When a team as talented as the Dodgers gets swept in a four-game series, there are so many things that have to go wrong for that to happen—even in Game 4 alone, you could probably point to several mistakes, letdowns, and a bit of bad luck as to why the result went the way it did. In the middle of that, one might focus on Tyler Glasnow as the latest of the noteworthy Dodgers to perform well below their normal standard, leading to this series exit.
All the pressure that was not there with Glasnow during
the regular season, as this team has been able to routinely play it safe with his many injury problems, was stored for this one moment. The reigning back-to-back champs were vulnerable; they needed one dominant outing from a starter who has the stuff to shut down any lineup any time. Despite early glimpses of it, Glasnow came nowhere close to it.
Contrary to every other game in this series, the Dodgers were able to give their starter a significant lead early on. What was lacking when Tarik Skubal, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Blake Snell pitched was given to Glasnow, as Los Angeles hoped to stave off elimination. That pressure to be absolutely perfect wasn’t necessary after just two innings, as the Dodgers put up a four-run lead in the second.
Nearly as important as the early offensive breakthrough, Glasnow looked unhittable through three perfect innings—the Dodgers’ starter struck out two batters in each of the first three frames, bullying an offense that had been giving Los Angeles pitching all sorts of trouble.
A theme of these four games was that all that seemed excruciatingly difficult to achieve for the Dodgers came with relative ease for Milwaukee. While it felt like the Dodgers had to dig deep inside for those four runs in the second, Glasnow went from complete control to getting battered by a Milwaukee offense in the blink of an eye.
It began as it so often does with Glasnow on the mound: a walk, the first of the game to Brice Turang; then came two bullets for extra-base hits, and just like that the Dodgers’ lead was cut in half. And it still could’ve been fine had Glasnow settled in after finishing the inning, but he just generated an even bigger mess in the following frame, again starting with a walk. By the time his line was done, he was responsible for four runs, unable to hold on to an early lead.
For the whole series, you’ve seen me come here and focus on the offense’s struggles over anything else, from underwhelming pitching by a starter and/or relievers, but here things were different. Sure, stopping at four with nothing to show for it from the third inning onward is regrettable, but Glasnow had what no other Dodger starting pitcher had in this whole series, and he squandered it. Excruciatingly, he did so in the worst possible way, twice setting the table for a scoring inning with a free pass.
