ATLANTA — For at least the 30th time in the past 10 years, Dave Roberts addressed a crowd of large, bespectacled men eager to douse themselves with alcohol.
As the Dodgers manager lavished deserved praise on his victorious ballclub, the 54-year-old clutched a gold-tipped champagne bottle in his left hand. Meanwhile, another 750 milliliters of joy sat comfortably in the back pocket of his baseball pants. The Dodgers players weren’t the only ones ready to party.
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But first, Roberts had some words of affirmation.
“There is no team more talented than the Los Angeles Dodgers,” the three-time World Series-winning skipper boasted. “This is the best organization in sports, top to bottom. We’re smarter, we’re better and we’re tougher.”
“And we are dinosaurs!” outfielder Teoscar Hernández, 33, intervened.
The room burst into laughter, drowning out Roberts. Hernández’s self-deprecating joke referenced a comment made earlier this season by new San Diego Padres owner José E. Feliciano, who proclaimed, “The owner of the Dodgers owns a lot of dinosaurs.” And although Dodgers president and leader Mark Walter does indeed own a large number of prehistoric animal fossils, Feliciano’s remark was interpreted as an insult to Los Angeles’ aging core players.
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Hernández, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Will Smith, Freddie Freeman, Max Muncy, Tommy Edman and Kiké Hernández are all over 30 years old. Freeman is 37 years old. Muncy is 36 years old. Betts turned 34 on Wednesday. Gray hairs, real and proverbial, are starting to grow.
“We’re old! We’re fucking old, yes,” veteran infielder Miguel Rojas, 37 and nursing a back injury, said above the gleeful din.
Old, yes, but still good.
The Dodgers dinosaurs knocked off the Atlanta Braves 4-1 on Wednesday in an NLDS Game 4 that seemed much more one-sided than that. Certainly, the game was on the line for much of the night, as starters Tyler Glasnow and Tyler Mahle traded zeroes after each team scored a sloppy run in the first inning. The score remained tied at one as Glasnow and Mahle left the stage, putting the bullpen in the spotlight.
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Los Angeles held. This is not the case for Atlanta.
Game two hero Didier Fuentes replaced Mahle in the seventh with one play and one out. He persuaded Max Muncy to opt out, but quickly issued free passes to the next two Dodgers: Josue De Paula, a 21-year-old with 42 career regular-season appearances, and Kyle Tucker, the highest-paid man in MLB history. That brought Atlanta skipper Walt Weiss out of the dugout and flame-throwing reliever Robert Suarez into the game. Los Angeles outfielder Andy Pages, one of the most fascinating characters in the extended Dodgers universe, approached the plate.
Pages, 25, is not old. If he had been born in the United States and not Cuba, he might still benefit from his parents’ health insurance. Last fall, Pages turned in one of the putrid statistical performances of all time in the postseason, going 4 for 51 with a measly RBI. This earned him a bench for Games 5, 6 and 7 of the World Series, although he more than made up for his lackluster bat with a season-saving hitch in that dramatic Game 7.
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This season, Pages progressed as a hitter, earning a spot as the National League’s starting center fielder in the All-Star Game. But an injury late in the summer derailed his rhythm heading into October. He started this NLDS 0-for-7 with four strikeouts. It seemed extremely familiar. Roberts, however, has not lost confidence.
“I’m going to continue to give Andy some leash,” the skipper said before Game 3. “I believe in him. I think to win the World Series this year, we’re going to need him to be an active member of our team.”
In Game 3, Pages had two hits and scored a point. In Game 4, he delivered the final blow.
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With the bases loaded and the count complete, Pages roped a 100 mph Suarez heater up the middle for a backbreaking two-run single. Teoscar Hernández and pinch runner Edman rushed home. Muncy added a solo shot in the ninth. The Dodgers bullpen did the rest. Los Angeles, once again, ended an October evening full of alcohol and smelling of cigars.
“When you splash champagne and beer on everyone, there’s nothing cooler than that, man,” Muncy said amid the bacchanal. “You work seven, eight months to get to this point. You have to enjoy it. That’s why you play baseball.”
But not all of the Dodgers played good baseball this week, including some of the older, more important ones.
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Ohtani went 2-for-13 and did not record an extra base hit. He looks disconcerted, far from the world beater we’ve come to expect. Roberts hit him fifth in the third game, for goodness sake. Betts was 3 for 14 with all singles. Receiver Will Smith (1 for 16) looked the worst of the bunch. It was far from a reassuring offensive performance. LA only scored 3.5 points per game. The roster’s collective .264 OBP in this NLDS was the lowest mark posted by a 21st Century Dodgers team in a victorious playoff series.
Their relatively complete series victory is therefore testament to an otherworldly pitching staff. It turns out that a rotation of Tarik Skubal, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Tyler Glasnow can win you low-scoring games. The bullpen, considered this club’s Achilles heel, also stepped up to give up just four won runs in 14 2/3 innings of work, including 4 1/3 scoreless runs to close out Game 4. That’s how a club overcomes a .203 team batting average – holding opponents to a .145/.259/.242 slash line.
“The Dodgers had something to do with it,” Braves manager Walt Weiss said after the game of his team’s offensive struggles. “They’re going for their third consecutive world championship for a reason. Their arms keep coming at you.”
And next week they will continue to arrive in the NLCS. A tantalizing rematch against a pumped-up Brewers team awaits. Milwaukee’s lineup is sure to put up a better fight than last year and almost certainly a better fight than the Atlanta hitters just put together. The first game is Sunday in Wisconsin, and it should be a battle.
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But that impending showdown certainly wasn’t on the Dodgers’ minds after their win on Wednesday. The imitation champagne flowed freely. No journalist, player or staff member was safe from a cold shower of Budweiser. Rojas, the elder statesman of this aging empire, back pain and all, was skipping around the room with a $150 bottle of bright green tequila in his hand. He chanted the viral house remix from TikTok playing through the locker room speakers.
“Make money, stay pretty, manage your business, enjoy life, stay sexy and don’t worry about it.”
Quite a mantra for a group of dinosaurs.
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