Braves Even NLDS at 1-1, Beating Dodgers 3-2 on Bubic Wild Pitch as Series Shifts to Atlanta

Since Tarik Skubal and the Dodgers took Game 1 of the NLDS behind five home runs between the two teams, Los Angeles had every advantage walking into Game 2 Sunday night at Dodger Stadium. They blew it.

The Atlanta Braves beat the Dodgers 3-2, evening the best-of-five series at one game apiece, according to NBC Los Angeles. The series now shifts to Atlanta, where Chris Sale faces Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Game 3 on Tuesday.

How the Braves took the lead back

Michael Harris II tripled in the fifth inning after Teoscar Hernández took what the Occasional Digest described as a bad route on the line drive, putting Harris 90 feet from the go-ahead run. Dodgers reliever Kris Bubic then lost control of a sweeper in a 2-0 count to Mauricio Dubón. The pitch sailed high and outside, off catcher Will Smith's glove, and Harris scored standing up, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"We didn't want to give in there," Bubic said, per the Times. "But that's the last thing you want to do there."

Harris added an RBI double off reliever Edgardo Henriquez in the seventh for insurance, NBC Los Angeles reported. He finished a home run short of the cycle.

Snell couldn't match Skubal's Game 1 outing

Dodgers starter Blake Snell, a two-time Cy Young winner, lasted just 3⅔ innings. He threw 90 pitches, only 47 for strikes, walked five, struck out five, and allowed one run on three hits, according to The Sporting Tribune. He loaded the bases in the first inning before escaping with just one run, on a two-out, two-strike infield single from Dubón. Manager Dave Roberts pulled him after his fifth walk in the fourth, with his pitch count already at 90.

Roberts said there were no concerns entering the start. "Not at all," he said, according to The Sporting Tribune. "I thought that he wasn't that sharp in San Francisco, but we got him out of it, felt great coming out of that outing."

The bullpen gamble that's working for Atlanta

Braves manager Walt Weiss used a second straight bullpen game rather than start Chris Sale on two days' rest after Sale closed out the wild-card finale against Philadelphia, Sports Illustrated reported. Left-hander Ray Kerr opened and threw 2⅔ scoreless innings, striking out four while allowing two hits and a walk, and got the final out of his outing by striking out Shohei Ohtani.

Kerr made just nine regular-season appearances this year, didn't debut until August, and posted a 1.47 ERA over 18⅓ innings, according to Sports Illustrated. Fox Sports detailed his path to the mound: foster care, academic ineligibility out of junior college, a stint working at a 7-Eleven and a movie theater in Reno, Nevada, before a second junior college and an Alaska summer league performance got him noticed by the Mariners organization. He also threw 3⅓ scoreless innings in the deciding Game 3 of the wild-card series against Philadelphia.

"Ray Kerr is amazing, man," Weiss said, according to Fox Sports. "He did it again."

Dodgers' bigger problem: no manufactured runs

All seven of the Dodgers' runs in the series have come on five solo home runs, three with the bases empty, according to the Los Angeles Times' Kevin Baxter. The Dodgers are 0 for 9 with men in scoring position, stranding 13 runners, and are hitting .215 against the ten pitchers Atlanta has used, Baxter reported. Freddie Freeman's fourth-inning homer off his former team tied the game at 1, and Max Muncy's two-out, two-strike shot in the ninth cut a 3-1 deficit to 3-2 before closer Raisel Iglesias secured the save.

That's a reversal from the regular season, when the Dodgers won 100 games despite ranking outside the top 16 in home runs, relying instead on being third in MLB in walks and near the bottom in strikeouts to manufacture runs, Baxter reported.

"We've got to find a way to score some runs without hitting a home run," Freeman said after the loss, according to both the Times and The Sporting Tribune. Mookie Betts, who walked twice, put it more simply: "Sometimes it's just you can't hit."

The disagreement among outlets isn't about what happened Sunday, it's about what it means. Sports Illustrated framed the bullpen-game strategy as having "flipped the NLDS on its head" in Atlanta's favor. The Los Angeles Times focused on what the Dodgers gave away rather than what Atlanta earned, emphasizing the Hernández route and Bubic's wild pitch as self-inflicted. Both are compatible with the same box score: the Braves have now won with a bullpen game in back-to-back contests against two Cy Young winners, and the Dodgers have yet to solve a Braves relief corps that's held them to .215 hitting through two games.

The series resumes Tuesday in Atlanta with Sale and Yamamoto on the mound, and the open question is whether the Dodgers' power-reliant offense can generate the two-out, bases-empty traffic Roberts says his lineup needs, or whether Atlanta's bullpen can keep stacking scoreless innings into a third straight game.