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Immediately after Dave Roberts decided to pull reigning World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto from Game 2 of the NLCS, he explained his reasoning.
“For me, I felt we had to stop the damage right there,” Roberts told Ken Rosenthal during a live interview on the Fox broadcast.
Yamamoto had the shortest postseason outing of his career on Monday night, after he threw 75 pitches in 2 ⅔ innings while giving up three runs, four hits, two walks, and having only one strikeout.
The decision to pull him came after Christian Yelich put the Brewers ahead 3-2 on a two-RBI single.
In the at-bat before Yelich, Yamamoto faced the longest at-bat of his career, where he threw 12 pitches and had six of them fouled off in a 3-2 count against Jake Bauers.
Before Bauers, Yamamoto threw 22 pitches to David Hamilton, Jackson Churio, Brice Turang, and William Contreras.
“Obviously they’re at home, they feel the momentum, Hamilton leads off, steals a base, and they kind of feed off of that,” Roberts said. “We just gotta reset, regroup. We’ve got six innings of baseball to play.”
After Yamamoto exited, Alex Vesia came in the game and got Garrett Mitchell down swinging.
The Dodgers regained the lead in the fifth when Logan Henderson committed a throwing error in the fifth that allowed Kyle Tucker to score. Freddie Freeman brought home Tommy Edman two at-bats later on a sacrifice fly.
Milwaukee tied the game at 4 after Contreras hit a no-doubt, solo home run over the center field fence.