Playoff demons gone! Dodgers outlast Padres to advance to NLCS

Columnist

Oct. 11, 2024 Updated 9:42 PM PT

This time, they didn’t choke.

This time, they did the choking.

On a glorious night amid a roiling sea of joyful blue, the Dodgers wrapped their weathered arms around the San Diego Padres on Friday and crushed those brown jerseys like an empty paper sack, eventually exhaling with redemption, relief and a coveted spot just four wins from the World Series.

In the winner-take-all Game 5 of the National League Division Series, the Dodgers took all the criticisms of the past two postseason collapses and squashed them under a barrage of fastballs and two breathtaking long balls in a near-perfect 2-0 victory over the Padres at a shamelessly joyful Dodger Stadium.

Buried were the sins of their predecessors, the failings of past seasons, the rut of postseason humiliation.

Buried, from here to Chula Vista.

It was the first postseason series-clinching win at Chavez Ravine with fans in attendance in 11 years and, man, what a sight. When Kiké Hernández threw to Max Muncy for the final out, the pavilion roofs came unhinged, 53,000 fans leaping and roaring in unison, Blake Treinen standing in the middle of it all on the mound, raising both hands to the sky as if in shock, the entire Dodgers team surrounding him and hugging and bouncing as if shouting out two years of October pain.

“I Love L.A.” rarely has sounded louder, or lasted as long, or been so filled with hope.

Later, in a Dodgers clubhouse teeming with bubbly, Miguel Rojas held up a shot glass and shouted to the group that had shut out the Padres over its final 16 innings, “Hey bullpen! This shot is for your guys!”

Dave Roberts then exhorted his team to keep pushing, the manager shouting, “Eight more wins! And I tell you right now guys, I’ve never believed in a group of men more than I believe in you guys. And more importantly, each one of you guys believed in each other.”

They believed even though they trailed two games to one in this series against a preening Padres team on the verge of embarrassing them. They believed even though Rojas and Freddie Freeman both suffered injuries and their starting pitching was a mess and, based on baseball history, they had only an 18% chance to survive.

Roberts even compared this series comeback win to a couple of three-games-to-one deficits that his teams have overcome, elevating Friday night to rarefied air.

“It rivals 2004 when we beat the Yankees, when I was a player with the Red Sox, it rivals beating the Braves in 2020 to get to the World Series ... this is right there with it,” Roberts said. “To kind of win this series how we did, to kind of fall behind — and those guys coming into the postseason had a lot of momentum — speaks to the character of our guys. This is right up there.”

The Dodgers now host the upstart New York Mets in the National League Championship Series beginning here Sunday, a seven-game duel with the winner advancing to the World Series.

It will feel anticlimactic, and for good reason. The Dodgers should dominate. The outmanned Mets have been advancing this postseason on little miracles. The superior Dodgers are all muscle. They proved it once and for all Friday against a Padres team that was probably their biggest hurdle in their chase for their first full-season World Series championship in 36 years.

This first series was the hard one. This was the one the Dodgers really needed. They entered the tense evening amid the memories of first-round exits in the last two postseasons, including a 2022 humiliation by these Padres.

Could they shake off the demons of their history? Could they erase the memories of their failures?

Could they ever.

Dodgers players celebrate around reliever Blake Treinen after the final out of Game 5 of the NLDS.

“We didn’t come here to win the NL West; we came to win the World Series ... we’ve got to do that or we go home and we think about it all offseason and this team gets to spring training to think about failures from years past, blah, blah, blah,” Hernández said before the game.

They indeed avoided the blah, blah, blah. They did it with wow, wow, wow.

It started with the surprise starter giving a shocking performance, struggling Yoshinobu Yamamoto finally earning some of his record $325-million contract by shutting out the Padres on two hits over five innings.

“I knew he wasn’t going to run from this spot,” Roberts said. “I’m looking forward to riding him through the World Series.”

It continued with the Dodgers’ own Señor October, Hernández, a prolific playoff hitter who sent Yu Darvish’s first pitch into the left-field stands in the second. Hernández has an amazing 14 homers and 30 RBIs in 188 postseason at-bats, including three home runs against the Chicago Cubs in Game 5 of the 2017 NLCS.

“It’s very easy for you to see yourself failing in the postseason ... the anxiety, the self-doubt, all these things start creeping in your mind,” Hernández said afterward, later adding, “Whenever those thoughts come in, I visualize myself having success over and over again. You get to the field the next day and you have already seen the day happen. So nothing overwhelms over you, no moment gets too big.”

His moment was followed five innings later by a similar shot into the left-field stands by Teoscar Hernández, the underrated offseason steal by Andrew Friedman, the most valuable player not named Shohei Ohtani.

Kiké Hernández, center, celebrates with Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernández after hitting a solo home run for the Dodgers.

“Not running away from the big moments,” Teoscar Hernández said in an understatement as big as his swing.

The game finished with the Dodgers bullpen that had been so brilliant in a Game 4 do-or-die win, this time four relievers holding the Padres hitless over the final four innings. The Padres finished the series without scoring a run in the final 24 innings, with Dodgers pitching retiring the final 19 batters.

The fans roared with every pitch and kept their water bottles to themselves, a worthy accompanist to a team flirting with greatness.

“If there’s something that this crowd is, it’s hungry,” Kiké Hernández said. “They want a championship. They want another one. The one we had a couple years back, the city didn’t get to celebrate it because of obvious circumstances. We know how bad they want it … we just know that our fans have our backs and we’re ready to rock with them.”

They rocked, the Padres were rolled, one October chapter finished, two more remaining, a once-dreaded journey dances on.