Game 5 turned on bullpen decisions — one good, one bad

HOUSTON

You can forget a lot of things in 5 hours and 17 minutes.

Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager, said Brandon Morrow would not work his fifth consecutive game of this World Series.

A.J. Hinch, the Astros manager, said Ken Giles, his wounded closer, would probably not get the baseball in a game-winning situation and, ideally, not at all.

Hinch remembered. Roberts didn’t.

The rest of Game 5 went on, with the lusty swings that made baseballs sound like backfiring cars in the night, the insistent comebacks, and the morose walks to the dugout by whatever pitcher had just been punished.

For all the home runs, it ended on a nice conventional single in the 10th by Alex Bregman off Kenley Jansen, and pinch-runner Derek Fisher scored, just an inning after his former University of Virginia teammate Chris Taylor had tied the score for the Dodgers with a two-out, two-strike hit.

Carlos Correa jumped over a dugout rail and became a coach, waving Fisher home, then begging him to slide. Very few of the 43,300 had left Minute Maid Park. They took the party into the new bars and restaurants of a resurgent downtown, having seen their final game of 2017 and realized they’d remember it until 3017, if not longer.

Houston 13, Dodgers 12. Los Angeles had a four-run lead, a three-run lead and a one-run lead that all got away, and the two bigger leads were supposed to be protected by Clayton Kershaw. There were six half-innings of three or more runs, and the Dodgers were down 11-8 and then 12-9 before they somehow scrambled back.

But Giles did not finish this game for Houston. Chris Devenski did. Jansen, having thrown 33 pitches, gave it up for the Dodgers and gave up his second home run of this World Series.

The Astros hit five home runs, the Dodgers two. Yasiel Puig’s line drive into the seats in the ninth was the 22nd home run of this series, breaking the record the Angels and Giants set in 2002. And there is at least one game left, although the Astros’ Justin Verlander will pitch it tonight in what is predicted to be a chilly Dodger Stadium, right on his normal schedule.

“We kept coming back,” Dodgers reliever Ross Stripling said. “If we can hold them to 12 runs or less in the next game we’ll have a chance.”

The trouble began when Kershaw got the first two outs of the fourth inning and then somehow dissipated.

Yuli Gurriel’s tying three-run home run crashed into the Lexus sign well above the left field Crawford Boxes and would have downed any low-flying aircraft. When Kershaw lost a battle to Bregman and walked him on 10 pitches, that was it, and so began the parade of relievers who, by now, look like Valley Forge stragglers.

It didn’t matter that Kenta Maeda had thrown 42 pitches two nights ago and that he’d been a starter most of his career anyway. He got the call, and Jose Altuve belted a home run that scaled the 404-foot sign, wiping out another Los Angeles lead.

“It’s the case for us and the Astros at this point in October,” Roberts said. “I think everyone is taxed right now.”

When Maeda and Jansen are pushing their expiring arms into the fray, it’s heresy to beg off. Maeda has thrown 92 pitches in these Series games, Jansen is at 90.

Morrow had pitched in all four previous World Series games over a five-day period, all of them in get-it-done situations, all of them at high 90s stuff. Again, it’s a territory he doesn’t normally occupy. Before the game Roberts said Maeda might work an inning and maybe a little more, but he did not want to use Morrow.

“Then he called down and said that he felt good,” Roberts said. “He called and said, hey, if we take the lead, I want the ball, my body feels good. So in the seventh inning, you can’t turn him down.”

And so the Dodgers went ahead 8-7 despite themselves, trying an ill-conceived bunt that got a hobbling Justin Turner thrown out, but scoring on Cody Bellinger ‘s triple that center fielder George Springer tried to turn into a hero catch.

Morrow came in. The results were immediate and traumatic.

Spectators caught two of his six pitches. Catcher Austin Barnes caught one. Springer hit a truly massive home run to the train tracks in left field, Bregman singled and Altuve doubled. Then Correa hit a sky ball that lazily back-spun its way over the fence. It was 11-8 and the ref stopped a fight for which Morrow should never have been signed up.

And no one did that for him. He volunteered.

“I saw how the game was going, I saw what was going on,” he said. “I did call down to the dugout, in the seventh. It’s not that I felt bad. I threw the ball hard. Those pitches weren’t the worst I’ve ever thrown. But they didn’t have as much life as usual.”

And even though he upheld the competitor’s code and cemented his respect in the clubhouse, Morrow realized later that discretion trumps valor.

“It was probably a selfish act on my part,” he said. “They had an agenda, a plan that they were going to use. I shouldn’t have gotten involved with it, but I did.”

Meanwhile, Hinch dredged Luke Gregerson and Collin McHugh out of oblivion when the Dodgers chased Dallas Keuchel. Then he called upon Brad Peacock, author of 52 pitches on Friday night, and Peacock’s battle fatigue showed, too.

But Hinch was not going to prevail upon Giles, who has lost the fans’ confidence and his own. Devenski got nicked up in the ninth and Joe Musgrove finally quieted the Dodgers. Any zero on the board shone like a diamond. LA scored in six of its 10 at-bats.

“We’re going to try to keep piecing it together,” Hinch said, describing what is not an actual plan. But at least he took charge of who pitched and who didn’t.

Roberts could have declined Morrow’s kind offer and stuck with his own plan, even after Kershaw soiled it. But the Dodgers’ bullpen has given up nine home runs in five World Series games with an unwinnable WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched) of 1.48.

“They kept coming back, they’ve got the best offensive team we’ve seen all year,” Roberts said. “But we kept coming back, too. We’ll take the day tomorrow and focus on winning just one game.”

If not, the Dodgers will spent a fall and a winter wondering how in the world a dozen pitchers aren’t nearly enough.