Oct. 16--Again. Again. Again.
Runners were abandoned. A base was forgotten. A manager's control was lost.
Get lathered, get rinsed, repeat.
In front of a stunned silent crowd at Dodger Stadium on Thursday night, the unthinkable became real, the impossible became the familiar, and history let out a blood-curdling scream.
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For a third consecutive year, in a third consecutive playoff series, the Dodgers season didn't simply end, it dissolved. The Dodgers didn't just lose a deciding Game 5 of the National League division series to the New York Mets, they embarrassingly handed it to them.
The front office changes, the players change, yet the ugliness stays the same, 27 years without a World Series and counting, the doom enveloping more than 50,000 folks at Chavez Ravine on Thursday in a familiar throat tightening that now feels like suffocating.
"Been standing here before," said Dodgers outfielder Carl Crawford, staring into space. "Same ending again."
In an eerie match of last season's crumble in St. Louis, the final score of the final loss was again 3-2, sending the players' rally towels crashing into the back of the Dodgers dugout, dropping Manager Don Mattingly's chin to his chest, and invoking a rare discouraging word from the guy who pays for it all.
"They let it go," said Mark Walter, the team's controlling owner, as he leaned against a clubhouse wall and sighed. "It's hard, it's very hard. We had their guys on the ropes."
Of all the awful sights Thursday, perhaps none was as compelling as the wincing Walter, especially considering he is the one who loosens the strings on a purse that has made the Dodgers baseball's richest team with a $300-million payroll.
Can we focus on that figure for a minute?
For $300 million, in the biggest game of the year, you would think the Dodgers could get more than two hits with 13 runners in scoring position. They could not. They had the Mets and scuffling Jacob deGrom within inches of the canvas in each of the first four innings, but let him up with bad strikeouts and hurried swings and unprofessional bats.
It was so bad, Walter was even computing the heartbreak, noting, "We had 54 pitches with runners in scoring position, 54 pitches ... it's so frustrating."
For $300 million, you would also think the Dodgers would always be covering third base -- there's only four bases to watch, right? -- yet in the fourth inning they inexplicably left it open after Zack Greinke walked Lucas Duda with the infield shifted to right. Daniel Murphy, who had earlier singled and jogged to second on the walk, saw the free base and sprinted to it. Moments later, Murphy scored the game-tying run on Travis d'Arnaud's deep foul fly ball, a 2-all tie that remained until Murphy won the game with a home run into the right-field seats in the sixth.
Mattingly blamed the naked base caper on rookie Corey Seager, but, in a broader sense, the blame will be felt by new Dodgers baseball boss Andrew Friedman. This was a case of old-fashioned hustle beating the sort of new-age baseball shift that has been implemented here by the Friedman regime. It is a shift that has sometimes succeeded but still requires more work, especially on a team with a rookie shortstop.
"We should all be kind of ... communicating, 'Get to third, get to third,'" said Mattingly after this expensive team was once again felled by 10-cent fundamentals.
Finally, for $300 million, you wouldn't think the Dodgers players and their manager would engage in a shouting match in the middle of their most important moment.
The enduring image of Thursday's loss will probably be Andre Ethier waving off Mattingly and screaming, "Shut up and manage!" after Mattingly had tried to calm him down after Ethier flied out with a runner on second in the third.
Mattingly claimed, and Ethier didn't deny, that the outfielder was angry at a called strike during his failed plate appearance. Mattingly said he was trying to calm Ethier down, but Ethier wasn't listening.
"He's maybe yelling at me because I'm trying to settle him down, but it was nothing between us," said Mattingly.
While Mattingly's fate was probably decided before this season started -- advance to a World Series or else -- that public lack of respect was symbolic of what is probably the end of his five-year tenure. Even though he won 55% of his games and became the first Dodgers manager to win three consecutive division championships, Mattingly will undoubtedly be viewed as the one constant in their three consecutive playoff meltdowns, and will probably pay the price with his job.
The other loser Thursday was Friedman himself, as the series loss cemented the questions that many fans have had about the philosophy that he and General Manager Farhan Zaidi have put into place. They are considered two of the smartest guys in baseball, but they couldn't build a team that advanced any further than Ned Colletti's teams, no further than last year, and the honeymoon is now officially over.
Their idea that the Dodgers didn't need a strong third starter didn't work. Brett Anderson and Alex Wood were shelled in Game 3. Their idea that the Dodgers can win with complementary hitters instead of at least two unabashed power guys didn't. They hit just two homers in the series while the Mets hit six and seemingly made every one count. Then there was the failure of Seager, pushed into the playoff starting lineup after only 27 games and batting just .167 in the series while failing to cover third base on that critical play.
Thursday night ended appropriately, with organist Nancy Bea Hefley cleaning out her space and heading out the door into retirement. It was a season that ended, once again and again and again, with the sounds of silence.
MORE DODGERS NEWS:
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Don Mattingly says Andre Ethier was yelling about umpire's call, not at him
