Arlington, Texas – The moment of truth came early, on top of another. The Los Angeles Dodgers scored the first three innings, but the Atlanta Braves then loaded the bases and did not dismiss anyone. The history of the sport is filled with moments like this – when the frustrated team gets hot, when the opponent responds and never recovers completely. The man trying to stop it this Saturday afternoon was Walker Buhler. Initially, he knew that his -f-speed pics were not as intense. Already with a game of balance, threatening to tangle, Buhler knew what he needed to do:
He needed to attack the best fastball team in baseball with fastballs.
Of the next 13 pitches, 11 were for seam fastballs. All were thrown 98 miles or above. The four touched 99. Another reached 100. Result: Strike, strikeout, groundout. Threat neutral. Season safe
“At the end of the day,” Buhler said, “it’s my best pitch.”
The Dodgers, as they had not tested all year, again won all things on the line, beating the Braves 3-1 in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series. There will be a game 7.. If the Dodgers win a third straight match, they will win from a deficit, which only the base teams have ever won. And this is the only way – the only chance to find them by small samples that tend to randomize the results at this time of year – to believe that who they are is good enough to pass them on. Eventually their talents will emerge. Their best is better than anyone.
Two nights ago, moments after the loss of Game 4, putting the dodgers on the brink, the text of the group would inspire players to do their much-awaited task. Along the way, Dodgers’ third baseman Justin Turner said he began to accept the challenge of doing something special. When Narik Hernandez arrived at the Globe Life Field on Saturday morning, less than 12 hours after saving the season, exhausting in Game 4, he found the most energetic clubhouse he had ever experienced before a day’s play.
“We can either meet the situation, or we can mess up and just go through the dynamics,” Hernandez said immediately. “This is not what we will do. We are not making things easy. We are still trying to win the World Series, and that is still the goal. No one said it would be easy.”
Game 6 certainly did not.
Major League-Best Against Fastballs This Season.960 O.P.S. Buhler needs to be blown fastballs by a team that owns, in which the most adverse conditions are imaginative. The Black Train requires the retirement of Freddie Freeman and Marcel Ozuna, two of the two best hitters in baseball, made by a weighted run that made a plus in 2020, when they represented a tying run in the seventh inning. He needs to defend the cookie bats against the right field fence with a leaping, twisting, full-extension, with his second game-changing game in several days.
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After making a stunning catch on the wall to rob extra baseman Marcel Ozuna, the batsmen let out a huge scream.
And he needed to find a version of Kenley Jensen himself that no longer seemed to exist.
Over the past few weeks, as Dodgers management explored ninth-inning alternatives, fellow players have consistently encouraged Jensen behind closed doors. At every turn – even after it was used in the sixth inning of a 14-run lead earlier this week – Roberts reiterated that Jensen would be counted on to record big outs for what is left this month. Through it all, Jensen was trying to reconcile his upper half and his lower half. Phone calls with Charlie Huff and Rick Honeycutt, who pitched 46 years in the major leagues, eventually got him back to his prime’s clean delivery.
In Game 4, Jensen swings with his dugout after striking to the side to save a four-run lead. An intensity Rarely seen.
In Game In, after only needing six pitches to record three outs, he He did it again.
“You can only see the confidence on the mound, which is attacking people,” Turner said. “That’s the same Kenley Jensen I and all of us out there know and love.”
The ninth-ranked start began with scattering catches with Jock Pederson. Think about it for a moment. Pederson, not known for his defense by any stretch, entered the game to be pinched-hit at the bottom of the eighth, as the Dodgers were brazen to face the run. He stayed there because Chris Taylor’s right ankle was still too miserable to play defense, and yet it led to a sinking line drive that changed the course of the entire inning and thus, the entire season of the Daggers jerseys.
Moments like this are everywhere now.
They are when Corey Caesar made a point of watching Max Fried’s curve early lane as early as possible and started his fifth fifth innings home run of the series.
When Pedro Base throws a right-to-right change to captain the bat on a nine-pitch with a strikeout from Travis D’Arnaud, the decisive eighth innings will set the tone.
They are when Buehler, admittedly quieter than he has ever experienced pitching a baseball game, arrives, lets him go and believes, regardless of the moments, that his best is better than his.
“I failed at those moments,” Buhler said of that second inning, a base-filled jam – two years after the second-inning, a base-filled jam in his post-ason debut resulted in a Ronald Aquina Jr. slam.
“I can handle that failure. I can go through it, and I’ve been good since then. That failure doesn’t scare me anymore.”
His fellow players seem to be at the same level, unaware of what the next game will bring.
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