LOS ANGELES — All season, opposing teams poked and prodded the Dodgers, searching for signs of weakness. A few briefly succeeded. A few drew blood.
None of it lasted. Instead, like a storm, the Dodgers gathered strength over the second half of the season. They entered October looking stronger than at any point this year. They have since set about proving that they, the defending World Series champions, are impenetrable.
“Oh, man, that was special,” Freddie Freeman said. “We’ve just been playing really good baseball for a while now, and the inevitable kind of happened today — Shohei. Oh my god, I’m still speechless.”
The Dodgers will now await the winner of the ALCS between the Blue Jays and Mariners to determine their World Series opponent.
For a Brewers team that led the Majors in wins during the regular season, the high point came one batter into the game at Dodger Stadium, when Brice Turang drew a leadoff walk. Ohtani struck out the next three batters in succession, then led off the bottom of the first with a homer. The Dodgers never lost that lead, scoring twice more in the first and again in the fourth, when Ohtani launched a second, Statcast-projected 469-foot shot in the general direction of the San Gabriel Mountains. Ohtani became the first Dodgers pitcher to go deep in the postseason and the first pitcher in MLB history to lead off a game — any game, regular season or playoffs — with a homer.
“Sometimes you’ve just got to touch him and make sure he’s not made of steel,” Freeman said. “Biggest stage, and he goes out and does something like that. Something that will probably be remembered as ‘The Shohei Ohtani game.’”
He was not done. In the seventh, the Dodger Stadium crowd serenaded him with a standing ovation as he walked to the plate. Ohtani responded with a third home run to ice the victory, this one to left-center field.
Less than an hour later, the Dodgers rushed the field to celebrate their second consecutive pennant. They hope to become the first back-to-back World Series winner since the Yankees won three in a row from 1998-2000.
That task will be difficult, though no more so than dispatching the regular season’s most successful team. The Dodgers accomplished that without much outward issue.
The ingredients of their dominance are not difficult to understand. Speaking before Game 4, Brewers manager Pat Murphy ticked through the list: “Shohei Ohtani might be the best baseball player on earth right now. … Freddie Freeman has touched our hearts many times in the wrong way. … Mookie Betts, what he’s doing in the game of baseball is incredible.”
But Los Angeles is about more than just those superstars. In the middle of this season, with injuries sapping their roster, the Dodgers struggled simply to maintain playoff position. Things began to change in the second half, when Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow returned from injury and Ohtani, who had spent April and May exclusively as a hitter, began unfurling his right arm. The Dodgers won nine of their final 11 games to win the NL West. They’ve since won nine of their first 10 postseason games.
In the NLCS, Snell, Glasnow, Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto produced a 0.63 ERA, combining to allow two runs over 28 2/3 innings.
