by Cary Osborne
At a point during the National League Division Series, manager Dave Roberts said that the Dodgers didn’t just start building momentum. They didn’t begin to play with a sense of urgency.
It was before October.
There was the last week of the season when the team was still batting the San Diego Padres for the National League West division title and won two come-from-behind games.
Going even farther back, the Dodgers were in Atlanta in mid-September playing against a team still in contention for a playoff spot when the news surfaced that starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow’s season was over. Glasnow’s elbow injury, one of the Dodgers’ big offseason additions and their top-of-the-rotation starting pitcher, was the latest source of difficulty for a team that had targeted the World Series since winter.
The Dodgers lost the first two games of that Atlanta series by a combined score of 16–3.
Dodger players and coaches met.
“We realized that we have the potential, that we have the players, that we’re still the Dodgers,” said left fielder Teoscar Hernández. “And we can do special things with the people we have healthy throughout the year and just the opportunity to maintain the team on the top until those guys were able to come back and keep helping the team win.”
The Dodgers responded with 55 runs over the next five games — and no fewer than eight in any of the games.
The Dodgers went 11–3 in their final 14. They won the NLDS in five. They won three of the first four games in the National League Championship Series.
Now they’re here at Citi Field for Game 5 — one win away from getting to the World Series.
And the determination remains.
“It’s 0–0 right now,” infielder Max Muncy said after the Dodgers’ 10–2 win in NLCS Game 4.
Even though it’s 3–1, and the Dodgers hold the home-field advantage in this series, the intent is to fly home to Los Angeles on Friday night with a National League Championship trophy — not two more chances to win it.
The Dodgers go back to Jack Flaherty to help them do that. The LA-native threw seven shutout innings in the Dodgers’ 9–0 win in Game 1.
The Mets counter — at least at the beginning — with left-hander David Peterson. Peterson entered in relief in Game 1 in the third inning, then allowed four hits and three runs in the fourth — including an RBI single from Freddie Freeman. Now Peterson moves to the front of the game.
“That’s (what) we’re trying to do, is put pressure on the starting pitchers from pitch one, and we have been able to do that the last couple of days,” Freeman said.
But in an elimination game for the Mets — they have their own sense of urgency. This is the team that was under .500 in the first week of July and surged into the postseason and upset two division champions — first the Brewers and then the Phillies.
“I could sense it today. I walk in the hitters meeting today, and we know where we’re at, back’s against the wall. The attitude. People smiling,” said Mets manager Carlos Mendoza. “That’s who we are. There’s no tomorrow for us. But we’ve been in this situation before. So nothing new.”
The Dodgers are playing with the same intent.
“I think you can see from my demeanor that we’re playing with urgency tonight,” said manager Dave Roberts.
NLCS: The Dodgers enter Game 5 with a sense of urgency was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.