Dave Roberts had a choice before the two swings that put the Dodgers one loss from a sweep, and the way he explained it afterward sounds less like strategy and more like a confession. Blake Snell had retired fourteen straight hitters and sat at 88 pitches when Roberts sent him back out for a seventh inning the Dodgers didn’t survive. Two batters later, the Dodgers were down 3-0 in the NLCS, and the man who made that call was still describing it like a scouting report instead of a guess.
The Brewers didn’t need to grind out five tough at-bats to take control of Wednesday’s game. They needed two swings in the seventh, off a pitcher who hadn’t allowed a home run all season across ten starts and 46 1/3 innings. Roberts explained the decision to CBS Sports this way: “His stuff was really good, I don’t think that they were seeing him well. I was trying to get him 3 more hitters… I felt good with where Blake’s stuff was at.” That isn’t a pitch count. That’s a manager who can’t name the point where trust was supposed to run out.
Pregame, this series was framed as the gamble on Snell’s health paying off for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who needed length from their ace more than anyone else on the roster. Instead, the gamble turned out to have a shelf life, and nobody in the dugout could say exactly when it expired.
Roberts managed Game 3 on feel, not a plan.
Snell had cruised through six innings on just 81 pitches, racking up nine strikeouts without incident. The seventh opened with a walk, and Jake Bauers turned an 11-pitch at-bat into a two-run home run. Two pitches later, Garrett Mitchell did it again. Eighty-eight pitches had read like health; the back-to-back homers read like something else.
I watched that sequence more than once, and the part that doesn’t sit right isn’t the walk or the homer to Bauers. It’s the decision to send Snell back out to face Mitchell, a left-handed hitter, right after the first ball left the yard. SI made a version of the same case afterward: Roberts can’t be faulted for the matchup with Bauers, but leaving Snell in to face Mitchell next is harder to defend.
Snell’s home run log made the collapse stranger than most. Entering Wednesday, he hadn’t allowed one all season:
https://twitter.com/YahooSports/status/2110572066512462235
That streak didn’t survive one bad inning against a lineup that has stopped missing mistakes. Snell didn’t dodge it afterward. “Three home runs in a game? I mean, I didn’t give up one all year. To give up three in a game, that’s pretty frustrating,” he said. “It’s not gonna define me.”
He’s probably right about that part.
His manager is the real problem: pitch counts and matchup data were sitting right there, and he chose a feeling instead, in the biggest start of the year.
The Milwaukee Brewers need one win to finish the sweep. The Dodgers need four straight against a Brewers bullpen the Dodgers still haven’t figured out, starting with whoever starts Game 4 and whatever Roberts decides to trust this time.
Dave Roberts had a reason for everything except a plan.
