NEW YORK — Shohei Ohtani hit a leadoff homer and scored four times, Mookie Betts also went deep and drove in four runs, and the Los Angeles Dodgers routed the New York Mets 10-2 on Thursday night for a 3-1 lead in their lopsided National League Championship Series.
Betts had a two-run homer and a two-run double among his four hits. Max Muncy extended his streak of reaching base safely to 12 plate appearances, a postseason record, and the Dodgers moved to within one win of their 25th pennant — most in NL history.
The Dodgers won 9-0 in Game 1 and 8-0 in Game 3. They’re just the second team to have three wins by eight or more runs in a single postseason series. The New York Yankees did it in the 1960 World Series, which they lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates on Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run in the ninth inning of Game 7.
Game 5 of this series is Friday at Citi Field, with Jack Flaherty expected to pitch for Los Angeles with an opportunity to put his hometown team in the World Series.
New York had not committed to a scheduled starter, but it was likely to be Kodai Senga or David Peterson.
Surprise cleanup hitter Tommy Edman had three RBIs, including a tiebreaking double off starter Jose Quintana with two outs in the third inning. Kiké Hernández followed with an RBI single that made it 3-1.
“It’s ridiculous,” Edman told Fox after the game when asked about the Dodgers offense. “We have so much talent. But not only that, we have a bunch of guys who work hard. Great resilience. We’ve had a few lulls — relative lulls by our standard — throughout the second half of the year, but they don’t last very long. We just come back fighting regardless of how we’re feeling.”
Betts broke open the game, greeting reliever Jose Buttó with a two-run double in the fourth and then right-hander Phil Maton with a two-run homer in the sixth.
Both big hits followed walks to Ohtani, and Betts gave a huge fist pump between second and third as he rounded the bases after his third homer of these playoffs.
Betts became the third Dodgers player with four hits and four RBIs in an NLCS game, joining Steve Garvey in Game 4 of the 1974 NLCS and Chris Taylor in Game 6 of the 2021 NLCS.
Mark Vientos provided a rare highlight for New York, hitting his fourth postseason homer in the first inning off $325 million rookie Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
But the Mets, who were 14-2 in their past 16 games at Citi Field when they arrived home Wednesday, were blown out on their own turf for the second consecutive night.
New York has been outscored 30-9 in the series. The Dodgers’ plus-21 run differential is the highest by a team in the first four games of a series in postseason history.
“We’re playing our game right now,” Muncy told Fox after the game. “We’re playing Dodger baseball. That’s something we did extremely well with during the regular season, and we’re staying within ourselves. We’re not trying to do too much at the plate. We’re not trying to chase things around. We’re staying within the zone, and it’s getting good results for us.”
The latest Mets flop after a thrilling comeback ride this far into October hushed a sellout crowd of 43,882 and left Citi Field eerily quiet in the late innings — and just about as empty as April.
Information from ESPN Research and The Associated Press was used in this report.
