TORONTO — During the regular season, the Dodgers played 162 games in 193 days. They then played 10 more times in 18 days in the first three rounds of the playoffs.
It was a chore that gave way to a routine as comfortable as an old shoe.
This daily routine was disrupted when Dodgers swept the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series, giving them a week off before the start of the World Series, the team's longest break since February. And the Dodgers looked anything but rested and updated on Friday 11-4 shelling Toronto Blue Jays, leaving them trailing in the postseason series for the first time since the NLDS last fall.
“I'm pretty sure the guys felt the velocity a little bit better,” said Miguel Rojas, one of the few Dodgers who spoke to the media after the loss. “But there is nothing we can do. This will not be an excuse for us to perform unsatisfactorily.”
Maybe that's not an excuse. But this could be an omen.
This World Series is the fifth in which a team that won its best of seven LCS, as the Dodgers did, faced a team that needed seven games to win the series, as Toronto did. The team that won and got the break had lost each of the previous four World Series, winning just two of 18 games.
Dodger manager Dave Roberts denied the story on Friday.
“I really don’t think the week’s layoff has anything to do with tonight,” he said. “We were rested. I thought we were in a good position. We were 2-0 up. So I don't think it had anything to do with it.”
Blake Snell, the pitcher who gave up the lead, also waved off the break.
“There are no excuses. I need to get better,” said Snell, who had 10 days between starts, his longest layoff since coming off the injured list in August. “I don't care if there's a month off. Find a way to be ready.”
He wasn't against the Blue Jays. After averaging 16 pitches per inning in 14 previous starts, he needed 29 to get through the first inning on Friday. And after giving up two runs and six hits in 21 innings this postseason, he gave up five runs and eight hits in just five-plus innings in Toronto, with two of those runs coming on Dalton Varsho's home run in the fourth inning, the only homer Snell has given up to a left-handed hitter this year.
Emmett Sheehan, who followed Snell to the mound, had not pitched in two weeks. He had his worst performance of the year, facing four batters and seeing three of them strike out.
“I felt good before the game. I felt the same as before,” he said. “I thought I made some good pitches and they made some really good swings.
“It's not a good feeling.”
A long layoff can affect pitchers more than hitters because after throwing with a slightly fatigued arm all season, they suddenly feel fresh and strong and their pitches lose some of their swing.
“You don't want to feel too good. You feel too good, you try to throw too hard because you feel good. And it doesn't go where you want it to go,” said Will Klein, who cleared the Dodgers with a scoreless eighth inning. “[The ball] doesn't go where you want it to because you're used to underestimating it a little, like 90 or 95%. You never actually reach 100.
'There is such a thing [as] too fresh.”
Klein last appeared in a major league game a month ago; Since then, he has been training at the Dodgers' facility in Arizona. He said the team has tried to maintain the rest of the pitchers' routines with bullpen sessions or simulated games, but that's not the same as throwing in a high-load situation against opposing hitters in a World Series game in front of 44,353 fans, as Snell, Sheehan and Klein had to do on Friday.
And history shows that the Dodgers are not the first team to be broken by the break.
But they had less than 24 hours to wait for the second gamewhich means they're back to the comfortable, if tiring, routine that got them to the World Series in the first place.
“There will be another one tomorrow,” Klein said. “We can't go out and lose today, no matter how much we'd like to. Thinking about today won't help you win tomorrow.”
