All One Can Do Is Hope: Dodgers One Loss From the End

There are times when going to the box score and crunching the numbers can provide a better understanding of why a game, or in this case an entire series, has turned out the way it has.

After Wednesday night's 6-2 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers, however, there is little need to break out a calculator, consult a spreadsheet or summon the statistical department. The Dodgers are getting their undies handed to them, and Milwaukee is being kind enough to return them neatly folded.

Down three games to none in the National League Championship Series, the two-time defending World Series champions are one loss away from watching their season come to an abrupt and thoroughly unpleasant conclusion.

The Dodgers have not merely fallen behind in this series; they have spent three games looking like a team that has forgotten how to turn its considerable collection of offensive talent into something resembling a functioning offense. The Brewers, meanwhile, have looked like a club that understands precisely what it wants to do and has no particular interest in waiting for the Dodgers to remember how to stop it.

Wednesday's game offered a particularly cruel illustration of the problem. The Dodgers had opportunities throughout the evening, finally took a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the sixth inning, and briefly gave the home crowd reason to believe that perhaps, just perhaps, the evening might end with something other than another long ride home. Will Smith's two-run double off Milwaukee reliever Abner Uribe provided the breakthrough, snapping an offensive drought that had become increasingly difficult to watch. Uribe had loaded the bases by walking Teoscar Hernández, Kyle Tucker and Shohei Ohtani, and Smith finally made the Brewers pay, driving a double off the left-center-field fence for his first hit of the NLCS. He had entered the game hitting just 1-for-25 in the postseason, which made the timing particularly welcome.

Naturally, the Dodgers were not finished finding ways to make a promising situation unnecessarily complicated. With runners at second and third and only one out, Enrique Hernández and Tommy Edman struck out back-to-back against DL Hall, extinguishing the rally before it could develop into anything more substantial.

The Dodgers had the lead, the crowd had a pulse, and Milwaukee had been given an opportunity to escape further damage. The Brewers took it, because that is apparently what competent teams do when presented with an opening.

Blake Snell had spent most of the evening giving the Dodgers every opportunity to win a game that their offense seemed determined to make difficult. Jackson Chourio ambushed him with a home run on the very first pitch of the night, a center-field blast that immediately put Los Angeles in the familiar position of having to play from behind.

Snell responded by settling down, striking out hitters at a healthy clip and holding Milwaukee to that one run through six innings. At one point, he retired 14 consecutive Brewers, and with nine strikeouts and only two hits allowed through six, he appeared to have put the opening-pitch mistake firmly behind him.

For a while, Snell was the one Dodger who looked entirely comfortable with the circumstances. The offense continued to strand runners, the crowd grew increasingly restless, and Snell kept sending Milwaukee hitters back to the dugout. He was doing the work required to keep the game within reach, even as the Dodgers made scoring look like a task requiring congressional approval.

Then came the seventh inning, and with it the decision that changed everything.

Snell walked Andrew Vaughn to open the inning, and Christian Yelich entered as a pinch runner. Jake Bauers followed with a two-run homer to right field, a 412-foot shot that put Milwaukee back in front, 3-2. Bauers had already made Snell work through an 11-pitch at-bat, and the Brewers' dugout responded to the home run by spilling onto the field in celebration. Garrett Mitchell followed with another home run, this one traveling 428 feet to right-center, and suddenly the Brewers had a 4-2 lead. Snell's night was over.

The decision to send Snell back out for the seventh will inevitably invite scrutiny. He had been outstanding through six innings, but the walk to Vaughn was the warning sign that something had changed. Whether fatigue, diminished command or simply the accumulated demands of the evening had caught up with him, the result was unmistakable. Two consecutive home runs erased the Dodgers' lead and put Milwaukee back in control. Snell had not surrendered a home run in 46⅓ innings during the regular season, yet he gave up two in a matter of moments to left-handed hitters.

It was a brutal ending to an otherwise excellent outing, and Snell deserved better offensive support than he received. He was charged with four runs on four hits in 6⅓ innings, striking out nine and walking two.

The final line will not fully convey how well he pitched before the seventh, nor how little margin for error the Dodgers' offense had given him. When your team has scored only twice, one bad inning becomes catastrophic. Milwaukee needed only a brief opening to turn a close game into another Dodgers defeat.

The Brewers added two more runs later, with Justin Wrobleski's wild pitch allowing Brice Turang to score in the eighth and Joey Ortiz delivering a two-strike RBI single in the ninth. By then, the damage had been done. Milwaukee had reclaimed the lead, widened the gap and once again demonstrated that it was better equipped to take advantage of the opportunities presented to it.

The most troubling part of this series is not simply that the Dodgers are losing. Teams lose games, even very good ones. It is that the Dodgers keep creating enough opportunities to change the outcome and then failing to do so. They had runners on base in all but three innings Wednesday, yet they could not generate enough offense to support Snell's performance. They have not hit a home run in the NLCS, and the lineup's inability to produce consistently has become the defining feature of their postseason.

Kyle Tucker, who has continued to show patience at the plate and find ways to get aboard, offered a message of confidence after the loss. "I believe in this group. If there's a team to do it, it's this team," he said.

Smith echoed the sentiment, insisting, "One game at a time, we gotta win four games. That's what we're gonna do tomorrow." Snell, meanwhile, took responsibility for the opening-pitch home run, saying, "To give up a leadoff home run to start the game is frustrating, but I'll learn from it."

Miguel Rojas perhaps captured the disconnect between the team's talent and its results most directly. "It's a tough one to wrap your head around, especially with the talent we have in this group, and the way we know what we are capable of playing, especially on the offensive side of the ball," he said.

All of that is understandable. Nobody in the clubhouse is going to declare the season over while games remain to be played, and nobody should expect players to abandon hope publicly. But the Brewers have earned the right to be taken seriously, and their manager, Pat Murphy, has recognized the importance of his team's ability to respond whenever the Dodgers briefly threaten to take control. "All three games we've played so far, and hopefully that continues, where just every time they score, we come back and score," Murphy said. "That's not easy to do in baseball."

No, it isn't. Neither is winning four consecutive games against a team that has beaten you in three straight, especially when that team has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to capitalize on your mistakes. The Brewers have been disciplined at the plate, relentless in their at-bats and opportunistic when the Dodgers have faltered. Bauers' long at-bat before his home run was a perfect example. Milwaukee is not waiting for the Dodgers to beat themselves; it is making them work for every out and punishing them when they fail.

There is, of course, the historical context. The only previous time the Dodgers fell behind 3-0 in a best-of-seven postseason series, they were swept by the Baltimore Orioles in the 1966 World Series. The only team in major league history to overcome a 3-0 deficit to win a postseason series was the 2004 Boston Red Sox, who rallied against the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series.

The Dodgers have won four consecutive games on numerous occasions this season, as manager Dave Roberts pointed out. "We've won four in a row a number of times this year," Roberts said. "We've got to win tomorrow. That's our only focus."

And so we arrive at Thursday night, with the Dodgers facing elimination at Dodger Stadium and the Brewers looking to complete a postseason sweep after being swept by Los Angeles in last year's NLCS.

There are no shortage of familiar phrases available for a team in this position. Backs against the wall. Season on the line. Pushed to the brink. Teetering on the edge. Take your pick; the Dodgers have managed to qualify for every one of them.

But the most useful assessment of the situation came not from a manager, a player or a television analyst, but from our own Dodgers insider, Ronnie, the Dodger parking lot attendant whose postgame analysis was delivered with the concise authority of a man who has seen enough to know when further explanation is unnecessary.

Asked about the Dodgers' predicament, Ronnie offered five words of wisdom: "All one can do is hope."

There it is. Strip away the playoff clichés, the assurances about talent, the promises to take things one game at a time and the increasingly elaborate explanations for why the offense cannot seem to produce when it matters most. After three games, Ronnie has reduced the situation to its essential truth. Hope remains, but the Dodgers have not given their fans a great deal else to work with.

The Brewers need one more win. The Dodgers need four. And somewhere between those two numbers lies the uncomfortable reality of a season that, only recently, seemed destined to end with another championship celebration.

For now, the Dodgers can point to their talent, their experience and their history of winning streaks. They can insist that they believe in one another and that the next game is the only one that matters. They can even take comfort in the fact that a comeback, however improbable, remains mathematically possible.

But as Ronnie might remind us, hope only goes so far. At some point, the Dodgers have to stop talking about what they're capable of doing and start showing it on the field. Four wins are needed to save their season.

The first one on Thursday would be a good place to start.