Everybody's picking a side in the wrong fight. Was it the Braves' offense folding, or the Dodgers' pitching being that good? The honest answer is neither. Atlanta lost this series because its rotation was already a crime scene before the first pitch, and no lineup and no bullpen was going to cover for that long.
Start with what the Braves didn't have. Spencer Strider and Spencer Schwellenbach were both gone for the season and never threw a pitch in this series. Reynaldo López, Bryce Elder and Hurston Waldrep were down too. By Game 4, Walt Weiss was handing the ball to Tyler Mahle and then reaching for Didier Fuentes with the bases loaded. Chris Sale got Game 3 on extra rest because there was nobody behind him to burn. What Atlanta trotted out could barely be called a rotation. You can't win a best-of-five that way, and the Braves didn't.
Now the part Dodgers fans don't want to hear: Los Angeles played good, workmanlike baseball. Look at the scores: 5-3, 3-2, 3-1, 4-1. Every game decided by a run or two. The Dodgers themselves couldn't buy a hit with a runner in scoring position until the seventh inning of Game 4. Yoshinobu Yamamoto was excellent against Sale in Game 3, and the back end of Tanner Scott and Edwin Díaz finally looked like the group they drew up back in April. Credit that. But nobody pitched like Koufax here. They pitched like a healthy team against a broken one, which is exactly what they were.
The offense deserves its share of the blame, and the numbers are ugly. Ronald Acuña Jr. went 3-for-21 this postseason, all three hits singles. In Game 3, down 3-1 in the bottom of the fifth with two men on, he had the whole night teed up and grounded out. When your best hitter disappears in October, the margin for everything else vanishes, and the Braves had no margin to spare.
Then there was the finale, which Atlanta handed over. Mahle walked Shohei Ohtani, Sean Murphy threw it away trying to catch him stealing, and Mauricio Dubón dropped the ball at short to let Ohtani trot home. That's a run the Dodgers didn't earn with a bat. Andy Pages cashed two more on a single off Fuentes, and Max Muncy put it away with a homer off Raisel Iglesias. A low-event, one-run game decided by sloppy defense is the mark of a thin team cracking, plain and simple.
The "Dodgers were just that dominant" crowd is overselling it, and the "offense collapsed" crowd is only half right. Both are symptoms. The disease was a starting staff dismantled by injuries long before anybody took the field at Truist Park. That's what left Weiss playing bullpen roulette he was always going to lose.
There's a version of this season that still counts as a win. The Braves went 94-68, took the NL East as the third seed, and beat the Phillies in the Wild Card round after missing the playoffs the year before. That they got this far with a rotation held together by tape is to their credit. The two-time defending champion Dodgers, 100-62, are back in the NLCS for a third straight year.
So spare me the debate. The Dodgers didn't need to be great, and Acuña didn't need to be this bad, for Atlanta to go home. The Braves lost this series in a training room in March, and everything in October was just the bill coming due.
