Why Dodgers' three-peat bid may have died in third inning of Game 2

The Los Angeles Dodgers had the perfect man on the mound Monday night. 

Down 1-0 in the National League Championship Series, season wobbling, they handed the ball to the one pitcher who never loses when it matters — Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The man who is 8-1 with a 2.14 ERA in his postseason career, the reigning World Series MVP, 3-0 with a 1.23 ERA in starts following Dodgers losses … what could go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out. Yamamoto lasted just 2.2 innings against the Milwaukee Brewers as the Brew Crew went on to post an eventual 7-4 win to take a 2-0 NLCS lead.

The Dodgers' dynasty didn't just take a punch in Milwaukee. It may have taken the punch.

The Dodgers' robot finally broke

It wasn't just that Yamamoto got hit, but it's how he got hit that matters. 

The Brewers fouled off plenty of pitches, worked a surreal 12-pitch walk from Jake Bauers to load the bases in the third and then Christian Yelich delivered the go-ahead two-run single that ended Yamamoto's night at 75 pitches. Three runs, two walks and one strikeout equated to the shortest postseason start of his career.

This is the same pitcher who threw a complete-game three-hitter against these Brewers in last year's NLCS — the first playoff complete game since Justin Verlander in 2017. 

Mookie Betts said it best afterward, offering, "It was tough. But he's a human being, too. So I think everybody's so used to him being a robot that if he didn't go eight innings, no hits and whatever, then it wasn't Yamamoto. So it just shows he's a human being, and it's playoff baseball. It's part of it."

Brewers found the blueprint

Here's the scary part for Dodgers fans ... this wasn't luck. The Brewers had a plan — see pitches, spoil pitches, make the $300 million ace work for every out — and executed it to perfection.

And it wasn't just Yamamoto. Tarik Skubal, the other pillar of the super-rotation, got knocked around in Game 1's 81-pitch effort as well. Combined, the duo lasted just 7.2 innings across two starts.

The entire three-peat dream was built on the idea that this rotation was unbeatable in October. In 48 hours, Milwaukee solved it.

Dodgers' clock is ticking

Down 2-0 and heading back to Chavez Ravine, the Dodgers are in a hole they haven't seen since the 2023 NLDS. The first potential NL three-peat ever is slipping away … and it's slipping away the one way nobody imagined. The pitching broke first.

Yamamoto is likely lined up for a potential Game 6 … if the Dodgers get there. That's a sentence that would have been absurd a week ago but Milwaukee has made it a very real possibility by solving the Skubal-Yamamoto puzzle.