The Dodgers didn’t show up to NLCS Game 1 trying to win a home-run derby.
That’s notable for a club that spent the 2026 regular season mashing 204 homers, even with Shohei Ohtani missing much of September and dealing with injuries that had already chipped away at his power before he landed on the injured list. Los Angeles still got plenty of pop from the rest of the lineup, too; no other Dodger cleared 30 home runs, a pretty clean sign of how deep the power ran through the roster.
But against Jacob Misiorowski, Dave Roberts made it clear the usual feast-or-famine plan wasn’t the answer. Before Game 1, Roberts said the Dodgers needed to be “more a little bit conceding the slug, hitting the ball out front, to then seeing the ball a little bit longer to spoil pitches, to shoot the ball the other way.
That's how you've got to beat this guy. To think you're going to catch him out front and pull it in the air is bananas.
"The Padres, I thought, had the perfect plan to get him. They got him out after four innings, which was a huge, huge win.”
That blueprint didn’t come from nowhere. On Oct. 3 in Game 1 of the National League Division Series, San Diego pushed Misiorowski to 88 pitches over four innings and forced Brewers manager Pat Murphy to burn five relievers over the final five frames. Milwaukee still came back to win that game, 3-2, and eventually took the series in four, but the Padres handed the Dodgers a useful lesson: make the starter work, and the bullpen eventually gets involved.
Los Angeles followed that script on Sunday. Misiorowski carried 92 pitches into the fifth inning, and after he needed just two pitches to get Kiké Hernández, Murphy headed to the bullpen.
By then, the Dodgers had only managed one run, but the contact quality told the real story. They had swung and missed just 10 times, good for a 10.4% whiff rate against a pitcher who had generated whiffs on 17.6% of all his pitches in the regular season.
The matchup between Misiorowski and Dodgers starter Tarik Skubal lived up to the billing, and by the sixth inning both teams were into their bullpens. San Diego had already shown the way.
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