Excerpt:
Read it all at: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/585470 ... s-dodgers/NEW YORK — Welcome to one of the strangest postseason series ever played. Can we just call it The Blowout Series?
Every day, you think this National League Championship Series is due for a breathtaking October classic. Then you look up at the scoreboard, and it’s 10-2 in the fourth inning.
We’re five games into this thing now, and the Dodgers and Mets are both flying across the country to play another game Sunday. So at least this NLCS has that going for it. It’s never felt close, but — at Dodgers 3 wins, Mets 2 wins — it can’t possibly be closer.
Just check out the scores of these five games so far. The expression, nail-biter, is guaranteed not to cross your mind.
Game 1 (Sunday): Dodgers 9, Mets 0
Game 2 (Monday): Mets 7, Dodgers 3
Game 3 (Wednesday): Dodgers 8, Mets 0
Game 4 (Thursday): Dodgers 10, Mets 2
Game 5 (Friday): Mets 12, Dodgers 6
If you look at those scores and ask — Is this as bonkers as I think it is? — you’re not alone. Does it make you feel better to know that even the men playing in this series aren’t sure what the heck is happening.
“Well, it’s different,” said the Mets’ Brandon Nimmo.
“It makes no sense,” said his ever-philosophical teammate, reliever Ryne Stanek. “But it’s the playoffs. You almost expect things to go sideways.”
“You know,” said his bullpen buddy, Phil Maton, “baseball is just gonna baseball.”
Oh, is it ever. At least it’s one of those times in life when you should be grateful that there’s a column known as the October Weird and Wild column. We exist to tell you just how off the rails this series is.
We also exist to tell you that games like Friday’s — when the winning team (the Mets) somehow struck out zero times in 44 plate appearances — are so hard to comprehend that afterward, Francisco Lindor made me show him the box score on my phone before he could be convinced that had really happened. More on those Mets Zero Heroes shortly.
But first, let’s help you make sense of …
The land of the blowouts
Five games. Five blowouts. C’mon, man. How even?
“It’s not exactly how I saw this going,” Nimmo said — and with good reason.
How rare are series like this? I asked our friends from STATS Perform to help me dig into that question. No matter how we framed it, the answer was always: Incredibly rare.
Five straight games decided by four runs or more?
Those of us covering this series spent much of the day asking each other: Do you ever remember a series like this? We couldn’t — and for good reason. There have only been three other series in postseason history in which five games had a margin of four runs or more:
1965 World Series — Dodgers vs. Twins (6)
2010 ALCS — Yankees vs. Rangers (5)
2021 ALCS — Red Sox vs. Astros (5)
(Source: STATS Perform)
