Mortar, pestle meet. The New York Mets feel the full power of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Batsmen who refuse to chase. One relief after another after another with double encrypted security when it comes to protecting a lead.

The Dodgers are so good that they are getting drama out of the postseason. For the fourth time in five games they gave their opponents nothing. They won NLCS Game 3 on Wednesday with another shutout, 8-0.

They are the eighth team to post four shutouts in a postseason, but the first to win three of them by eight or more runs. They invented a new way to win: the blowout shutout.

“We’re deep,” Dodgers infielder Max Muncy said. “The front office has really done a great job making us a great team.”

The Dodgers come at you in waves. With their third postseason shutout by five or more pitchers, they tied a record set by the Milwaukee Brewers in 2018. Manager Dave Roberts has so many good options and uses them so expertly (it helps hold big leads) that Mets star Francisco Lindor has seen 10 pitchers in 13 plate appearances this series – he’s never had the same reliever seen twice.

The offense is no less relentless. It caused the Mets to throw 22 walks in three games. Muncy saw 23 throws with a jeweler’s eye on Wednesday and never once chased a throw out of the zone.

Muncy had as close to perfect a night as any hitter could have. He became only the second player in postseason history to reach base five-for-five with at least three walks and a home run. The other was Babe Ruth in Game 7 of the 1926 World Series.

“We have to not only move forward, but we have to continue to stay on offense and make throws,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “If we fall behind, they will have to pay us.”

This is not how October is supposed to go. October is for biting your lips and nails. It serves to hold on to threads and hope. It’s for that feeling in your gut that’s only remotely matched anywhere else in life when your rollercoaster car rattles at the top of the first drop: a cocktail of thrills and terror in your gut. The Dodgers are ruining all the fun. They’re October’s spoiler alert.

All you need to know about the Dodgers is what happens if they score first. They are 72-16 when scoring first, the best record in baseball. This means they have an 88 percent blocking rate when playing from the front. No matter how early. No matter how little. In Game 3, the score was 2-0 in the second inning when Los Angeles won the game with overwhelming dominance.

Next, it’s up to Jose Quintana, the Mets’ Game 4 pitcher on Thursday, to keep the Dodgers from scoring first. Quintana throws 58.7% of his pitches outside the zone, more than any starting pitcher in the MLB. Quintana makes his living chasing batters, making the Dodgers his nightmare matchup. They don’t hunt.

“We have a lot of guys,” Muncy said, “who are built for the moment.”

Over here was Enrique Hernández, who hit a two-run home run in the fifth, hitting a home run every 29 at bats in the regular season, but hitting a home run every 13 at bats in the postseason.

Over there was Shohei Ohtani, who is so good he makes MLB stadiums obsolete. He smashed a three-run home run in the eighth The ball was hit so high on the line that Mendoza asked the referees to check the replay to determine if it was a foul. The call to the International Space Station, which would have been the only worthwhile vantage point, did not go through.

“There was no way to reverse it,” Muncy said. “That was about 100 feet above the foul pole.”

Ohtani is the outlier of the outliers. The home run extended his ridiculous streak with runners in scoring position to 17 hits in his last 20 at-bats. Nobody has ever had such a successful streak.

On the home run, his bat reached a speed of 115.9 miles per hour and a launch angle of 37 degrees. There were 5,515 home runs this year. This was the only one that was hit so hard and so high. Here’s your entire list of highest-launched home runs at a speed of at least 115 mph:

Oh, and let’s not forget that over there is Walker Buehler, who after an injury-plagued, boring season put on his superhero cape and pitched four innings, his most swings and misses for him in four years.

“He’s a different animal in the postseason,” Muncy said.

If there’s one pitch in an 8-0 game that can be pinpointed as a turning point, it was the one Buehler threw to Lindor with two outs and the bases loaded in the second inning. The Dodgers had a 2-0 lead that seemed less certain at the time. The Mets had the right man starting and the crowd at Citi Field was beside themselves. Lindor had just faced a high fastball to bring the count to 3 and 2.

Buehler had thrown 74 full-score throws all year. Only nine of them were knuckle curveballs. Only one of the 74 was a knuckle curve for a strikeout. Catcher Will Smith called for the curve. Buehler didn’t shake it all night and didn’t want to come here. Back then, before his second Tommy John surgery, there was no doubt about what was coming.

“Oh, I would have thrown a fastball in 2018, 2019, 2020, yeah,” he said.

At the time, Roberts called him “a bully” because of his ability to intimidate hitters with his fastball. The surgeries have robbed Buehler of the extra jump on his heater, at least for now, so the difficult situation called for something different. Thanks to Smith for reading the room.

Buehler nodded, reached deep into his bag of tricks and pulled out the ankle curve. It was in the middle of the zone, but Lindor was taken aback and swung right through it. It was a big moment in the game and in Buehler’s post-operative journey.

“Yeah, I think when you talk about the operations and the road and all that, I think the ability to make a big pitch in a big place is kind of the last thing checked off, but the only thing you want to.” “Check off more than anything else,” he said. “And tonight that was a big deal for me.”

Buehler played 148 games in his major league career. On Wednesday, he threw a higher percentage of breaking balls at 45.6% than in all but one (55.6% in 2019 NLDS Game 5). Whatever it takes.

The Mets received a lot of praise for being the last team to make the playoffs excited about comeback victories and an extensive travel schedule. But in their own way, the mighty, starry Dodgers take on a similar patina to the Grinders. For example, to get to New York, they took a player-only flight from Los Angeles. Roberts and the rest of the staff had to fly on a separate charter with families, including crying little ones. The players then went to a players-only dinner.

“They make sacrifices when it comes to family time for an even stronger team mentality,” Roberts said. “If it means growing together even more, I’m all for it.”

When Roberts held his best relievers out of a loss in Game 2, he viewed the rest of the NLCS as a five-game series with a fully rested bullpen in which the Mets hadn’t looked at his heavily indebted arms. The advantage Roberts envisioned suddenly became even greater as Game 3 progressed. For example, Ohtani’s late home run meant he didn’t have to use Daniel Hudson or Evan Phillips.

Roberts started Yoshinobu Yamamoto (five shutout innings in his last start) and Jack Flaherty (with seven shutout innings) for the next two games, with a loaded bullpen behind him. Batter by batter, reliever by reliever – the Dodgers are all about the daily grind. Meanwhile, New York knows what it has to do to survive the Dodgers’ brick-on-brick stubbornness: Don’t let them score first.