Cody Bellinger’s dramatic house run catapulted the Los Angeles Dodgers one step nearer to their dream Hollywood ending.
The World Sequence was set Sunday after the Dodgers captured the Nationwide League pennant by beating the upstart Atlanta Braves, 4-3, in Arlington, Texas, in Sport 7 of the Nationwide League Championship Sequence.
Bellinger’s seventh-inning blast broke a 3-Three tie created by Kiké Hernández’s solo house run the earlier inning. Their heroics had been made attainable by teammate Mookie Betts, who made a wall-climbing, homer-robbing catch off a blast hit by Braves slugger Freddie Freeman within the fifth inning.
The Dodgers trailed within the sequence 2-Zero and 3-1 earlier than rallying to maintain their dominant 2020 marketing campaign alive. Los Angeles was baseball’s greatest staff within the common season, profitable 43 of 60 video games, an unbelievable 71.7 p.c profitable price, whereas scoring 136 extra runs than their opponents.
“Man, we’re resilient,” Bellinger mentioned. “The Atlanta Braves are an incredible staff. It was not a simple sequence, and that was enjoyable proper there.”
Dodgers supervisor Dave Roberts mirrored on the unusual summer season marked by the coronavirus pandemic, protests in opposition to systemic racism and now a Nationwide League pennant.
“I am simply so pleased with these guys. It has been a loopy yr, guys away from their households, social injustices,” the emotional supervisor mentioned. “This yr is our yr. That is our yr!”
The Dodgers will meet the analytics-driven Tampa Bay Rays, who gained the American League pennant Saturday by beating the scandal-plagued Houston Astros.
The Rays had been the American League’s greatest common season staff, profitable 40 of their 60 video games.
Moments after the Dodgers’ victory, oddsmakers pegged them as 1-2 favorites within the World Sequence, whereas the Rays had been listed as 9-5 underdogs, worldwide bookmaker William Hill mentioned.
The Dodgers get to remain put in Texas, the place the World Sequence shall be performed on impartial floor beginning Tuesday at Globe Life Subject, the new house of the Texas Rangers.
A lot of the playoff video games have been performed at impartial websites, as Main League Baseball hopes “bubbles” will maintain gamers and staffs secure from the coronavirus, which compelled groups right into a truncated 60-game schedule, far fewer than the conventional season of 162 video games.
For long-suffering Dodgers followers, Sunday night time’s victory fueled hope that this Dodgers forged — loaded with bankable main males like Betts and Clayton Kershaw and younger supporting stars like Sport 6 profitable pitcher Walker Buehler, championship sequence MVP Corey Seager and Bellinger, the 2019 Nationwide League MVP — can lastly script a world title.
The glamorous Dodgers have baseball’s 10th-longest title-less string, a outstanding streak of October failure given their run of eight straight Nationwide League West titles.
The Dodgers final hoisted the Commissioner’s Trophy in 1988 after a World Sequence greatest identified for Kirk Gibson’s walk-off house run in Sport 1 in opposition to the Oakland A’s and their lights-out nearer, Dennis Eckersley.
The Los Angeles bridesmaids have been shut — and unfortunate — earlier than, dropping the 2017 and 2018 World Sequence to the Astros and the Boston Crimson Sox, each later implicated in sign-stealing scandals.
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