Dave Roberts had a rule in his back pocket Monday night, and he only followed it once. With lefty Aaron Ashby on the mound to close out Game 2, he sent Miguel Rojas up to hit for Max Muncy. That's straightforward percentage baseball: get the same-handed advantage, let your designated lefty-masher do his job. Nobody should quarrel with that call by itself.
The problem is what happened around it. Shohei Ohtani batted for himself against that same lefty. So did Will Smith. The Dodgers made their final three outs of the night with one hitter getting a platoon advantage and two others facing the exact matchup Roberts had decided, one batter earlier, was bad enough to pinch-hit for. If the logic held for Muncy, it doesn't stop holding because the next two names in the lineup are more famous.
Milwaukee's won two straight in this series by grinding out the uncomfortable stuff, and the Dodgers were already down three runs when Ohtani, Smith and Rojas came up in that final frame. Turang and Bauers had delivered the insurance that made it 7-4 an inning earlier. No pinch-hitter, no bullpen matchup, guarantees a baserunner against a team playing like that. Swapping Ohtani out for another bat wouldn't have erased the three-run hole the Dodgers were already in.
But that only explains the scoreboard. The decision-making is still on Roberts. Roberts was managing a game that was already out of reach, where the only rational goal left was stacking the best individual matchups and hoping for a miracle. He believed that enough to act on it for Muncy, but not enough to act on it for Ohtani or Smith, and he's never had to explain why those two outs were untouchable and the third one wasn't.
Whether Ohtani should have been right to bat at all in that state is fair to ask. Nothing conclusively establishes what shape he was in during that at-bat, and a manager doesn't get to be second-guessed off a hunch. Roberts owed his team a consistent standard that night, and he didn't give them one. A manager who pinch-hits for one struggling veteran against a lefty and leaves two others in against the identical matchup is just picking favorites.
The Dodgers are down two games to none in this NLCS but still alive, with Game 3 shifting to Los Angeles. If Roberts wants to survive this series, he needs to decide whether he actually believes in the matchup math he used on Muncy. Monday night, he clearly didn't believe in it enough to use it on anyone who mattered more.
