As if the night hadn’t already become excruciating enough for the Braves, thousands of Dodger fans started doing the tomahawk chop and chant before the fifth inning Sunday, mocking them.
This after the Dodgers had scored four runs in the fourth inning to take a 10-4 lead.
And then it got worse. Oh, it was a bad night to be a Brave.
A pair of 22-year-old Braves rookie pitchers, starter Julio Teheran and reliever Alex Wood, were put through a grinder in their postseason debuts as the Dodgers pummeled Atlanta 13-6 before a packed house of 54,646 at Dodger Stadium to take a 2-1 lead in the best-of-five division series, leaving the Braves on the brink of elimination.
The Dodgers set a franchise record for runs in a postseason game and the Braves absorbed their worst postseason whipping since a 12-3 defeat against Houston in Game 5 of the 2004 division series.
The Braves must win Game 4 on Monday night at Dodger Stadium if they are to take the series back to Atlanta for a Game 5 on Wednesday. Lose Monday and it’s over for the 96-win NL East champions.
“We’ve got come back tomorrow and expect to win, that’s what we do,” Braves catcher Brian McCann said. “Just like Game 2, we’ve got to come back and win. We know what the task at hand is and we plan on doing it.”
“I don’t think we’ll have a problem putting this behind us,” said Evan Gattis, who had three of the Braves’ 10 hits. “I mean, it’s the same story all year – win the game (that’s played) today.”
Journeyman Freddy Garcia, with more postseason starts and innings than the rest of the Braves pitchers combined, will start Game 4 against Dodgers right-hander Ricky Nolasco, the former Marlin who’s long struggled against Atlanta.
“I don’t panic,” Garcia said. “I just make pitch.”
Teheran was rocked for eight hits and six runs in just 2 2/3 innings and Wood gave up three hits and four runs in 2 1/3 innings, all his runs unearned after the left-hander’s error on a Carl Crawford bunt to start the fourth inning.
“I was a little excited about this game,” Teheran said. “I didn’t have my best, and I tried my best. It was just one of those games that you do everything, and the things don’t go as you expect.”
Crawford hit a three-run homer in the fourth-run second inning, Juan Uribe added a two-run homer off Wood in the four-run fourth and Hanley Ramirez had a single, double and triple and has already matched a Dodgers postseason record with six extra-base hits in the series.
Oh, it was ugly.
“I think (Teheran) just left some balls out over the plate, made some mistakes,” Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez said. “And with this club, if you do that, you’re going to look down at a gas tank with a lighted match. I don’t think the emotions or the crowd had anything to do with it, I think he just made some mistakes.”
The Braves roughed up rookie starter Hyun-Jin Ryu for six hits and four runs in three innings, only the second time all year that the Dodgers lefty allowed more than three runs in a home start.
But Braves pitchers couldn’t slow Los Angeles hitters until it was too late. The Braves mustered four hits after Ryu left, three of those hits coming in the ninth inning, including Jason Heyward’s two-run homer to straightaway center off lefty Paco Rodriguez.
“Tonight is over with,” Heyward said. “Come back out tomorrow with the same mindset we did today, and that’s to win the ballgame.”
Since 2003, the winner of Game 3 has gone on to win 14 of the 15 division series that were tied after two games. The Braves will try to buck that trend and shed what’s become a postseason monkey on their backs — six consecutive playoff series losses since they beat Houston in a 2001 division series.
The Braves are 10-22 in postseason games since then, including eight losses in their past 10 games. This is the seventh consecutive postseason series in which they’ve lost Game 1 and won Game 2. Thus far, they haven’t won one of those series.
“We know we either win or go home,” Braves right fielder Justin Upton said. “That’s the bottom line. It’s pretty clear cut. So we know we’ve got to come out and win a ballgame.”
There have been some brutal nights in recent Braves postseason history, but not many worse than Sunday, when Teheran was staked to a 2-0 lead in the first inning and gave up four runs in the second, including Crawford’s two-out, two-strike homer.
“That’s definitely a big one for me, to take the lead and get the team some momentum,” Crawford said. “It was huge for us. That was at the point in the game where we could have fell back and gotten into a big hole. It was good to hit that home run.”
Said McCann: “With two outs there, if we get out of that inning, maybe it’s a whole different ball game. You’ve got to tip your hat to Crawford for putting a good swing on it.”
The Braves scored two runs on three hits in the third inning to tie, but Teheran gave it up again in the bottom of the inning as the Dodgers scored two more runs on four hits, including a leadoff double by Ramirez.
“It was a dog fight,” Gattis said. “I mean it was we score, they score, we score, they score. And then it kind of got out of hand a little bit.”
After Ryu left the game, Chris Capuano pitched three hitless relief innings for the Dodgers to give the soft-tossing lefty a 1.61 ERA in seven games (five starts) against the Braves since the beginning of the 2011 season.
When Crawford led off the fourth with a bunt that Wood booted, it was the 10th time in a 12-inning stretch that a Dodgers leadoff hitter reached base. And unlike Game 2 on Friday, when Braves starter Mike Minor repeatedly got out of trouble, the Dodgers made Teheran.
“We walked or guy or make a fielding error,” Gonzalez said. “Give them extra outs, and you gete put in a tough position.”
One out after Wood’s error, Crawford scored on a triple by Ramirez, his sixth extra-base hit of the series to tie Steve Garvey’s franchise record set in the 1978 NLCS against Philadelphia.
“He’s locked in,” McCann said. “I mean, he’s covering both sides of the plate. I’ve played against him for a long, long time now and when he’s hot, he’s as good as it gets.”
Yasiel Puig’s two-out single scored Ramirez to push the lead to 8-4 and Uribe followed with a two-run homer off Wood to give the Dodgers almost as many runs (10) as Braves pitchers had outs (11) to that point.
It was a stunningly rapid and thorough reversal of fortunes for the Braves after a promising beginning.
Upton doubled with one out in the first inning and scored on a two-out single by Gattis. After McCann walked, Chris Johnson singled to drive in another run for a 2-0 lead.
Teheran gave up a leadoff single to Crawford in the first inning and threw a wild pitch to move him to second with none out. Then he worked out of the jam in impressive fashion, striking out Mark Ellis, getting a fly-out by Ramirez and striking out Adrian Gonzalez.
But things unraveled for Teheran in the second, after consecutive singles by Puig and Uribe to start the inning, the Uribe hit a bloop that landed in front of Gattis in left field after he made a bad read and got a late start in. Teheran struck out Skip Schumaker, then walked A.J. Ellis on seven pitches after getting ahead in the count 1-2 against the No. 8 hitter.
With bases loaded and one out, Ryu hit a sacrifice fly that nearly got over Upton’s head in right field. And five pitches later, Crawford scorched a 2-2 slider far over Upton’s head into the right-field bleachers for a 4-2 lead.
“With two outs there, if we get out of that inning maybe it’s a whole different ballgame,” McCann said. “You’ve got to tip your hat to Crawford for putting a good swing on it.”
For the Braves, the agony had just begun.
Before it was through, the Dodgers added three runs in the eighth inning. All of those were charged to reliever Jordan Walden, although two run-scoring hits in the inning came against lefty Luis Avilan.
