Blake Treinen glanced toward his dugout, saw manager Dave Roberts emerge from it and, for a moment, felt demoralized. There were two runners on with one out in the eighth inning. The Los Angeles Dodgers clung to a one-run lead, a Yankee Stadium crowd of close to 50,000 people had sprung back into life, and Treinen, navigating his third inning, was exhausted. But a title was only five outs away. Giancarlo Stanton , the man due up, was supposed to be his primary matchup. Treinen didn’t want to leave — and Roberts didn’t intend to intervene.
He arrived to encourage. To comfort.
Roberts, near the end of his ninth tension-filled October as the Dodgers’ manager, placed both of his hands on Treinen’s chest to calm his nerves.
“Focus up,” Treinen recalled hearing. “This is your last guy.”
Roberts looked on from the dugout as Treinen induced a harmless popup to Stanton on the first pitch. When he saw Freddie Freeman wave him off out of the corner of his eye, he trusted his first baseman’s instincts and let Treinen stay for another hitter, Anthony Rizzo , and roared when it resulted in an inning-ending strikeout. In the ninth, with no legitimate reliever options left, he turned to Walker Buehler — a starter who hadn’t pitched out of the bullpen since 2018 — and watched as he retired three consecutive New York Yankees with ease.