LOS ANGELES — The Phillies shook off two tough home losses to get on the board in the NLDS, breaking through Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto and successfully holding down a dangerous lineup in an 8-2 win in Game 3 on Wednesday night.
The winning runs came in the fourth inning, after three easy frames for Yamamoto. Kyle Schwarber announced the Phillies were back with a 455-foot monster of a homer that cleared the right-field pavilion in Dodger Stadium. And the hits just kept coming after that.
Alec Bohm and Brandon Marsh each batted in another run, contributing to Yamamoto’s shortest start since July 7. The right-hander entered the game having not allowed a single earned run in his past three starts and without allowing multiple runs in his past six, but the Phillies seemed to figure out his complicated pitch mix before long.
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“The lineup woke up,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said after the game.
The biggest problem: Yamamoto’s splitter, usually one of the best pitches in baseball, becoming completely toothless. He threw 12 of them. Of the eight outside the strike zone, the Phillies swung at only one of them. Of the four left inside the zone, the Phillies swung at all four. Of their five total swings, none were whiffs on a pitch that had an elite 42% whiff rate during the regular season.
Given how much of Yamamoto’s game lives on that north-south interplay with his four-seam fastball and splitter, that’s a weapon he couldn’t afford to lose against a seasoned lineup. Yamamoto responded to a question about his splitter by noting the strength of his other pitches, but the results were their own rebuttal.
“Overall, my stuff wasn’t that bad, not necessarily terrible,” Yamamoto said after the game. “Because I was trying to use all my pitches. And actually my fastball, four-seam, was good. And so I was trying to rely on the other pitches, but it didn’t work out.”
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More runs arrived in the eighth inning to all but end the game at the expense of Clayton Kershaw, who made his 2025 postseason debut and allowed five earned runs in two innings, including a second Schwarber homer.
That meltdown wound up being fortunate for the Phillies, who were ready to use closer Jhoan Duran for a potential two-inning save. Instead of having to use their best reliever in all three games, they were able to sit the flame-thrower and finish out Game 3 with the rest of their bullpen.
The bullpen intrigue came after a start that worked out great if you consider the combined effort of Aaron Nola and Ranger Suárez. The Phillies surprisingly turned to Nola, who ran up a 6.01 ERA this season, to start the game, but he was essentially an opener, throwing two scoreless inning and going through most of the Dodgers’ lineup.
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Suárez then came in and dominated for five innings — outside of a home run allowed to his first batter, Tommy Edman.
“They pretty much did exactly what we wanted,” Thomson said. “We wanted to use those guys to get as close to Duran as we could to save some of the bullpen for tomorrow if we want.
“Nola was really good. The plan was to go one time through the lineup and Ranger is on [Shohei] Ohtani. Ended up with Edman leading off the third. He’s 1-for-20 with nine strikeouts against Ranger, and he hit the first pitch out of the ballpark. Yeah, they executed perfectly.”
Game 4 is scheduled for Thursday at 6:08 p.m. ET, with Tyler Glasnow and Cristopher Sánchez taking the mound.
This news was originally published on this post .
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