John Smoltz got a firsthand look at the Dodgers’ collapse in the National League Championship Series.
On the call with play-by-play announcer Joe Davis, the former Cy Young winner watched every pitch from the Dodgers’ rotation. Tarik Skubal, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow comprised the lethal group, but none of the elite hurlers made it past the fifth inning against a red-hot Brewers lineup.
Smoltz criticized the Dodgers’ pitch selections in the NLCS, where the back-to-back World Series champions were swept by Milwaukee.
“They pitched well, but they didn’t pitch good enough in situations where veteran pitchers should not be making those mistakes,” Smoltz said on the Flippin’ Bats podcast. “In my opinion, there were some pitch selections — I don’t know if it came from Will Smith or it was the pitcher himself — and they put the Milwaukee Brewers in a position to flex their muscles when the Dodgers should have been flexing theirs.
“It was the most shocking scenario that I could have seen from a standpoint, all right, lay out the series, this is how Milwaukee’s gonna win. There’s no way you said they’re gonna win trailing every game, never being down, with the exception of the last game being down by four. They were gonna out-homer, they were gonna hit better with runners in scoring position, that isn’t as shocking they did that in the regular season. And they were gonna dominate from the bullpen in a way that we have never seen.”
