If he wants to be known as more than a good young pitcher, the postseason is the hurdle every good young pitcher must surmount. It was that way for Ford and Koufax, for Gibson and Hershiser, for Glavine and Maddux and Smoltz. Before Thursday, it was that way for the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw, who at 25 entered this Division Series having won 77 big-league games but never one in the playoffs. Come Game 2, it was that way for Mike Minor.
He was the Atlanta Braves’ second-best pitcher over the second half of 2012 and their best for the first part of this one. But he hadn’t been as precise in September, and the Game 1 start that figured to be his fell to Kris Medlen. That might have been the biggest break the 2013 Braves will ever get: As much as they wanted to win Game 1, they had to win Game 2. Minor won it for them.
He beat Zack Greinke on a night when beating Greinke (six innings, four hits, two runs) took real doing, a night when another pitching wobble could have snuffed the Braves’ season. Minor yielded a run in the first inning and hits in six different innings, but he never let a second run cross. He left the final eight outs to the best bullpen in the sport — even though David Carpenter made it interesting by yielding a home run to Hanley Ramirez — and a series many observers had all but handed to the Dodgers is tied heading West.
In winning, Minor proved something to his team and its fans and surely to himself. He hadn’t thrown a postseason pitch before Friday night, and it was unclear whether his style of pitching — he has a good fastball but shorts out no radar guns — would translate to October.
“I felt a lot more composed than I thought I might be thinking about it earlier today,” Minor said afterward, but early returns weren’t promising. He needed 40 pitches and a double play to exit the second inning down only 1-0, and right about then you wouldn’t have pegged this as his breakthrough performance.
But the Braves tied the score in the bottom of the second on Andrelton Simmons’ two-out double, and Minor was different from there on, different and bolder and better. “I felt like I needed to go back out and have a shutdown inning,” Minor said.
He had four more shutdown innings. He was handed a lead in the fourth — another two-out hit, this a single by Chris Johnson, did the trick — and in the sixth he worked what we’ll just call Mike Minor’s Inning of Truth.
With one out, Ramirez doubled down the left-field line. Tying run in scoring position, the middle of the Los Angeles order upcoming. Adrian Gonzalez stepped in, the Adrian Gonzalez his Dodgers teammate A.J. Ellis, speaking before the game, had called “probably the smartest hitter I’ve ever played with. He hits to the situation — never gets too aggressive, never gets too patient. He just knows what the pitcher is trying to do to him.”
It was Gonzalez’s two-run homer that undid Medlen in Game 1. A home run now would put the Dodgers ahead; a simple single would tie the score. Minor jumped ahead 1-2, backing the brainy hitter into a pitcher’s count and threw a sinking fastball that Gonzalez missed.
Two outs now, tying run still at second. Yasiel Puig, the outrageously gifted rookie, topped a ball to the left side that almost nobody else could have turned into a single. Being outrageously fast, Puig beat Chris Johnson’s throw.
Two on, two out, Jose Uribe up. A veteran of postseasons past, Uribe fouled off two two-strike pitches and ran the count full, whereupon Minor made the best pitch of his big-league life — a curve that dipped under Uribe’s bat to quell the uprising.
Much more would happen. Luis Ayala missed first base. Luis Avilan started a dauntless double play. Dodgers manager Don Mattingly walked Reed Johnson to pitch to Jason Heyward, who delivered a two-run single. Ramirez grabbed back those two runs. Gerald Laird, in the game only because Fredi Gonzalez pinch-ran for Brian McCann, threw out pinch-runner Dee Gordon, who carried the tying run, with one out in the ninth. Craig Kimbrel walked two, but earned a four-out save.
Much more would happen, but it was in that moment when Minor struck out Uribe that you knew this night would belong to this pitcher and his team. The Dodgers could well win the next two games and advance to the NLCS without needing to return to Turner Field, but we learned in this pulsating Game 2 that the series will be no walkover.
These Braves didn’t win 96 games by hiding their heads when duress comes knocking. They can play, too. More to the point, they can pitch. A pitcher who had never started a playoff game won the one the Braves had to have, and in the process Mike Minor declared himself to be a Major Player.
About the Author
