Sean Manaea Carries Mets’ NLCS Hopes After Game 1 Rout

Family and friends will say their last goodbyes to Mabeline Mullins Glasshagel in Wanatah, Ind., on Monday. The 78-year-old died last Tuesday at a Valparaiso hospital. She left behind two daughters, two sisters, six grandchildren, three great grandchildren and many nieces and nephews. One of those nephews, Sean Manaea, will not be able to attend the funeral. A left-handed pitcher for the New York Mets, he is tasked here at Dodger Stadium with stopping one of the hottest teams in postseason history while Aunt Mabel, the sister of his mom, Opal, is laid to rest.

“It’s a small town,” Manaea says. “Everybody knows everybody. My whole family basically will be there. I will have a few friends at the game.”

Manaea grew up in Wanatah, a town of about 1,000 people and less than 1.5 square miles. His father, Faaloloi Manaea Jr.—the son of a Marine who served in World War II—served in Vietnam, after which he was stationed in Indiana. There he met Opal. They settled in Wanatah, where Manaea grew up with as solid a Midwestern work ethic as it gets. His dad worked in a steel mill and his mom in a car factory.

Manaea is the embodiment of that work ethic. The 34th pick in the first round in 2013 out of Indiana State, Manaea has more career wins (77) than any other first-rounder in that draft—11 years and five organizations later. His quest for betterment is boundless.

At the end of July this season, after watching Chris Sale pitch, he changed how he threw a baseball. He ditched his overhead windup and lowered his arm angle. He also changed the grip on his changeup, switching to a one-seam grip. Since the re-invention, Manaea is 7–2 with a 2.98 ERA in 14 starts.

Today, when his family is saying goodbye to Aunt Mabel, the Mets need Manaea more than ever. The Dodgers look just about as unstoppable this week as any team has ever looked in October. They won NLCS Game 1 on Sunday by the same score as a forfeit is recorded, 9–0, while encountering almost as little resistance.

There is a name for what the Dodgers have become, and it dates to the 1630s. Through the streets of Puri, a town in India, people pulled a huge wagon with an image of Krishna as part of an annual festival. It was said, probably apocryphally, that devotees sacrificed themselves by throwing themselves in front of the barreling wagon. From that tradition emerged the word “juggernaut,” which has come to mean a merciless force that can be destructive to anything in its path.

See also, Dodgers, Los Angeles.

These Dodgers have thrown 33 consecutive scoreless innings, tying the postseason record of the 1966 Orioles. They have outscored the Padres and Mets in this run, 23–0. They crushed the Mets in Game 1 with such a clinic of offensive baseball that it was the biggest shutout blowout without the need of a home run among the 389 postseason Game 1s ever played.

Like pearls on a necklace, Los Angeles strung together nine hits, seven walks and—get this—two unnecessary but well-executed sacrifice bunts to roll over New York. As competition goes, it wasn’t pretty, unless you are a devotee of swing decisions. There the Dodgers painted a masterpiece.

The Dodgers did not chase 22 of the first 23 pitches out of the zone thrown by Mets pitchers Kodai Senga and David Peterson. Six of their nine hits, including four of the five that knocked in runs, happened after a Dodgers batter worked the count in his favor by not chasing out of the zone.

“You’ve got to take what they give you,” says Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc. “It just depends on how they pitch. So, there’s not one formula that we try to use.”

On this night, Senga could not find his splitter or the strike zone. He needed help. The Dodgers provided none. Senga walked four of the first eight batters. Three of them scored. The rout was on.

“He was struggling with his command, and I thought they recognized that,” Van Scoyac says of his hitters, “and just kind of put the pressure on him by making him try to throw strikes and it affected him.”

The Dodgers make pitchers sweat. Only the Yankees and Brewers chased pitches less often than did the Dodgers. They were even better in Game 1 limiting their chase (24%) than they were during the season (29.1%, well below the league average of 31.8%).

“You know, it’s, it’s like, who cares what the soup recipe is as long as it ends up being the same product in the end?” Van Scoyoc says. “So yeah, some nights it’s slug, some nights it’s hits.

“That’s what we do. We talk about being adaptable and taking what the other team gives you and finding different ways to win the game. And this game tonight, with how they pitched us, that was how we had to win the game.”

The Mets were flummoxed. They thought Peterson was the bullpen weapon of choice to neutralize Shohei Ohtani.  But Ohtani ruined that idea the first time he saw him, in the third inning and the Los Angeles lead at 4–0, with a 116.5 mph laser of a run-scoring double. It was Ohtani’s second run-scoring hit of the night. Peterson wound up wasting 40 pitches in a low-leverage spot as Mets manager Carlos Mendoza hoped to buy time for his offense to awaken against locked-in Dodgers righthander Jack Flaherty. Instead, the deficit just grew larger.

By the eighth inning, the Mets had seen enough of Ohtani. When Ohtani came to bat with two runners on against José Buttó, Mets pitching coach Jeremy Hefner marched to the mound with instructions to pitch carefully to Ohtani. Buttó more than complied; he threw four pitches nowhere near the plate.

But avoiding Ohtani only funnels the game to another MVP, Mookie Betts, who promptly exhibited his own greatness with a bases-clearing double. Since the start of September and the first meaningful pennant race and postseason of his seven-year MLB career, Ohtani is hitting .613 with runners in scoring position (19-for-31), including 16 hits in his past 19 such at bats, an unfathomable rate of success at any time, but especially this time of year.

“I mean, there’s going to be some variance in it, and obviously some focus and some execution on his part,” Van Scoyoc says. “Hopefully that keeps going for the next few weeks.”

The Mets are in trouble already in this series because Peterson was burned in a low-leverage spot, they have no obvious antidote to Ohtani in their bullpen and it’s obvious that the Dodgers are not going to accommodate them with chase swings the way the Phillies did in the NLDS.

At least New York has the right pitcher on the mound to try to stop the juggernaut. Ever since Manaea re-engineered his pitching style and stuff, the Mets are 11–3 when he takes the ball. Given how the Dodgers are rolling, this assignment just grew especially more difficult. And given how much Aunt Mabel meant to him, and how this start is his own way of saying goodbye, it just grew more meaningful.