. The Padres are the ones that have to pull out all the stops for a win, but they also have a pitcher on the mound that they probably trust quite a bit. That said, if they see even a wobble, manager Craig Stammen will be forced to go to a bullpen that he has seen be out-pitched twice already.
Meanwhile, the Brewers can let the game come to them a bit. Obviously, they want to win, but if May falls apart early and the game gets out of hand, they may just ask him to bite the bullet so that the relievers can live to see another day. Should the Padres pull this one out, Game 4 is tomorrow night, and a fresh bullpen could be the difference maker.
