Dodgers live up to their own expectations, defeating Mets to reach the World Series

The low point came 34 days ago.

During a late-season series in Atlanta, the Dodgers lost two games as their division lead dwindled. They learned Tyler Glasnow would become the latest, and most important, pitcher lost for the season to injury. For a brief moment, the team felt that people were “panicking,” as outfielder Teoscar Hernández described it, about their season. For one of the few times in a year full of adversity and unforeseen setbacks, manager Dave Roberts noticed confidence in his clubhouse waning.

So, in an uncharacteristic move for a manager who describes himself as “not a big meeting guy,” Roberts decided to call one, gathering his players before a Sept. 18 game against the Braves to deliver a simple reminder.

“We’re still the Dodgers,” Roberts told the group, as Hernández recalled. “We can do special things.”

Five weeks later, the Dodgers made good on that prediction.

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On Sunday night, they returned to the World Series.

With a 10-5 defeat of the New York Mets in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, the Dodgers won the 25th pennant in their storied franchise history. For the fourth time in the last eight years, they will play for a championship that, this season, few outside the team saw coming.

“There’s just a lot of unforeseen things that can happen in a long baseball season, and we have a lot of good players,” Roberts said this week, having been at the helm for each of the team’s past World Series trips.

“I just felt we have enough talent in the room to do that,” Roberts added. “But the most important thing was that those guys responded amongst themselves.”

Respond, the Dodgers have.

To the litany of starting pitching absences that left their October rotation unsettled. To an ever-changing cast of characters amid their injury-plagued season.

Even the playoffs have brought setbacks, from Freddie Freeman’s sprained ankle to inconsistent starting pitching to two elimination games in the NL Division Series, and a squandered chance to clinch the pennant in Game 5 of the NLCS on Friday.

Yet, the team managed to advance to the Fall Classic anyway — riding a wave of internal belief that hasn’t always been present in October disappointments of years past.

“It was just about how we were gonna get here,” outfielder Mookie Betts said. “The question was not if.”

Indeed, the Dodgers always planned to be in this position, trying to win their second championship since 2020 and first in a full season since 1988. But the group mounting this run looks far different than they ever expected.

It’s why, in Game 6 on Sunday, they had to go with a bullpen game, lacking the rotation depth typically required of a deep postseason run. They didn’t have Freeman in the starting lineup, either, electing to rest him amid a one-for-15 slump in which his ankle had hampered his swing and limited his defensive range.

The team had a rookie in center field, Andy Pages. They had two veterans with sub-.230 batting averages in the regular season, Kiké Hernández and Chris Taylor, in the infield. They had a slumping catcher, Will Smith, behind the plate.

“How we got there,” Roberts conceded with a laugh, “absolutely not how we envisioned this.”

But they also had Betts, Shohei Ohtani … and Tommy Edman, the trade deadline acquisition who tied a Dodgers franchise record with 11 RBIs in the series, including four on Sunday (a two-run double and two-run homer). They had a lockdown bullpen that escaped jam after jam in Game 6, leaving 12 runners stranded by holding the Mets one-for-eight with runners in scoring position.

And, most importantly, they had the right mixture of confidence, intensity and ever-abundant resiliency — displaying all the traits Roberts emphasized in his clubhouse meeting last month.

“It was just a meeting to put everybody’s head up again,” Teoscar Hernández said. “And just keep pushing until we win everything.”

To do that, the Dodgers will have to produce four more victories against the New York Yankees in the World Series, which will begin with Game 1 on Friday at Dodger Stadium. The matchup marks the 12th time the Dodgers and Yankees have met for a championship. Few have ever been so hyped.

The Dodgers’ final step there was Sunday’s nervy game, in which the team jumped to a 6-1 lead before hanging on down the stretch.

Edman supplied the early offense, answering an RBI infield single from Pete Alonso in the top of the first with a two-run double in the bottom of the inning. The cleanup hitter Sunday with Freeman out of the lineup, Edman delivered again in the third, getting four-straight changeups from Mets starter Sean Manaea before pounding an elevated fastball to left for a two-run blast.

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“You’ve got to give them credit,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza told the Fox broadcast while discussing the Dodgers’ approach against Manaea, who failed to replicate his Game 2 effectiveness in a two-inning, five-run outing. “Because they were all over him.”

The Dodgers added more before the inning was over. Max Muncy drew a walk in Manaea’s final at-bat. Then, reliever Phil Maton threw a hanging slider that Smith launched over the center field wall. Smith only has six hits this postseason, but two have been important home runs in the team’s two series-clinching wins.

Up 6-1 at that point, Roberts carefully managed his limited options out of the bullpen the rest of the way.

Rookie right-hander Ben Casparius offered an early helping hand. Following opener Michael Kopech in the second inning, he escaped a two-on, two-out jam on a down-the-middle fastball that Brandon Nimmo popped up. He returned to the mound in the third for a fourth out.

From there, Roberts was able to string together the final seven innings with nothing but trusted high-leverage relief arms. Anthony Banda stranded the bases loaded in the third, striking out Jeff McNeil to extinguish that threat. Ryan Brasier gave up a two-run homer to Mark Vientos in the fourth, but bounced back with a scoreless fifth.

More trouble arose in the sixth, when the Mets drew back-to-back two-out walks off Evan Phillips to load the bases again. But he executed a crucial three-pitch sequence against Jesse Winker, dotting a couple outer edge fastballs before snapping off a sweeper that Winker hit to left. The shallow fly ball that hung up just long enough for Teoscar Hernández to get there. Once again, disaster had been averted.

The teams traded runs in the next two half-innings. Ohtani hit an RBI single to center in the bottom of the sixth, capitalizing on Alonso’s poor decision to — unsuccessfully — try and get the lead runner on a Taylor sacrifice bunt in the preceding at-bat. The Mets then squandered another chance in the top of the seventh, scoring only once — on a Francisco Alvarez sacrifice fly — after having runners on the corners with one out against Daniel Hudson.

That paved the way for Blake Treinen, the Dodgers’ best reliever this postseason, to get the final six outs. The seventh Dodgers pitcher of the night, he got them out mostly with ease, hardly even needing the three insurance runs the Dodgers added in the eighth, even with the Mets scoring one more run in the ninth.

Asked earlier this week about the mid-September team meeting in Atlanta, Treinen called it a “challenge” from Roberts to the rest of the team.

“It wasn’t this big rah-rah thing, and he didn’t chew us [out],” Treinen said. “But it was like, ‘Hey guys, this is who we are … We’re as good as we want to be.’”

“I think we’ll look back,” Treinen added, “and say it was a turning point.”

One that has resulted in the Dodgers going to the World Series — an accomplishment that, despite everything that went wrong this year, they always believed they would achieve.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.