The Dodgers lineup has been at home to start the postseason.
On Tuesday night in Atlanta, the formula worked as homers from Kiké Hernández and Freddie Freeman provided all the offense the Dodgers needed to pull one win away from advancing to the National League Championship Series.
With Yoshinobu Yamamoto on the mound, it doesn’t take much.
Here are my four picks from the Dodgers’ 3-1 Game 3 win:
(Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Hernández has been a slightly below league average hitter during his 13-year regular season career. But in the postseason, he’s basically Aaron Judge.
Judge, who has not played this postseason due to injury, has an .822 OPS and 17 home runs for his playoff career. Hernández, after going deep off Chris Sale with a two-run shot to start the scoring Tuesday, also has 17 homers along with a career .832 postseason OPS.
Hernández, it’s worth noting, has played in far more playoff games than Judge. In fact, no player in Dodgers history has played more. Tuesday was his 94th with the franchise.
That’s what he built his reputation on, taking his game up a notch in October.
Hernández has discussed in the past his use of visualization, a practice he began after several years of postseason failure early in his career. Starting in the 2017 playoffs, every night before going to sleep before a playoff game, Hernández envisioned every scenario he could think of that would happen on the baseball field and then imagined himself succeeding in that moment.
More often than not, he would, starting with his three-run home run in Game 5 of the 2017 National League Championship Series. Since then, he’s become an October legend.
For his regular season career, Hernández has struck out approximately once in 28 at-bats. In the postseason, it’s once in 17 at-bats.
Among players with at least 100 career home runs (regular season and postseason), Hernández is the only player in MLB history to have at least 10% of his career home runs come in the playoffs.
Two years ago, Hernández didn’t start any of the first three games of the Dodgers’ NLDS series as his team lost 2-1 to the Padres. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts corrected that decision in Game 4, choosing to go with the players he trusted with the season on the line. Hernández entered the starting lineup for playoff games 4 and 5. The Dodgers won both, and he started every game for the rest of that playoff run.
He wasn’t in the starting lineup for Games 1 and 2 of this year’s NLDS — there are fewer ways for Roberts to work this year, given the roster construction — but Hernández still got his chance.
2.
(Photo by David J. Griffin/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Hernández’s 17th career postseason home run tied teammate Freddie Freeman for the 17th most in MLB history.
Or, at least it did for a few minutes.
Two batters after Hernández went deep off Chris Sale in the fourth inning, Freeman did the same, moving the first baseman into an eight-run tie for 10th all-time with his 18th career playoff home run.
It was Freeman’s second home run of the series after going deep just once in the second half of the season. He was limited to one extra-base hit all of September, clearly limited by a knee problem that sapped his power and made his motion out of sync.
Any concerns about his health seem to have disappeared now that the calendar has turned to October, where Freeman, like Hernández, has developed a penchant for finding another fixture.
Freeman has reached base in 25 consecutive postseason games with the Dodgers dating back to Game 1 of the 2024 World Series. That year, he endured an ankle injury to record the first grand slam in World Series history. It was the first of his four home runs in the series.
This year, he is 4-for-11 with two home runs to start the playoffs. He was a few feet away from another home run. In the third inning Tuesday, Freeman launched a 101.3 mph fastball to the opposite end that was robbed by left fielder Mauricio Dubón with a wall bounce.
He hit three more than 100 mph balls off the bat in Game 3 and also helped out defensively, capping the win with a sensational first base pick on a throw by Mookie Betts to end the game.
3.
(Photo by Daniel Shirey / MLB Pictures via Getty Images)
Much of the discussion entering Tuesday centered on the Braves’ decision to save ace Chris Sale for Game 3 rather than use him in Game 2 after the veteran lefty threw 21 pitches in relief to end the wild-card streak on Oct. 1.
Choosing to use Sale in that spot, for that long, to close out the series win against the Phillies was a risky play, considering the potential toll it could take on his arm moving forward. But the decision seemed to work well when the Braves stole Game 2 in Los Angeles, sending the series back to Atlanta tied at one game with their ace on the mound.
The only problem?
The guy who gets the ball for the opposition is the reigning MVP of the World Series.
It was Yoshinobu Yamamoto who stole the show in the Game 3 ace, allowing just one run on four hits and a walk while striking out a postseason career-high 10 strikeouts.
That feat is notable, considering that last postseason Yamamoto became the first catcher since Curt Schilling in 2001 to throw a complete game playoff game. He would later dig his place further into postseason lore, tossing six innings of one-run ball in Game 6 of the World Series before returning a night later and throwing 2 2/3 innings of relief.
In case he needed any extra motivation Tuesday, he had never beaten the Braves before, despite allowing just one earned run over 16 1/3 innings in his previous three starts against them.
That changed in Game 3.
4.
(Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
The Dodgers entered October unsure of who would close their games.
The most obvious pick was Tanner Scott, who led the club with 25 receptions this year in a comeback season. But ideally, Roberts would prefer to use Scott for a series of hard lefts.
After allowing two runs in the ninth inning of Game 1, Scott followed Yamamoto into the eighth inning of Game 3. The ninth inning belonged to Edwin Díaz.
That’s what the Dodgers envisioned when they gave Díaz three years and $69 million this offseason, ahead of a disastrous 2026 season marred by injuries and underperformance. Díaz posted a career-worst 8.68 ERA and missed time with an elbow problem that required surgery and a neck problem that landed him on the injured list in August.
But he bounced back in late September looking more like the pitcher the Dodgers expected to get, going five scoreless innings to end the season while striking out nine. His speed and stuff increased as well.
After striking out two in a scoreless sixth in Game 1, Díaz got the call in the ninth in Game 3 and bounced off Ozzie Albie’s leadoff double to throw a scoreless frame.
The Dodgers may have found their ninth-inning answer in the guy they hoped would be all along.
4 ½. What’s next?
Tyler Mahle has given the Braves everything they could have asked for following his acquisition at the deadline from San Francisco.
Now, he will be tasked with trying to save their season against Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow in Game 4 on Wednesday.
Worth watching: Braves manager Walt Weiss said after the game that Ronald Acuña Jr. locked up his knee in Game 2, which is why he served as DH in Game 3. Acuña is just 3-for-21 to start the postseason.