NLDS Game 2: The backup catcher that made Dodgers-Nationals interesting again

WASHINGTON, D.C. – It’s late Sunday afternoon, Daniel Murphy is running small circles in order to stir up the pigeons he’d rather not have in his sightline, Mark Melancon is cleaning up the Washington Nationals’ first win in this series, the Los Angeles Dodgers are about to shrug and settle for one-of-two here, and these are the moments – nearly four hours of ball past, along with another October day, the protagonists of a postseason game being separated from the rest – when Jose Lobaton more often than not shakes a few hands, packs up his stuff and shuffles off to the next assignment. Maybe he played and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he had a hit, though probably he didn’t. His teammates would love on him, for sure, because he’s one of those guys the other 24 adore, because he’s one of those guys who’s hardly ever missed a chance to show up and give himself over to what was required of him that day.

They’re on the gigantic posters outside the stadium. They’re on the commercials. They get most of the good money. Jose Lobaton, the backup catcher, works when Wilson Ramos doesn’t, though maybe not against a left-handed pitcher, and it’s been a little tough lately on that sore right ankle anyways, but there he is late Sunday afternoon, shaking a few hands, packing up his stuff and standing with the protagonists of a 5-2 win, Nationals Park screaming its approval, the National League division series alive again.

See, Ramos blew a knee at about the worst imaginable time, which left 23-year-old Pedro Severino and Lobaton as the catchers for the Nationals, and instead of having a fifth- or sixth-place hitter at the position, they had a couple guys who’d bat eighth and conduct themselves accordingly. It’s a hard game, which maybe was what Lobaton, a career .226 hitter with 17 home runs spread over parts of seven big-league seasons, was thinking come the fourth inning. The world had a ways back decided Lobaton, a switch-hitter, was better off from the left side, except on Sunday he would be a right-handed hitter against Dodgers lefty Rich Hill. This is what came of Ramos’ injury and an assignment to catch Tanner Roark in Game 2, and so he’d come up in that second inning, gotten a first-pitch curveball and rolled it straight back to Hill, who’d started the double play that snuffed a bases-loaded, one-out mess. By the fourth inning the Dodgers were leading, 2-0, which had no one recalling that second-inning at-bat any more fondly, when Lobaton arrived again against Hill, this time with two Nationals on base and two out.

At least he’d seen the curveball before, maybe a half-hour earlier, and – what the heck – it wasn’t as though Jose Lobaton were new to this sort of thing. Three years and two days before, back when Lobaton was a Tampa Bay Ray and in the division series against the Boston Red Sox, he’d ended a game kind of like this one with a home run into the ray tank at The Trop. That was left-handed, sure, in a place where the only breeze would’ve been generated by the air-conditioning units, but a walk-off homer nonetheless, in a big moment, on a big stage.

Series – headed to L.A. in a few hours – possibly in the balance? Rich Hill? Nasty curveballs? Gushing wind from left field? Two-run deficit? From the side of the plate he’d hit precisely two home runs in 266 career at-bats? Achy ankle?

Pssh.

He got two fastballs, a ball and a strike. Then a curveball. Hill meant to throw it to the outside corner, arm side. It curled instead toward Lobaton. It came in a bit high.

“You see something in your first at-bat,” Lobaton said. “You kind of know how it’s going to be or how they break. That at-bat, my first at-bat, he got me. Like I was guessing curveball my first at-bat and I stayed too much back and I couldn’t hit it good.”

These things happen.

“To be able to come in and have really, really good professional at-bats,” Daniel Murphy said of Lobaton, “and we saw it again today – when is the last time you hit right-handed in a game?”

Lobaton looked up.

“Like a month and a half,” he said.

“That’s just professional right there,” Murphy said.

So along came that one-and-one curveball, not as precise as the rest. Lobaton swung, caught it good, and the ball was launched high toward left field. The crowd, begging for something meaningful, gasped and tried to wish it farther. The left fielder, Andrew Toles, galloped away, toward the wall. The wind fought that ball. Hill’s stare fought that ball.

“I’ve never played a game here with the wind blowing that hard,” Nationals left fielder Jayson Werth said. “Didn’t think somebody could hit a ball out to left field.”

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts’ lean fought that ball.

“You’ve really got to click it to get it out,” he’d thought, hopeful.

Toles stalled out on the warning track, raised his head, raised his glove. Nationals manager Dusty Baker thought the worst.

“He looked like he was going to catch it,” Baker said.

For the better part of nearly four hours, left fielders for both teams would read a ball hit their way, instinctively take a step back, then come charging toward the infield. For those couple seconds in the fourth inning, however, the ball carried. And kept carrying. And landed in the Dodgers’ bullpen.

Nats 3, Dodgers 2.

The stadium exhaled. Lobaton grinned. Bryce Harper stood at the top step and plucked Lobaton’s helmet from his head as he passed by, into an elated dugout. The bullpens would toil for another couple hours. The Nationals would pull away, little by little. Murphy himself, an October later, would drop a couple big hits – a single that accounted for the Nats’ fourth run, another that accounted for their fifth. But the one moment that changed it all, that woke the series, that made Monday interesting again, it belonged to the backup catcher in the eight-hole batting from the wrong side and spitting into the wind.

“I remember the inning before, I was talking to the umpire, and I was telling him the same, like, you know, wow, that wind is really bad for hitters right now,” Lobaton said. “And then when I hit the ball I was like, I think I hit it really good, just I don’t know if it’s going to go out. And then when it went out I was like, wow, that’s pretty cool.

“But, yeah, everybody was asking the same. And a couple guys in the dugout are like, wow, maybe that moment [it] wasn’t windy. Maybe that moment it just stopped and gave me something extra.”

It’s early Sunday evening and the trucks are backed up to the clubhouses. Lobaton strolls past boxes and bags and all sorts of things that will be loaded and driven to the airport and put on an airplane and flown to Los Angeles and then trucked to Dodger Stadium. They were going anyway, no matter how Game 2 went. It’s better this way for the Nats, who maybe couldn’t do this down 2-0, who feel better about themselves at 1-1. Lobaton skirts the last box. He’s wearing garish socks. The left one has stripes on it. The right one, stars. He’s walking alongside Murphy.

“Right now, we don’t have Willy,” Lobaton says, meaning Ramos. “I’ve got to try to do something for the team. And I’m not saying that I’m going to be like Willy and hit a homer and hit .300, but I’m going to do something what I do in the game, play my defense all the time and play hard and then see what happens.”

Pssh. What the hell, go ahead and hit a homer.