Friday could have been the night the Dodgers lost the National League West.
Instead, it turned into their best win of the season.
After leading by three runs early, the Dodgers were thrown a major plot twist in the second inning, with veteran starter Clayton Kershaw forced to leave the game after recording only three outs because of a left toe injury.
Suddenly, an overworked bullpen that was already running on fumes needed to cover eight whole innings.
Read more: As Freddie Freeman rested his fractured finger, he got an unexpected ‘mental’ reset too
That early three-run lead evaporated, too, after the first reliever to enter the game, Joe Kelly, struggled with his command in a four-out, 47-pitch appearance.
From there, however, the Dodgers played perhaps their most important baseball all year.
They scored four late runs, including a critical three-run home run from Will Smith in the seventh. They pieced together five shutout innings from five worn-out middle relievers.
And, even though they almost blew by giving up four runs in the ninth, they held on for a 10-9 win at a raucous Chase Field to extend their National League West lead to five games over the Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres.
Given the Dodgers’ ever-growing pitching concerns, the coming days (and weeks) won’t be easy.
But, at the start of a pivotal four-game set here in Phoenix, they opened the series with the unlikeliest, and most challenging, of triumphs, opening up their largest division lead in almost four weeks.
This game had a little bit of everything.
Freddie Freeman returned from a three-game absence and hit a two-run homer in the first, despite still playing with a fractured right middle finger. The Diamondbacks answered with two runs in the bottom half of the opening frame, but squandered the opportunity for more when Teoscar Hernández made a diving catch in left field and doubled off Josh Bell at second base for an inning-ending double play.
Then, the Dodgers went back in front via a three-run rally in the second.
That’s when things truly got interesting.
Two pitches into the bottom of the second, Clayton Kershaw gave up a solo home run to Corbin Carroll on a hanging 67.4 mph curveball, registering as one of the slowest recorded pitches of his 17-year career.
Before Carroll finished rounding the bases, manager Dave Roberts and head athletic trainer Thomas Albert were already walking out of the dugout. Kershaw, it turned out, had a toe injury on his left push-off foot. His night was over (the severity of his injury wasn’t immediately clear).
The Dodgers’ pitching headache was just beginning.
Over the next eight innings, the team tried to piece together outs from an overworked bullpen that had combined for more than 11 innings in a series against the Baltimore Orioles this week.
And after Kelly stumbled through his outing, including a run-scoring balk after he exceeded MLB’s new step-off limit, their options were looking bleak.
But, in the kind of sequence that could swing momentum in the late-season NL West race, the rest of the Dodgers bullpen rose to the occasion.
Alex Vesia got four outs on 14 pitches to get through the fourth. Ryan Brasier, Michael Kopech, Daniel Hudson and Blake Treinen then followed with scoreless innings apiece –– despite the fact Brasier and Kopech had already pitched four times in the last week, Treinen had pitched three times in the last week and Hudson was pitching on consecutive nights after an extended nine-day break to manage his already ballooning workload.
Meanwhile, the Dodgers offense went to work.
Though they didn’t score again against Arizona starter Zac Gallen, they worked his pitch count enough to chase him from the game after five innings. And once they got to the Diamondbacks bullpen, they steadily pulled away in what became a blowout win.
Max Muncy led off the sixth inning with a double, and later came around to score on a wild pitch.
Smith had the night’s biggest swing in the seventh, launching a back-breaking, two-out, three-run home run to left-center –– a much-needed blast for the catcher amid his second-half struggles.
Shohei Ohtani added more insurance in the eighth, becoming the first player in MLB history to have 43 steals (he reached that mark in the second inning Friday) and 43 home runs in the same season by going the other way for a solo blast that made it 10-5.
The bullpen masterpiece was almost ruined in the ninth, when Anthony Banda, the Dodgers’ most-used reliever since joining the team on May 19, was summoned to pitch for a third night in a row.
He gave up a two-run single to Jake McCarthy, then a two-run home run to Eugenio Suárez that trimmed the lead to one.
But, the Dodgers still ended the night slapping hands, somehow entering the eve of September positioned for their 11th NL West crown in the last 12 years.
Chances are the team’s pitching staff will look different come Saturday night. The club will almost certainly have to make some roster moves to freshen up the bullpen, particularly with a spot start looming on Sunday.
But in the afterglow of a victory that came against all odds, such concerns seemed minimal.
On a night the Dodgers could have lost the division, they instead strengthened their lead with the kind of performance that could catapult them down the stretch run of the season.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.