The Los Angeles Dodgers find themselves in a 2-0 hole in the National League Championship Series after dropping Game 2 to the Atlanta Braves despite a furious rally in the ninth inning.
While the final score would indicate it was a close game, that wasn’t the case for most of the night as the Dodgers bats stayed quiet and they found themselves trailing 7-1. To their credit, they continued to battle by scoring three runs in the seventh inning on a Corey Seager homer, and then four more in the ninth before ultimately falling a run short.
After the game, Seager discussed the confidence he and his teammates built by finally breaking through in those last few innings.
“his team’s got a lot of fight. We’ve done it all year. We were one swing, one anything away from tying that ballgame and going into extras,” he said. “It’s never over until it’s over. This is a long series. We’re looking up to the challenge.”
Seager had a solid night at the plate as he also had an RBI double in addition to the three-run home run. He added L.A. has to continue to have high quality at-bats in order to overcome the 2-0 deficit and win the series.
“Come back out, take good ABs. All night, I think we took better ABs. We got through the middle parts of the innings [Monday] night and ABs got away from us; they had some quick innings. All tonight, we had really good ABs,” Seager said. “Just continue that [Wednesday].”
A byproduct of the Dodgers’ late comeback was that they got to see some of the Braves’ high-leverage relievers like Chris Martin and closer Mark Melancon for the second time in as many days.
“The more we can see them the better off we’re going to be,” Seager said. “As long as we keep getting them, keep grinding out the starters to try and get in the bullpen as fast as possible, start seeing some guys we’ve seen the past couple nights, it will definitely be helpful.”
While they were able to get to the bullpen, the Dodgers failed to score any runs early off starter Ian Anderson. They seemingly had him on the rope all night but weren’t able to break through is his four innings.
Seager feels that getting out to an early lead in Game 3 and the rest of the series will help turn the momentum in their direction.
“We’ve obviously had slow starts the past couple games. At the end of the game we got back, scratched some hits together. You’ve just got to keep that rolling,” he noted.
Seager hoping to have more success against Braves’ backend starters
A big reason the Braves are up 2-0 in this series is the performances of Braves starters, Max Fried and Anderson, who have combined to toss 10 shutout innings.
Atlanta doesn’t have a lot of starting pitching depth beyond those two, so Seager hopes they can get to the starters in the next few games.
“Yeah, for sure. But you’ve still got to come out and play. We’ve got to come out and perform. Nothing is going to be given to us,” he said. “Coming out and taking good ABs, getting in the strike zone, pitching, attacking people, good things will happen.”
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