Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s complete game is Dodgers’ latest pitching flex

MILWAUKEE — Technically, Roki Sasaki was available to relieve the Dodgers on Tuesday night.

In reality, this was not the case.

“I wouldn’t say unavailable,” manager Dave Roberts said before the game. “But we are unlikely to use it.”

Without the most electric arm in their unreliable bullpen, how could the Dodgers record the final outs needed to win Game 2 of the National League Championship Series?

Here’s how to do it: by making their enclosure a non-factor.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto threw a complete game, becoming the first Japanese pitcher to do so in a playoff game. The offense spared Roberts another late-inning scare by adding insurance runs in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings.

The result was a 5–1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers at American Family Field, which extended the Dodgers’ lead in the NLCS to two games to none.

Two more wins and the Dodgers will advance to the World Series for the third time in six seasons. Two more wins and they’ll be on track to become baseball’s first repeat champions in 25 years.

Ninety-three teams took a two-game lead to none in a best-of-seven playoff series. Seventy-nine of them moved forward.

In other words, this series is over.

If the Philadelphia Phillies couldn’t overcome a 2-0 deficit against the Dodgers, these overmatched tryhards in Milwaukee certainly won’t.

With the next three games at Dodger Stadium and Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani and Blake Snell expected to start those games, the most pressing question about this NLCS is whether it will return to baseball’s smallest market for Game 6.

Don’t count on it.

The Brewers’ bullpen was supposed to be superior to the Dodgers’, but that advantage was negated by the Dodgers’ superior pitching.

Reaching this point in October required the Brewers to exhaust their relievers, so much so that by the time Abner Uribe entered Game 2 in a sixth-inning emergency, he might as well have been Tanner Scott.

“We’re more exhausted than the Dodgers,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said.

The workload made the Brewers’ bullpen as rickety as the Dodgers’, and that was with Sasaki just a spectator.

What decided the game was that Murphy had to rely on his bullpen and Roberts didn’t.

Brewers starter Freddy Peralta pitched 5 ⅔ innings. A day after Snell faced the minimum number of batters in eight innings, Yamamoto recorded all 27 outs required to win a game.

Roberts said he didn’t hesitate to send Yamamoto back to the mound for the ninth inning. The night before, he had asked Sasaki to close, and the decision to pull Snell nearly cost the Dodgers the game.

“Obviously,” Roberts said as diplomatically as possible, “there were some issues with the bullpen.”

Things now include Sasaki, whose ability to handle an October workload was called into question after failing to finish the ninth inning of Game 1. In the match in question, Sasaki gave up a point and had to be replaced by Blake Treinen.

Sasaki’s form in the first match raised alarm bells, and rightly so. The converted starter still looked exhausted after his three-inning relief appearance against the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 4 of the NL Division Series. His fastball velocity has gradually declined over the course of the postseason, and he’s not the kind of pitcher who can be as effective throwing at 96 mph as he is when throwing at 100 mph.

Sasaki never pitched as a reliever in the United States or Japan. He spent 4 1/2 months on the injured list this year due to a shoulder impingement. Just as the Dodgers didn’t know what to expect from him when they first deployed him out of the bullpen, they don’t know what they can expect from him now.

“It’s one of those things where we’re still in uncharted territory with him,” Roberts said.

At different stages of the season, the Dodgers asked the same questions about their downtrodden bullpen: How could they survive when their team’s firefighters were also arsonists? How could they win a World Series with such an unreliable group of late-inning options?

In this NLCS, the Dodgers showed how. They will use them as infrequently as possible.