Dodgers escape elimination on arm of Kershaw

Pitching on three days’ rest and on a five-start postseason skid, Kershaw kept the simmering crowd of 44,183 at bay while on the mound.

After 6 ¹/₂ months of coming to the ballpark and knowing, win or lose, there always would be another battle to fight this season, the Mets face the new reality Thursday that tomorrow is not guaranteed.

Pitchers Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard, who started games 1 and 2 of the National League Division Series for the New York Mets, have names that conveniently fold into a simple mashup: Syndergrom.

Greinke will try to match the gem thrown by Dodgers teammate Clayton Kershaw in Game 4 Tuesday.

The victor takes on the Cubs in the NLCS at home. “They have respect for the players, and we have respect for them, and we really owe them”.

“If you look at how I pitched them last time, I threw more fastballs to their righties and less fastballs to their lefties”, Greinke said, “and they had more lefties than most teams. I definitely wanted to send this back to Los Angeles”, said Kershaw. That one ended with Wright’s two-run single off reliever Pedro Baez and with Kershaw losing his fifth straight postseason start. Offensively, Justin Turner leads Los Angeles with seven hits, Adrian Gonzalez has five RBI and Enrique Hernandez has drawn two walks.

“Kershaw learned that firsthand in Game 1, a 3-1 Mets win in which deGrom outpitched the reigning National League MVP and three-time Cy Young Award victor”. “It’s the playoffs. So it doesn’t really – obviously your routines change a little bit, different things like that, but as far as being prepared, being ready for it, I’ll be fine come tomorrow”. “This kid is tremendous”.

“The one pitch I know he wants back is the pitch to Kershaw”, Collins said. “This guy’s an animal, the way he works, represents us, the game of baseball, himself”. The Dodgers have won two of the three games and Kershaw has a 1.89 ERA and 0.74 WHIP in those short-rest starts. The team won two of three in Los Angeles in early July before splitting the first two games of this series there. In 475 regular-season outings, he’s only pitched in relief eight times.

“There’s no curse or anything”, he said. The Maple Leafs had 1,034,103 followers and the Blue Jays had 1,030,844 as of Tuesday night – a difference of just 3,259. Though Daniel Murphy hit a solo home run off him in the fourth inning, the Mets never really felt like they mounted a serious threat. That compelled Mattingly to bring in closer Kenley Jansen to get out of the eighth and pitch a likely four-out save.

Against a pitcher like deGrom, the Dodgers will not be able to depend exclusively on the long ball, as they did in the first quarter of the season. “For a lot of reasons, but obviously most important was just to give Zack a chance”. “He’ll keep the ball down”, said Mets rookie left fielder Michael Conforto, who will start against Greinke.

The Mets started this series by beating Kershaw, and used a solid game plan to do so. “I think personally the more I see a pitcher, the more advantage I have”. But the seventh inning was his undoing, with Matt Adams blasting a 3-run homer that gave St. Louis a 3-2 win and the series victory.

Manager Terry Collins has used a few different lineups this series, and he’ll go back to the one that the team used in Game 2. When he was here there wasn’t a position that he played that we were concerned about.