Clayton Kershaw And The Dodgers Must Rescue Their Legacies After The Rays Rescued Baseball In Game 4

For the better part of three fitful months, it appeared Major League Baseball had finally absorbed self-inflicted wounds that could not be repaired by the game itself.

While the NHL and NBA figured out how to conclude their seasons in safe and competitive fashion during the worst pandemic in a century, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and the owners stonewalled the players’ union and frittered away the time they had to come up with a way to conduct something approximating a regular season until Manfred said he had no choice but to implement the 60-game schedule he and the owners wanted to play all along.

On Opening Day, the owners and players somehow managed to agree to add six playoff teams to the field, which allowed the sub-.500 Astros and Brewers to back into the postseason following game no. 60 a mere 66 days later. In between, there were scores of positive coronavirus tests, which necessitated doubleheaders consisting of seven-inning games. There were also leadoff two-run homers in extra innings and walk-off wins on the road. It was a mess. 

An excruciatingly long and boring first two rounds of the playoffs did nothing to rescue the sport. The third day of the playoffs featured two games in which both teams used at least eight pitchers without going into extra innings, which was two more times than it had ever happened in the previous 100-plus years. Of the 12 first- and second-round series, only three went the distance. Lots of homers were hit. Lots of front offices scripted lots of questionable game plans.

The potential for salvation presented itself during the LCS round, when the universally loathed Astros stormed back from a 3-0 deficit against the Rays in the AL before thankfully falling in Game 7 and the Dodgers overcame a 3-1 deficit to beat the Braves (really, an Atlanta team blew a big lead in the postseason) to win the NL pennant. That created a rare World Series pitting the two teams that finished with the best records in their leagues — it only happened three previous times in the wild card era — which meant at least there’d be no debating the legitimacy of whomever won the championship.

But while the Dodgers or Rays will be a worthy champ, neither created much in the way of compelling baseball during the first three games of the World Series, a span in which there were exactly zero lead changes.

And then Saturday night happened.

The Rays’ wild, remarkable and thrilling 8-7 win over the Dodgers is not only going to go down as the biggest where were you when sports moment of a calendar year largely bereft of sports, it’s going to be remembered as one of the greatest World Series games ever played.

A leadoff homer in the fourth by Rays postseason breakout star Randy Arozarena began a span of eight consecutive half-innings in which each team scored at least run — the longest such streak in World Series history and baseball’s version of the Marvin Hagler-Thomas Hearns brawl.

The Dodgers produced two-out RBI hits in the top of the fifth, sixth and seventh. Every time, the Rays responded with a homer. In the eighth, Corey Seager delivered another two-out RBI — the Dodgers’ seventh of the game and their 57th run scored with two outs in the postseason.

The runs streak finally ended in the bottom of the eighth, when the Rays stranded two and manager Kevin Cash used the penultimate bench move at his disposal by using Brett Phillips as a pinch-runner for Ji-Man Choi. In the ninth, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts called on Kenley Jansen — who is the longest-tenured closer in baseball yet began the postseason with a loosening grip on ninth-inning duties — to close out a win that would have put Jensen’s fellow aging franchise icon, Clayton Kershaw, in position to start the potential World Series clincher tonight.

Of course, everyone knows what happened next, and even if you saw it, you still can’t believe what you saw. A one-out broken bat single by Kevin Kiermaier. Arozarena laying off a pair of filthy two-strike pitches in working a nail-biting two-out walk to bring up Phillips, who hit .196 in 51 at-bats during the regular season, batted just twice in the playoffs and wasn’t even on the active roster for the ALCS, during which he became a bit of a Twitter celebrity for his dance moves and the supportive signs he drew in the dugout.

Phillips fell behind 1-2 before becoming this generation’s Francisco Cabrera by delivering a game-tying single to center. Chris Taylor bobbled the ball and Arozarena raced around third but fell head over heels halfway down the line. Arozarena wasn’t even in the picture as Max Muncy made the relay throw to catcher Will Smith.

But the ball glanced off the glove of Smith, who was already turning in anticipation of making a swipe tag, and trickled away. Jansen, a former minor league catcher, never backed up the plate and Arozarena slid home with the winning run before punctuating his instantly viral moment with an instantly iconic image as he slapped home plate more than a half dozen times while the Rays spilled out to mob a hydroplaning Phillips.

It was just the fifth time in World Series history a team delivered a walk-off hit while losing and the first time since Joe Carter’s championship-winning three-run homer in Game 6 of the 1993 World Series. The time before that? Kirk Gibson’s gimpy-legged two-run homer in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. Regardless of how the series turns out, Game 4 will be looked back upon as reverentially as those all-time classics.

Game 4 may also define its combatants. While the Rays would surely love to win the World Series, there will be no better representation of their resiliency and resourcefulness than the Game 4 victory.

But the Dodgers, who were so close to turning tonight into a coronation opportunity, are now facing another crucible and referendum on their collective and individual postseason struggles.

With former Rays general manager Andrew Friedman bringing a small-market focus on the margins to a franchise with a nine-digit payroll, the Dodgers have become a regular season juggernaut. They’ve earned eight straight division titles, won more than 100 games in 2017 and 2019 and were winning at a 115-victory pace in the shortened 2020 campaign.

But the randomness of the postseason has yet to benefit the Dodgers, who have been eliminated by the World Series champion in each of the last four seasons — the drought-busting Cubs in the 2016 NLCS, the cheating Astros in the 2017 World Series, an all-time great Red Sox team in the 2018 World Series and the Nationals in the 2019 NLDS. There’s no shame in losing to any or all of those teams, but at some point, the Dodgers need to cement their status as a great team by raising a banner.

Nobody symbolizes the “yeah, but…” nature of the Dodgers more than Jansen and Kershaw. The blown save for Jansen was his record-breaking fourth in World Series play. He hasn’t been all bad (4.40 ERA with a 1.05 WHIP), the saves were blown over a span of three World Series and he was the victim of some rotten luck Saturday.

But history isn’t usually nuanced, as Kershaw knows. Kershaw, one of a handful of active sure-fire Hall of Famers, has a 2.43 regular season ERA but a 4.22 postseason mark. As MLB.com noted earlier this week, his postseason numbers would look far better if his managers had been quicker with the hook and if the relievers who followed him were a little more effective.

Still, Kershaw’s postseason resume is the one stain on an otherwise all-time great career, and for a few minutes Saturday night, Jensen was one pitch away from giving Kershaw a chance to rewrite the narrative tonight by pitching the Dodgers to a championship.

Instead, the Dodgers were unwilling partners in helping the Rays rescue baseball from itself. And so tonight, Kershaw, Jensen and the rest of the Dodgers take the field looking to accomplish a smaller but no less important task: Rescuing their legacies.