Dodgers advance to NLCS, sweep Diamondbacks

The Arizona Diamondbacks were secretly one of baseball’s best stories: a rags-to-riches tale that began last year when they thought they were a contender and stumbled drunkenly down a canyonside. They were supposed to be great, and they were awful. Then they were supposed to be awful, but they were great. Everyone loves a story like that.

The Los Angeles Dodgers have won five National League West titles in a row, and they’re kind of good. They were better than the Diamondbacks coming into the series, and everyone knew it. But there was still a chance that the ghosts of September would creep up and take the Dodgers down.

Instead, the Dodgers will advance to their third National League Championship Series in the last five years, sweeping their divisional rivals out of the postseason. They won, 3-1, and they haven’t lost in October.

Scoring started early, with Chris Taylor hitting a leadoff double, moving to second on a walk, moving to third on a sac fly, and scoring on a slow grounder to first. It was station-to-station baseball, and it was deployed perfectly to give the Dodgers an early 1-0 lead.

The second run was less complex. Cody Bellinger hit a ball real far-like in the fifth inning. It wasn’t the last time Bellinger would make his presence known, as he was involved in a couple of brilliant defensive plays, and the solo home run gave LA some welcome insurance. In the sixth inning, Austin Barnes added a solo home run of his own. The only scoring from the Diamondbacks was a solo homer from Daniel Descalso, and the game was 3-1.

Game 3 was a low-scoring affair because of the efforts of Yu Darvish and the other Dodgers hitters, though. Darvish was brilliant with just 76 pitches over five innings, allowing just two hits and a hit batsman and striking out seven. Meanwhile, the Dodgers were unable to take advantage of Zack Greinke’s five walks, going 0-for-10 with runners in scoring position.

The imbalance of solo home runs was enough, though, and the Dodgers will not be bounced from the first round of the postseason ignominiously after their historic regular season. The Dodgers benefited from some superlative bullpen work, getting key outs from Tony Cingrani, Brandon Morrow, Kenta Maeda (who was surprisingly electric), and Kenley Jansen, who mowed down Paul Goldschmidt for the last out of the game in a tense showdown.

They’ll will move to the NLCS, where they will have a chance to win their first pennant since 1988, even though they’ve been in the NLCS in five out of the last 10 seasons.

The Diamondbacks won more games than they were supposed to, and they should feel ecstatic about their turnaround. They downed one division rival in the Wild Card Game, but they ran into a Darvish-shaped buzzsaw in the NLDS.

The Dodgers will face the winner of the Cubs-Nationals series in the NLCS for a chance to go to the World Series.