Stars power Dodgers in opening rout
ARLINGTON, Texas — Clayton Kershaw, Cody Bellinger, Mookie Betts — the Los Angeles Dodgers’ stars all shined.
Nothing out of the ordinary there, even if the setting was surreal.
Baseball’s best team during the pandemic-shortened season showed off its many talents in the first World Series game played at a neutral site, beating the Tampa Bay Rays 8-3 Tuesday night.
With the seats mostly empty, Kershaw dominated for six innings, Bellinger and Betts homered and the Dodgers chased a wild Tyler Glasnow in the fifth inning and coasted home in the opener.
A crowd limited by the coronavirus to 11,388 at Globe Life Field, the new $1.2 billion home of the Texas Rangers, marked the smallest for baseball’s top event in 111 years.
Los Angeles hopes to go home with a title that has eluded the Dodgers since 1988, but tried to guard against focusing ahead.
“It’s hard not to think about winning. It’s hard not to think about what that might be like,” Kershaw said. “Constantly keep putting that in your brain: tomorrow, win tomorrow, win tomorrow, win tomorrow. And then you do that three more times, and you can think about it all you want.”
A regular-season star with an erratic postseason history, Kershaw looked like the ace who so often stars on midsummer evenings with the San Gabriel Mountains behind him at Dodger Stadium. With these games shifted, the 32-year-old left-hander wound up pitching not far from his offseason home in Dallas.
The three-time Cy Young Award winner allowed one run and two hits, struck out eight and walked one. He induced 19 swings and miss
es among his 78 pitches — more than his three previous Series starts combined.
“You can appreciate and totally see why he’s heading to the Hall of Fame one day whenever he’s done,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said.
Kershaw threw nine balls in the first, when he stranded a pair of runners, then threw just nine more over the next three innings.
“He had a game plan to try to really quiet down
things from there and he executed,” said Kevin Kiermaier, who ended Kershaw’s streak of 13 retired in a row with a fifth-inning
homer on a hanging slider that cut the Rays’ deficit to 2-1
Kershaw, a five-time ERA champ, improved to
2-2 in the World Series and 12-12 in postseason play, a shadow of his 175-76 regular season record. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts did not pitch him after Game 4 of the NL Championship Series last Thursday.
“I think we were going to stay away from him in Game 7 just for this particular reason,“Roberts said.
Eight of the.last 10 teams to win Game 1 went on the title, all except the 2016
Indians and 2017 Dodgers.
Bellinger, the 2019 NL MVP who began the opener with a career .114 batting average in 12 World Series games, had put the Dodgers ahead in the fourth with a two-run homer off Glasnow, having no trouble driving a 98 mph pitch into the Dodgers bullpen in rightcenter.
He capped his evening by leaping at the 6-foot centerfield wall in the ninth, robbing Austin Meadows of a possible home run.
Betts, brilliant throughout October but slumping at the plate, added his first postseason homer for the Dodgers, an opposite-field solo shot to right in the sixth off Josh Fleming.
Betts had two hits, scored two runs and stole two bases in the four-run fifth, when Corey Seager swiped one as Los Angeles became the first team to steal three bases in a Series inning since the 1912 New York Giants in Game 5 against Boston.
Glasnow was chased after 41⁄ innings with an
3 ominous pitching line that included three hits, six runs, six walks and eight strikeouts. He threw a careerhigh 112 pitches and became the first to walk six or more in a series game since Edwin Jackson of St. Louis in Game 4 of 2011.