NEW YORK—For the second time in the postseason, a bullpen game blew up on the Los Angeles Dodgers as the New York Yankees avoided elimination in the World Series Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium.
The 11-4, Game 4 victory gave the Yankees a chance to fight another day.
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The Dodgers, hit by a rash of injuries to starters this season, have periodically used their bullpen the entire game throughout the postseason, and were 2-2 in those contests, beating the San Diego Padres and the New York Mets during their first two playoff rounds. The Dodger Stadium Game 6 clincher in the National League Championship Series over the Mets was a bullpen game, although the Mets had clipped them when they used one in Game 2 of that series.
But if it’s any salve for the Dodgers, they won’t have to resort to this tactic again in the best-of-seven series.
The Yanks are still down 3-1, with another elimination tilt Wednesday night. Game 5 back at the Stadium offers a reprise of Game 1 starters: Gerrit Cole for the Yankees and Jack Flaherty for the Dodgers.
If the series returns to LA for Games 6 and 7, the Dodgers will have Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Walker Buehler available to start those games.
The Dodgers reached this juncture because they have nine pitchers on the injured list, while Joe Kelly and Evan Phillips were left off the 26-man World Series roster. The missing pitchers account for $40.5 million worth of LA’s $339.8 million payroll—the second highest in MLB. The bullpen they are relying on to close the starter gap is worth a total of $12.1 million.
And yet they stand on the brink of winning the World Series for the eighth time in their Brooklyn/LA history.
“It’s a war of attrition sometimes. That’s how you have to do it,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “A number of their guys have gotten hurt. Credit to them they’ve been creative. There’s a lot of ways to skin a cat. You don’t always have to be conventional.”
The biggest problem with the bullpen approach is that the more pitchers a team uses in a game, the chances multiply of at least one of them having an off night.
The Dodgers used eight different relievers over the course of the last two games, and only one of them, Daniel Hudson, on successive nights.
Hudson was one of the relievers the Yankees savaged on Tuesday night. The other was Brent Honeywell in the later stages of the game. The Yankees combined to score nine runs on six hits in the two innings, including a third-inning Anthony Volpe grand slam off Hudson and a Gleyber Torres three-run shot in the eighth inning off Honeywell.
The bottom of order did most of the damage. Volpe, Austin Wells and Alex Verdugo were 5-for-10 with six runs scored and seven RBIs. Even Aaron Judge finally jumped into the action, driving in his first run of the World Series with an eighth-inning single off Honeywell. He’s still 2-for-15 sans a homer or an extra base hit.
The Yankees came in having scored just seven runs in the first three games of the series. They were a pent-up group of frustrated hitters, not unlike Yankees fans, 49,354 strong, just waiting for some kind of production. When Volpe, the Yankees’ Gold Glove shortstop and a New York City product, hit Hudson’s first pitch into the left field bleachers giving them a 5-2 lead, the crowd exploded.
“I felt like the fans were just ready to erupt [Monday] night, but we just couldn’t punch anything in,” Boone said. “So, you finally got to see the top blow off of Yankee Stadium in a World Series game.”
The Yankees are still very much up against it. No team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a World Series. No team down 3-0 has ever even forced a Game 6. The only team to come all the way back in MLB postseason history was the 2004 Boston Red Sox over the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. Dave Roberts, now the Dodgers manager, stole a key base in the ninth inning of Game 4 at Fenway Park and then scored the tying run that ignited the Red Sox’ four-game comeback.
Boone won’t look past the next game. “Just win one today, come back and do it again the next day,” Boone said. “That’s our mindset.”
Roberts, who’s now on the other side of seeing a 3-0 series lead shrink, said he doesn’t even want to think about it at this point. He’s got to piece together enough pitching to win the series.
His starters are still 11th among the 12 teams to make this year’s playoffs with a 4.76 ERA. They’ve averaged 3.9 innings a start.
That’s put a heavy burden on the relievers, even beyond the bullpen-only games. To get through the first three games, Roberts has used an average of at least five pitchers a game. The bullpen finished eighth among playoff teams with a 4.12 regular-season ERA.
Yet, the Dodgers are 10-5 so far in the playoffs, one victory from a championship.
“I feel great about the pitching and the bullpen, in particular,” Roberts said. “Where we’re at going into [Game 5], no one gets a day off. We knew we had a bullpen game, but we came out of it with six guys rested. I feel good about that and being up 3-1.”
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