Dodgers advance to NLCS after Kerkering’s error

LOS ANGELES — The zeros kept piling up, the pressure kept building, and then, with the bases loaded and two outs in Thursday’s 11th inning, Orion Kerkering, the Philadelphia Phillies‘ young reliever, found himself in the middle of chaos. A slow roller off the bat of Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Andy Pages bounced off his left foot and settled a few steps in front of him. Baserunners were sprinting everywhere, 50,000-plus people were going ballistic. Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto tried to settle everything down by making eye contact with his pitcher and imploring him to make the easy throw to first baseman Bryce Harper.

But panic set in.

«Once the pressure got to me, I just thought there’s a faster throw to J.T., little quicker throw than trying to cross-body it to Bryce,» Kerkering said. «Just a horses— throw.»

The ball sailed toward Dodger Stadium’s backstop, allowing Hyeseong Kim to score the winning run in the Dodgers’ 2-1 victory in Game 4 of the National League Division Series. It eliminated the Phillies, abruptly ending a season in which they believed just as strongly as ever that they might win it all. And it sent the Dodgers to the NL Championship Series for the seventh time in 10 years, their hopes of becoming Major League Baseball’s first repeat champions in a quarter century still very much in play.

«Pure joy,» said Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy, whose team awaits the winner between the Milwaukee Brewers and Chicago Cubs. «A little bit of laughter because I wasn’t sure what happened. The way everyone was standing around, I thought it was a foul ball at first. But then it just turned into pure joy. I looked over at Andy and he’s upset about a broken bat at first and then he realizes, ‘Oh, I just won the game.’ Just a huge roller coaster of emotions.»

Dodgers reliever Alex Vesia referred to Game 4 as «a heavyweight fight,» but he could have been describing the entire series.

Dodgers-Phillies was a matchup of two of the sport’s most talented, star-studded rosters, packed with devastating rotations and decorated lineups. The starting pitching shined brightest. Through the first three games, the six traditional starting pitchers in this series — Blake Snell, Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto for the Dodgers; Cristopher Sanchez, Jesus Luzardo and Ranger Suarez for the Phillies — combined for a 3.03 ERA and 37 strikeouts in 32⅔ innings.

Game 4 played out similarly. Sanchez used his hellish sinker-changeup combination to stifle the Dodgers’ hitters through the first six innings, but Tyler Glasnow matched him pitch for pitch, allowing zero runs and five baserunners. Glasnow was making his first playoff start for his hometown team, after missing out on last year’s run because of an elbow injury, and wound up dominating one of the sport’s best lineups.

Asked what it meant, Glasnow said, «Everything.»

«Just being from here, it’s what I’ve been dreaming of my whole life. And being able to do it tonight was crazy.»

Glasnow exited with cramping issues after 83 pitches and watched Nick Castellanos get the Phillies on the board with an RBI double against Emmet Sheehan. Sanchez took the ball in the bottom of the seventh hoping to provide one more inning and allow Phillies closer Jhoan Duran to take over the final two. The Dodgers did not cooperate. Alex Call drew a one-out walk, and Enrique Hernandez followed with a single, forcing Phillies manager Rob Thomson to turn to Duran earlier.

Two batters later, with two on, two out and first base open, Thomson intentionally walked Ohtani, who was 1-for-17 with eight strikeouts in this series, to set up the right-on-right matchup with Mookie Betts. But Duran missed high with a 3-2, 101.4 mph fastball, bringing home the tying run. It was Duran’s first career bases-loaded walk.

«You’re not expecting that,» Thomson said. «And his ability to throw strikes, really wasn’t expecting that. But it happened.»

Duran and Matt Strahm got the Phillies through the ninth inning, after which they turned to Luzardo, their Game 5 starter, for two more. The Dodgers turned to Roki Sasaki, the much-hyped Japanese pitching sensation who not long ago seemed to be without a role on this pitching staff.

Eight starts into his major league career, Sasaki held a 4.72 ERA and was diagnosed with a shoulder impingement. He spent more than four months on the injured list and struggled to find his fastball velocity until a mechanical tweak at the Dodgers’ spring training facility finally synced him up. The Dodgers, plagued by a beleaguered bullpen, tried him out as a reliever, then watched him dominate the Cincinnati Reds with a triple-digit fastball and a nasty splitter in Game 2 of the wild-card round.

Sasaki did the same against the Phillies in Games 1 and 2, finishing both. In Game 4, he took it to another level.

Nine up, nine down.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts called it «one of the great all-time appearances out of the pen that I can remember.»

«I can’t speak enough to his growth and his contribution to this club,» Roberts added. «We’re starting to see something really special in him, and that’s why he was courted so hard in the offseason. But what he’s done now, on the biggest of stages — he’s just scratching the surface.»

The Phillies put the go-ahead run in scoring position in the top of the 11th, but Vesia ended a 10-pitch Harrison Bader at-bat with a strikeout, setting up the winning sequence in the bottom half. Freddie Freeman hit a one-out single. Two batters later, Muncy hit another. Hernandez followed by drawing a walk. Then came Pages, who had been going so bad in these playoffs — 1-for-23 with six strikeouts — that Miguel Rojas came out to pinch hit for him in Game 3. Pages swung through a first-pitch sinker way inside, then was late on another one out over the plate.

He broke his bat, producing a 69.5 mph ground ball that carried just enough backspin to prevent Kerkering from fielding it cleanly.

«The first thing I saw was that he didn’t initially field it,» Pages said in Spanish. «But when I saw that he didn’t throw to first and instead went home, the only thing I thought was, ‘There’s no chance at home.'»

Kerkering’s errant throw home marked the 11th time a walk-off run had scored on an error in the playoffs, and just the second time it happened in the clinching game. The Phillies were eliminated via walk-off loss for the fourth time in franchise history — and the first time since Joe Carter’s infamous home run off Mitch Williams in the 1993 World Series.

The Dodgers clinched a playoff series in walk-off fashion for the third time, but they did something even bigger: They got past the Phillies, perhaps the most talented team they’ll face in these playoffs.

«We knew going into it, it was going to be a dogfight,» Hernandez said. «It proved to be that way.»