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BOSTON – A long time ago, before his Los Angeles Dodgers fell on one notch, stabilized, slipped again, then spent the whole month of September scratching and scratching, fighting for another title of division and finally another pennant, Justin Turner, has embraced a harsh reality:
The first game of the series will be a rare treat: two real ace in the strength of their career face each other in a confrontation between pitchers in the old.
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Nothing will ever relieve the pain.
The Dodgers start Tuesday a long-awaited showdown with the World Series stars against the Boston Red Sox mastodon. It's still an opportunity to claim the championship trophy that has eluded this franchise for 30 years. But just the Dodgers doing the rest of this month can not erase what happened 355 days ago, when the Houston Astros defeated them in Game 7.
"We can win two or three world series in the future," said Turner. "I will probably remember losing the seventh game more than winning the championships."
The culprit was actually the fifth match. The Dodgers took a 3-0 lead with Clayton Kershaw on the mound, a prime opportunity to capture a crucial pivotal match in the 2017 World Series. But they made three advances and lost in 10 innings. They returned to win the sixth match, but were unable to recover from Yu Darvish's five-point collapse in Game 7.
"We had a lot of chances," said Dodgers receiver Yasmani Grandal. "The whole series boiled down to a few locations."
"It stung, man," said Alex Wood, the starter become reliever. "It took a long time."
Dodgers players did their best to distance themselves from memory in the off-season, but they could not help bumping. Joc Pederson, Ross Stripling, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Austin Barnes, Turner and Wood all married during the winter, constantly bringing everyone together.
The loss of the World Series was a frequent topic of conversation early on, but it soon dissolved and was replaced by the typical camaraderie of a team that has come closer along the way.
Wood took comfort in the routine he attended.
"It's one of the most hard-working teams I attend," he said. "See the guys work on the Saturday morning before the wedding, train six days a week from the time we finish the season until we arrive in the spring – there's a reason we're back here, we worked for that. "
Kenley Jansen started his training almost immediately. He returned to Dodger Stadium a week after the end of the season, entered the weight room and found himself increasingly angry over the days. He liked the feeling and decided to keep it. While most of his teammates did their best to forget, Jansen swore to remember.
"You let that motivate you, that one game you failed," Jansen said. "You let that motivate you because it will make you better."
But it took a while to postpone it. The Dodgers started slowly in 2018, losing 26 of their first 42 games to fall 10 under the .500 mark on May 16th. Jansen was not himself, Turner was on the disabled list, Corey Seager was lost for the season and the entire group fell into a funk collective. Jansen spent the rest of the season wondering why such a powerful team, as deep, could fall so early so soon, even after the Dodgers regained their place among the best in the National League.
In early September, he spoke to Ryan Madson, a veteran who won championships with the Philadelphia Phillies and Kansas City Royals.
Message from Madson: "Welcome to the hangover."
"I started laughing," recalls Jansen. "I said:" I guess so. "
"It's hard, dude," said Kinsler. "You have to train in the spring next year, and there are 3,000 people in the stands, and you've just finished a World Series of 50,000, 60,000 ridiculous people. like this one, which gets so much attention and you go back to Glendale, or wherever they are, and it's really a walk in the park.That's getting difficult in this regard.But a team that surrenders at the World Series understands where she wants to be at the end of the year.
This is played for the Dodgers, and they believe that they are better for that.
Last year, they held a 21-game lead in western Newfoundland before the end of August and continued until September. This year, they overcame a start of 16-26, then a 3-9 stretch in mid-August. They swept a series of weekends on the road to end their regular season, beat the Colorado Rockies in a tiebreaker of a game to avoid a wild card match, eliminated the Atlanta Braves in four games in the LNDS and survived the Milwaukee Brewers in seven in the NLCS.
"Nothing is really easy for us this year," said Turner. "Our back was against the wall – it was a must-win at every game."
The urgency created by the slow start was a blessing for these Dodgers. Suddenly, the idea of returning to the World Series could no longer consume them.
From the first launch of each series to the last of Game 7, you can follow the full post-season MLB on ESPN Radio. Listening »
"We just had to survive," said Grandal. "We have been in survival mode for almost half of the year."
Kershaw, who will start the match 1 against Chris Sale, called the World Series last year "good experience" and then stopped.
"It's not a good experience," he said from the podium before Monday's practice at Fenway Park. "An experiment."
According to Elias sports bureau research, the Dodgers are only the sixth team in history to have lost 10 games less and to reach the World Series in the same season.
The last team to lose the World Series and win the following year was Madson's Royals. The San Francisco Giants in 2014 defeated the New York Mets in 2015. Previously, that had not been accomplished since the 1989 Oakland Athletics, which had lost to the Dodgers in 1988 – the last championship Los Angeles baseball – beat the San Francisco Giants.
If the Dodgers beat the Red Sox, they will become the first NL team since the 1944 Cardinals in St. Louis to win the World Series the year after their defeat.
Even this can not eliminate the grief of love.
"You can not do anything about it," said Turner. "It's already done. It's here. And I do not think anyone in the room that was there last year will ever forget it. But what we can do is learn from it, move forward and draw all the experience and in this series. "
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