Blake Treinen threw his hands in the sky. His teammates poured out of the dugout and swallowed him up near the mound.
Around them, the collective force of 53,000 fans all too accustomed to October frustration and heartbreak roared in delirious unison.
And not for the last time this fall, either.
Not after a nearly flawless performance from their ballclub on Friday.
Read more: Plaschke: Playoff demons be gone! Dodgers outlast Padres to advance to NLCS
With a 2-0 defeat of the San Diego Padres in Game 5 of the National League Division Series, the Dodgers did more than just eliminate their Southern California rivals and advance to the NL Championship Series. Staring down a third straight potential NLDS exit, they banded together, shut down the Padres’ powerhouse lineup and exorcised some maddening postseason demons in the process.
“It’s relief,” manager Dave Roberts said, cigar in hand, during his postgame news conference. “It’s redemption.”
“I think we’re all sick of it,” infielder Gavin Lux added. “We want to change the narrative.”
Indeed, in each of the last two years, and three of the last five, the Dodgers failed to produce a moment like Friday’s.
In 2019, 2022 and 2023, they watched division-winning, 100-win ballclubs crash out of the playoffs in the best-of-five division series round. Even in 2020, when they won a World Series, their NLDS victory came in a neutral-site ballpark in front of zero fans.
This year, however, was different. And Friday’s win, the Dodgers’ second straight facing elimination after falling behind two games to one, was pure catharsis.
“I won’t lie to you, it’s a little bit of a relief,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “But this is a different group this year. There’s a lot of fight … We were going to win this game, no doubt about it.”
In the Dodgers’ first postseason series clincher in front of a home crowd since 2013, that internal belief was evident from the start.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the $325-million offseason signing the Dodgers entrusted with the Game 5 start, even after he apparently tipped his pitches in a three-inning, five-run clunker in Game 1, set the tone.
The 26-year-old right-hander retired the side in the first inning. He stranded a two-out walk in the second. Then, when the Padres mounted their biggest threat in third, with two runners on and one out, he threw a 3-and-1 slider below the zone that Fernando Tatis Jr. rolled into a double play.
“He was outstanding tonight,” Roberts said. “I knew he wasn’t going to run from this spot.”
In a more predictable development, Kiké Hernández rose to the occasion too, delivering the kind of postseason impact the club envisioned when it re-signed him in the offseason.
In the bottom of second, after a Will Smith double play sucked some life out of the crowd, Hernández went hunting for a first-pitch fastball from Padres starter Yu Darvish. When he got it, he connected on a solo home run to the upper reaches of the left-field pavilion.
“I kept telling myself, ‘They brought you here for a reason,’” said Hernández, who has batted .340 in his last 35 playoff games, dating to the 2020 postseason in which he won a World Series with the Dodgers.
Read more: Kiké Hernández renews his reputation for October heroics: ‘This guy always rises’
“I wanted to come back to make a run with this team,” Hernández added. “Because I really want to have a parade.”
From there, Darvish was dominant — until he wasn’t.
After Darvish retired 14 consecutive batters following Hernández’s homer, extending his success against his former Dodgers team — he has a career 2.27 earned-run average against them in the regular season and held them to one run over seven innings in the Padres’ Game 2 win — they took the veteran right-hander deep again in the seventh.
This time, it was courtesy of the other Hernández in the Dodgers’ lineup.
In a 2-and-1 count, Teoscar Hernández got a slider over the plate. After depositing it in the left-field seats with a line drive, he chucked his bat away with one hand. The pandemonium that ensued caused Chavez Ravine to shake.
“I got a guy right here that likes the moment too,” Kiké said in his postgame press conference, with Teoscar seated beside him. “I told him before Game 4, [it had] never been done in the history of this game, two Hernándezes going deep in the same game in the playoffs.”
Meanwhile, the pitching staff gave the Padres no way back, completing the series with back-to-back shutouts and a stunning streak of 24 consecutive scoreless innings, a team playoff record.
Yamamoto commanded his fastball with precision and snapped off an uncomfortable flurry of sliders, curveballs and splitters, producing a five-inning outing that was everything the Dodgers were hoping for and then some.
Evan Phillips got five outs after that, pumping up the ballpark as he left the mound following a strikeout of Manny Machado, who hit two balls to the warning track earlier in the game but finished the series in a three-for-20 slump.
A cursing, screaming Alex Vesia had veins popping from his neck after striking out Jackson Merrill to end the seventh.
“We know that the postseason runs through the bullpen,” Phillips said. “Through all the ups and downs throughout the year, we know we’re building toward this moment.”
There was one nervous sequence at the start of the eighth, when Vesia — who returned for a second inning with a string of left-handers due up — called for a trainer while warming up and left with an apparent injury.
That forced Roberts to turn to hard-throwing right-hander Michael Kopech earlier than he wanted, for matchups that better suited the left-handed Vesia.
No matter. Kopech retired the side in order, punctuating the inning by blowing a 102-mph fastball past Jake Cronenworth. Trienen took care of the ninth, setting up an NLCS meeting with the New York Mets that will begin Sunday at Dodger Stadium.
Eight more wins still separate the Dodgers from winning a World Series, something they haven’t accomplished in a full season since 1988.
But in a postseason all about redemption, their triumph Friday night, given their early eliminations in recent postseasons, served as a monumental and much-anticipated first step.
“We have a lot of ‘F-U’ in us,” Kiké Hernández said. “We’ve overcame a lot of adversity, not only during the season but in this series. But we were able to come out on top, and that’s the only thing that matters.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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