Dodgers’ Jack Flaherty flops in 2nd NLCS outing vs. Mets, who force Game 6 in Los Angeles

AP Baseball Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Instead of pitching his hometown team into the World Series, Jack Flaherty sent the National League Championship Series back to California.

Dominant in the opener, Flaherty flopped in Game 5.

Pete Alonso hit a three-run homer in the first and the Mets beat up Flaherty for five runs in the third inning of a 12-6 victory Friday night that pulled New York to 3-2 in the best-of-seven series.

“First time in a while I kind of let the game speed up on me a little bit and didn’t make the adjustment in-game that normally gets made,” Flaherty said.

Flaherty’s fastball velocity dropped 1.9 mph from his season average and the spin rate was down markedly on his four-seam fastball and knuckle-curve.

“He wasn’t sharp, clearly,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “He’s been fighting something. He’s been under the weather a little bit. So I don’t know if that bled into the stuff, the velocity. I’m not sure.”

A high school teammate of Max Fried and Lucas Giolito at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles, Flaherty was dealt to the Dodgers by Detroit on July 30. He insisted “there’s no added frustration” about falling short for LA.

He went 6-2 with a 3.58 ERA for the NL West champion Dodgers during the final two months and lost to rival San Diego in Game 2 of their Division Series when he allowed Fernando Tatis Jr.’s solo homer in the first and David Peralta’s two-run drive in the third inning of a 10-2 defeat.

Pitching on six days’ rest, the right-hander threw seven scoreless innings of two-hit ball against the Mets in the NLCS opener. Back on normal four days’ rest for Game 5, he had his first outing with no strikeouts since Sept. 10, 2022, for St. Louis at Pittsburgh.

Flaherty made his first appearance as a 29-year-old following his birthday Tuesday.

Alonso homered on a slider just 1.12 feet above the plate. Then in the third, Starling Marte pulled a two-run double down the left-field line on a sinker that didn’t, Francisco Alvarez hit an RBI single on another sinker, Francisco Lindor pulled a knuckle-curve into the right-field corner for a run-scoring triple and Brandon Nimmo singled into right field for an 8-1 lead.

“They did a good job in making adjustments and I didn’t,” Flaherty said. “That’s part of the challenge of it and what makes the postseason so interesting is facing a team two times in a span of five days.”

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This story makes editing changes throughout to correct the sequence of the Mets’ third-inning rally and the final score in Game 2 of the Padres-Dodgers NLDS.

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