Just a week earlier, he looked as if he was a reason, if not the reason, the Dodgers couldn’t win the World Series.
Sunday night, he became a reason they could.
In a 9-0 victory over the New York Mets in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, Jack Flaherty delivered the kind of performance that will immortalize him in these parts if his team parades down Sunset Boulevard early next month.
Flaherty was Sandy Koufax.
Flaherty was Fernando Valenzuela.
Flaherty was Orel Hershiser.
Over seven shutout innings, he limited the Mets to two hits, successive singles by Jesse Winker and Jose Iglesias in the fifth inning.
The Dodgers’ injury-riddled pitching staff is refuting history and their reputation by shutting out playoff opponents for a record-tying 33 innings.
The number of innings Flaherty pitched were as important as the number of runs he allowed, as they spared manager Dave Roberts from deploying any high-leverage reliever outside of Daniel Hudson.
The result: The Dodgers will be able to run a bullpen game in Game 2 on Monday.
A similar pitching plan produced a shutout of the San Diego Padres in the previous round. When the Dodgers head to New York for the middle three games of this best-of-seven series, they very well could do so with a two-games-to-none lead.
“For us to get seven innings in a long series was huge,” Roberts said.
The performance was also meaningful on a personal level for Flaherty, who was born and raised in the Los Angeles area.
Flaherty was 6 months old when he attended his first game at Dodger Stadium. Throughout his childhood, he attended as many as 20 games a season. In this very stadium, he pitched Harvard-Westlake High to a CIF Southern Section Division I championship.
The Dodgers acquiring him from the Detroit Tigers at the trade deadline marked a full-circle moment for him. Shutting down the Mets on Sunday night was something he said “you can’t really put into words.”
“I saw some family out there when I was warming up and I had gone to games here with them before,” Flaherty said. “So it kind of lets you relax a little bit.”
Seven days after he was pounded for four runs in 5 ⅓ innings in his first postseason game for the Dodgers, Flaherty produced one of the greatest starts of his eight-year career. He struck out six. He walked only two.
“It was a pitching clinic,” Roberts said. “Once we caught a lead, he did a great job of just going after guys and attacking.”
When Flaherty returned to the bench in the middle of the seventh inning, he was smacked on the backside by Shohei Ohtani. He was embraced by Roberts.
“Really, Jack did wonderful work,” Ohtani said.
Flaherty experienced a pinch-me moment later when Clayton Kershaw wrapped his arms around him.
Flaherty grew up admiring Kershaw, so much so that when he thinks of the Dodgers’ postseason pitching tradition, he doesn’t think of Koufax, Valenzuela or Hershiser.
“The answer is there’s only one — it’s Kersh,” Flaherty said.
Flaherty continued, “Regardless of what people want to say about what his postseason numbers are, he’s had a hell of a lot of good ones. He’s been an absolute stud for the entirety of his career.
“I think back on all those starts he’s had where he was phenomenal taking the ball on three-days’ rest and going out and still going six, seven innings no matter what. That guy’s second to none.”
To Flaherty’s point: The last Dodgers pitcher who had a longer scoreless start in the postseason was Kershaw, who blanked the Milwaukee Brewers over eight innings in the wild-card round in 2020. The Dodgers went on to win the World Series that year.
“Getting a hug from him afterwards and him letting me know it was a really good job is special and things you can’t make [of] it,” Flaherty said.
So was the hug he received after the game from his mother, Eileen.
“It’s hard not to smile about those things,” Flaherty said.
Suddenly, the Dodgers’ rotation doesn’t look combustible — or, “atrocious,” as I wrote in a column last week. Suddenly, the Dodgers have a pitching staff that hasn’t allowed a run in its last 33 innings, equaling a postseason record set by the 1966 Baltimore Orioles. Suddenly, between Flaherty and NLDS hero Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Dodgers look as if they might have the necessary starting pitching to not only win in this round but also in the World Series.
Flaherty lived out a dream on Sunday night. The Dodgers and their fans moved closer to theirs.
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