DODGER STADIUM (Los Angeles) – With Chris Sale unavailable, and with the Braves needing two bullpen games to get through the first two games of the National League Division Series on the road against two Cy Young Award winners, they still found a way to return to Atlanta with the series tied at one game apiece. Dodgers deadline addition Tarik Skubal came "as advertised" in Game 1, but Blake Snell couldn’t pick up where Skubal left off. The Braves patiently waited out the lefty, who couldn’t find the zone in a short outing, and held the high-powered Dodgers offense to one run until two outs in the ninth inning, when Max Muncy cut his team’s deficit in half with a solo shot off reliever Didier Fuentes.
Down to his last out, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts summoned rookie Josue De Paula for his first career playoff appearance. Braves manager countered with closer Raisel Iglesias, who induced a pop-up to end the 3-2 win. Here are my takeaways: On one side was Blake Snell, a two-time Cy Young Award winner.
On the other was Ray Kerr, a two-time junior college attendee. Naturally, it was the latter who departed the game with a 1-0 lead. This is Ray Kerr’s October, and we’re all just living in it.
"Ray Kerr is amazing, man," Weiss said. "He did it again." Kerr found out he was starting Sunday’s bullpen game the morning of the game. "I was like, ‘All right, let’s get it," Kerr said.
"Just another Sunday, right?" It certainly looked that way, the way he calmly handled the high-pressure stakes. Considering his journey, and the will and resilience it took for the 32-year-old to get to baseball’s grandest stage, maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Kerr grew up in foster care, attended junior college, became academically ineligible, returned home to Reno, Nevada, worked at 7-Eleven and a movie theater and figured that might be what the rest of his life looked like.
But then he made his way to another community college, pitched well, excelled during Alaska summer league, got noticed by the Mariners, signed a minor-league deal and worked his way up the professional ladder. He was coming off a two-year hiatus following Tommy John surgery when he returned to a big-league mound this year for the first time since 2024. After making nine regular-season appearances for the Braves, he got the ball to start the deciding Game 3 of the wild-card series and outdueled the Phillies’ Aaron Nola with 3.1 scoreless innings.
For his encore, he was only expected to go an inning or two. Instead, he outpitched Snell over 2.2 scoreless innings, striking out four batters and setting the stage for the Braves’ upset. "That was a huge start, or open, or whatever you call it, in two huge games for us," catcher Drake Baldwin told me.
"It says a lot about him." If the Dodgers’ postseason rotation was supposed to be impenetrable, indomitable, unconquerable, Sunday night demonstrated otherwise. Early last October, Snell looked like the pitcher the Dodgers paid for, combining to allow two runs with 28 strikeouts and five walks over 21 innings in his first three starts of the 2025 postseason. That was not the version of the left-handed pitcher who showed up Sunday in his first start of the 2026 postseason.
Snell allowed five free passes in Game 2 of the NLDS alone, looking rusty after dealing with a late-season groin injury that limited him to just five innings of work over the final two weeks of the regular season. Lacking control, it took Snell 90 pitches to labor through his 3.2 innings. He needed four pitches or more against each of the last 10 batters he faced and was unable to get out of the fourth inning following his fifth and final walk of the day.
"He just was fighting himself with his delivery all game," Roberts said. "I think that just, overall, it wasn’t the groin. He just wasn’t sharp tonight." He did, however, limit the Braves to just one run after Brock Stewart entered and retired Ronald Acuña Jr. to clean up his fourth-inning mess.
Still, it was hardly the outing they expected out of Snell after he recorded a 1.13 ERA in his final eight starts of the regular season after returning from an elbow procedure. A troublesome right knee had sapped Freddie Freeman’s power in the season’s second half, playing a role in the star first baseman hitting just one home run after the All-Star break and one extra-base hit in all of September. But he tends to find a different gear when the calendar flips to October.
On Sunday, he found it. The man who hit a walk-off grand slam (plus three more home runs) in the 2024 World Series and who ended an 18-inning World Series Game 3 marathon against the Blue Jays last year with another walk-off blast made his first major mark on the 2026 postseason Sunday with a game-tying solo shot off Grant Holmes in the fourth inning. The blast finally gave the Dodgers some momentum and a crowd of 50,729 fans, who had been quieted by Snell’s shaky performance, a reason to get rowdy.
But Michael Harris II ensured that was short-lived. Dodgers reliever Kris Bubic, pitching for just the sixth time as a Dodger after returning from an elbow injury, was one pitch away from a perfect fifth inning. He breezed through the first two batters, then got Harris down 0-2 before the Braves center fielder poked a sweeper well outside the zone the other way.
The ball carried, and carried, and carried, eventually up and over the outstretched arm of left fielder Teoscar Hernandez, whose circuitous route and failed attempt to make the play allowed the ball to ricochet off the wall and helped Harris stretch his double into a triple. "I knew I didn’t fully get it," Harris told me. "I knew it was slicing away from them.
As I got closer to first, I was kind of blocked by his body, so I didn’t know if he caught it or not. Then I had seen it bounce off the wall, and I just had to keep digging. Getting to third was consequential, as Bubic then fired a wild pitch to bring in the go-ahead run.
It was one of three hits on the day for Harris, who also singled and doubled and is leaving his imprint on the 2026 postseason. Harris’ three-run home run off Nola in Game 3 of the wild-card series helped send the Braves to the NLDS. It’s about as star-studded of a pitching matchup imaginable for Game 3.
The Braves played a dangerous game using Sale to face the final five batters in Game 3 of the wild-card series, two days after he started Game 1. That extra work between starts meant he was unavailable for Games 1 and 2 of the NLDS in Los Angeles, a risky proposition in a best-of-five series. "We needed to win that series, and that was our best chance to do it," said Weiss.
"So, I have zero regrets about pitching Chris Sale in that last game." The decision did not come back to burn him in Los Angeles, as the Braves still managed to steal Game 2 despite missing their ace, setting them up nicely for Sale to pitch in Atlanta in Game 3 on four days of rest since his wild-card relief appearance and six days of rest since his last start. The Dodgers also have to feel good about their chances, too, with Yoshinobu Yamamoto beginning his World Series MVP postseason follow-up campaign.
