The Los Angeles Dodgers will avoid an NLDS upset for a third year in a row.
With a tight 2-0 win over the San Diego Padres in Game 5 at home on Friday, the Dodgers won their first playoff series of the current postseason format. They lost in the NLDS each of the last two seasons to wild card teams.
It is the first postseason series victory of Shohei Ohtani’s MLB career.
The Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto out-dueled the Padres’ Yu Darvish in a historic playoff matchup of Japanese-born starters, and the Los Angeles Dodgers got home runs from Kiké Hernández and Teoscar Hernández to beat the San Diego Padres 2-0 on Friday and advance to the National League Championship Series.
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Yamamoto allowed two hits over five innings for the Dodgers before being pulled after 63 pitches in a decisive Game 5 between heated NL West rivals who were meeting in a Division Series for the third time in five years.
Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers will play the wild-card New York Mets in the best-of-seven NLCS starting Sunday night in Los Angeles.
The Dodgers won a decisive Game 5 at home for the first time since taking a 1981 NL Division Series against Houston after a season split into halves following a players’ strike. Boasting the majors’ best regular-season record of 98-64, they successfully avoided a third straight NLDS elimination.
The Padres’ big hitters went bust with their season on the line. Three-time batting champion Luis Arraez, Fernando Tatis Jr., Jurickson Profar and Manny Machado were 1 for 14 in Game 5 as Los Angeles pitchers retired their last 19 batters.
San Diego went scoreless for the final 24 innings of the series, dropping the last two games after taking a 2-1 lead back home.
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Yamamoto and Darvish were the first Japanese-born starting pitchers to square off in major league playoff history. The 26-year-old Yamamoto was the fifth rookie to start a winner-take-all game in Dodgers history.
Darvish, the 38-year-old childhood idol of Ohtani, gave up an early home run to Kiké Hernández, then set down 14 in a row. Teoscar Hernández’s homer chased Darvish in the seventh and made it 2-0.
The Padres and Dodgers combined to retire 26 consecutive batters — the longest streak in a single game in postseason history.
Darvish gave up two runs and three hits in 6 2/3 innings, struck out four and walked one.
Darvish and Ohtani teamed to help win last year’s World Baseball Classic for Japan, but they were rivals Friday. Ohtani struck out three times, including twice against Darvish in a game watched on Saturday morning in Japan.
The teams combined to score 43 runs in the first five games of the series, but the winner-take-all finale was a tense pitching affair in front of a sellout crowd of 53,183 that included Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James and a Hollywood contingent of Brad Pitt, Rob Lowe, Bryan Cranston and Jimmy Kimmel.
The Dodgers are headed to the NLCS for the 16th time overall and first since 2021 when they lost to Atlanta in six games.
The Padres head into the offseason with plenty of promise for next year. They challenged the Dodgers for the NL West title down to the final days of the regular season.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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