by Cary Osborne
Up six runs, you just never know.
A team could rally, and poof — there goes the lead.
That’s what made Kiké Hernández’s athletic, deceptive play in the fifth inning of Game 1 the National League Championship Series so important.
New York Mets second baseman Jose Iglesias followed designated hitter Jesse Winker’s single with one of his own.
Hernández raced over to collect the hit with Winker rounding second base.
Hernández’s body led on that he was throwing to third base. His arm though went a different way. He threw to second base and Winker was stunned.
Winker put on the brakes. Then he decided to go to third base.
Gavin Lux, who received the ball at second base, threw Winker out at third base.
“It was a huge play,” said manager Dave Roberts.
So huge that Roberts got the bullpen active.
So huge that had the Dodgers needed to go to the bullpen that inning, it might have impacted how the Dodgers would have looked at Game 2. Instead, Jack Flaherty went seven shutout innings, giving the Dodgers the ability to now use a bullpen game in Game 2.
“Look at the play that Kiké made there in the (fifth) inning — it changes the outlook of maybe the way that inning goes, getting that out there. So it was huge,” Flaherty said.
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Flaherty retired the next two Mets to end the inning.
Then he went two more innings.
“The game was still in the balance, and they started to kind of build an inning,” Roberts said. “But Kiké’s heads-up kind of ‘look, body going towards third and then throw behind the runner,’ just a heady baseball play. And that right there I thought took the wind out of their sail.
“So to be able to get that out and get through, that allowed Jack to keep going. That was a huge play by Kiké.”
Hernández has consistently shown throughout his postseason career an uncanny ability to come up big in big moments.
But it has often been his bat — like when he hit a solo home run off Yu Darvish in the second inning of Game 5 of the NL Division Series.
The bat was there, too, on Sunday. Hernández’s also jumpstarted the Dodger offense with a leadoff single in the fourth inning. He scored on a Tommy Edman single in a three-run inning.
NLCS: Kiké Hernandez’s next big postseason moment is a defensive one was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.