{"id":209945,"date":"2025-10-13T13:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T13:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/209945\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T13:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T13:50:07","slug":"six-players-to-watch-in-national-league-championship-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/209945\/","title":{"rendered":"Six players to watch in National League Championship Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

Only one playoff team managed to post a winning percentage of 1.000 against the Los Angeles Dodgers<\/a> this season.<\/p>\n

That would be the Milwaukee Brewers<\/a>, who went 6-0 against L.A. en route to finishing with the best record in the majors, outscoring the Dodgers 31-16. All those wins came when the Brewers were in the middle of an 11-game winning streak that moved them into first place in the National League Central Division \u2014 never to relinquish the lead.<\/p>\n

The last team to sweep the Dodgers in a season series of five or more games was the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, who would go on to win the World Series. The 1994 Atlanta Braves also accomplished the feat, but alas there was no World Series that season due to the players strike.<\/p>\n

The Dodgers will have a different look in this series. Blake Snell and Shohei Ohtani<\/a> were not available to pitch in any of those six losses; and Roki Sasaki<\/a> was a month or so away from a revelatory mechanical overhaul that saved his season.<\/p>\n

Smartly, Brewers manager Pat Murphy spent Sunday\u2019s media availability giving the Dodgers their flowers. Flowers? More like an entire greenhouse.<\/p>\n

Mookie Betts doesn\u2019t get the credit he deserves. \u201cTransitioning back to the infield and playing shortstop on America\u2019s team \u2026 it would be like Steph Curry playing forward.\u201d Freddie Freeman? \u201cHe\u2019s like my favourite person, player, in the game.\u201d Shohei Ohtani? \u201cOne of the all-time greats in \u2014 I don\u2019t know how many years he\u2019s played but he\u2019s one of the all-time greats.\u201d Teoscar Hernandez? \u201cOne of the great dudes in the game. And he\u2019s just performing in the clutch.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not overconfident, that\u2019s for sure. The Dodgers are a powerhouse, what can you say? You don\u2019t see many commercials in the United States, Canada, Japan \u2026 anywhere across the world that don\u2019t have Dodgers in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murphy, of course, has given the baseball world the phrase \u201cAverage Joes\u201d to describe his team, whose $121.6-million payroll is 17th in the majors. The Dodgers have the highest, at $313 million.<\/p>\n

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts noted his team is in a \u201cdifferent position\u201d than when the Brewers swept them in the regular season. But he expects Milwaukee to be the same: contact-heavy, speedy and aggressive. \u201cThe main thing is you have to get the lead. When you have a lead, their aggressiveness is more tempered. When the wind\u2019s at their back, they\u2019re very aggressive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here are six players to watch in the best-of-seven NL Championship Series:<\/p>\n

A right hamstring strain that cost Chourio 29 games in August helped facilitate a move from centre field to left, but he\u2019s kept hitting \u2014 just finishing a year that saw him become the youngest player in MLB history with multiple 20-homer, 20-stolen-base seasons. And, for the second year, he has put up impressive post-season numbers, slashing .389\/.421\/.667 against the Cubs with two doubles and a homer. In two playoff series over the past two years, he\u2019s hit .414. The Brewers do love themselves some contact \u2014 among playoff teams, only the Blue Jays and San Diego Padres struck out less often, and the Brewers scored the third-most runs during the regular season, behind only the New York Yankees and Dodgers. But every now and then it helps to have someone put a ball over the fence.<\/p>\n

Teoscar Hernandez, RF, Dodgers<\/p>\n

We all miss Teo, of course, even though he continues to giveth and taketh in the Dodgers’ NLDS win over the Phillies \u2014 an example of the latter being his glaring slowness in chasing down a J.T. Realmuto triple in Game 1, bringing in two runs. Teoscar being Teoscar, he then slugged a three-run homer to give the Dodgers the lead in a game they\u2019d eventually win. It was the fifth go-ahead homer with the Dodgers trailing in the seventh inning or later in a post-season game. Hernandez has driven in nine of the Dodgers’ 31 runs this post-season. The Brewers’ offensive DNA contains lots and lots of contact, which could mean balls in play and decisions that need to be made. Expect Hernandez \u2014 who was called out by Roberts earlier this season and told to \u201cplay with more edge\u201d \u2014 to figure in a couple of seminal offensive and defensive moments in this series.<\/p>\n

I mean, you could pick the entire Brewers bullpen because chances are good they\u2019ll be running multiple bullpen games. That\u2019s going to put these three rookie arms into play, with Misiorowski \u2014 coming off a dominant LDS, where he used his secondary stuff masterfully along with his velocity \u2014 in line for a start. Gasser, a left-hander, was hit around a bit by the Cubs but he\u2019s been stretched out to go multiple innings if necessary. He\u2019ll see some of those Dodgers lefty bats.<\/p>\n

Shohei Ohtani, P-DH, Dodgers<\/p>\n

I mean, you know you\u2019re something when despite being 1-for-17 with nine strikeouts, a manager intentionally walks you to load the bases in the seventh inning of his team’s do-or-die game \u2026 to get to Mookie freaking Betts! That\u2019s what Phillies manager Rob Thomson did to Ohtani, who finished the NL Division Series 1-for-18 and continued to post puzzling post-season offensive numbers, feast-or-famining his way to a .205 average in the playoffs with five home runs and one double in 88 at-bats. The Phillies prevented Ohtani from getting his arms out over the plate by jamming him with fastballs and running out lefty starters who mixed in change-ups and breaking balls on the outer side of the plate. The NLDS was our first glimpse of two-way Ohtani in the post-season, which saw him strike out nine in Game 1, throw all seven pitches and get 23 whiffs on 48 swings and leave, losing 3-2 in a game the Dodgers would rally to win.\u00a0But he also struck out four times, three of them called, continuing a trend of poor offensive performance in games in which he\u2019s pitched. \u201cIt hasn\u2019t been good when he\u2019s pitched,\u201d Roberts said during the series. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to think through this and come up with a better game plan.\u201d The plan, as it turns out? \u201cHe\u2019ll pitch at some point. We just don\u2019t know which day,\u201d Roberts later added. Ohtani usually gets extra rest between starts, so Roberts has plenty to think about. Cautionary tale: Ohtani has been really good in the LCS before.<\/p>\n

Eh, so that was what all the fuss was about. We said Sasaki would be one to watch in the NLDS and we were right, and we\u2019ll go one step further: he could become the first pitcher since Jon Lester in 2016 to be named NLCS most valuable player. Sasaki has faced 17 batters this post-season, allowing one hit, striking out five, walking none and retiring nine in a row with the score tied 1-1 in the Dodgers’ series clincher. In the 15 relief innings thrown by someone other than Sasaki, the opposition has managed 13 runs, so there will be understandable temptation for Rogers to over-utilize Sasaki if these are close games. The Dodgers have made a habit of shredding arms in recent seasons, but ESPN\u2019s Jeff Passan wrote a fascinating article<\/a> on a mechanical overhaul that Sasaki underwent in August to flip the script after a season of diminished velocities and stuff, created mostly by a right-shoulder injury.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t only the Blue Jays who live and die by the whole 26-against-one thing. The Brewers’ \u201cwhole is greater than the sum of its parts\u201d schtick was enough to carry them to the majors’ best record, and the acquisition of Vaughn in June was low-key one of the most significant in-season deals made by any team. Vaughn had an .869 OPS, nine homers in 64 games and has formed a nice platoon with lefty-hitting Jake Bauers. The Dodgers will run out more right-handed pitching than the Cubs did in the NLDS but Murphy has said he likes Vaughn\u2019s bat enough that he\u2019d contemplate having them both in the lineup, with Bauers in the outfield.<\/p>\n

Jeff Blair\u2019s pick: Dodgers def. Brewers, 4-2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Only one playoff team managed to post a winning percentage of 1.000 against the Los Angeles Dodgers this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-209945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}