Even the morning after, it’s difficult to know how to judge the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 8-0 win over San Diego in Game 4 of the National League Division Series. Was it a tribute to the power of despair? The triumph of an efficient system over individual excellence? Simple, stupid luck, repeated eight times in a row?

Whatever one attributes to the motive, let alone the value, the Dodgers pulled off the rarest of feats on Wednesday night when they ended their streak thanks to an eight-pitcher shutout. Even rarer was that only one of those eight, Alex Vesia, faced more than five Padres hitters. Vesia was stretched out through the fourth and fifth innings of a 30-pitch marathon that had veteran players sighing over the recent death of Luis Tiant, the wonderfully idiosyncratic pitcher who threw a complete game of 155 pitches over three days in the 1975 World Series after pitching a complete game stoppage, all at the age of 34 and while celebrating each win with a cigar the length and girth of an adult spaniel. But that was back then. This is exactly the opposite of that.

Wednesday was a day to honor the concept of full employment, as 51 pitchers were used in the day’s four games, including 15 in Detroit’s 3-0 shutout of Cleveland earlier in the day – one fewer pitcher than baserunners, if you can score points home. The average starter lasted 2 2/3 innings, and almost all of that was intentional. The Padres were probably hoping to get more than 10 batters’ worth of work out of ace Dylan Cease, but he took a short break and was pushed around by the suddenly rampant Dodger lineup, which, as we all know, is a pity for anyone not alive Doom becomes like Tiant.

I mean, it’s not like pitchers can’t do that anymore when they’re put under pressure. The point is that they are never pressed. There is no solution to a pitching problem that analysts and the managers they control believe cannot be solved with more pitchers, even though this risky strategy gets riskier with every pitching change. Chances are at least one of the eight will be terrible, and then where are you but fucked? In that sense, the Dodgers’ all-hands-on-deck shutout last night was a triumph against some serious adversity.

It wasn’t long ago that every team had some poor sucker who had to eat five innings in a blowout “to save the bullpen.” Now this is an extravagance; This year, 113 position players have taken the mound in a losing cause, none of them Shohei Ohtani. That’s exactly what people do these days.

And in a way, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts did what you do when you can’t afford the crutch of the crafty pitching position player: You empty your bullpen and hope for the best. He gathered the boys together before the game and explained how it would work; How he broke the news to Ben Casparius and Edgardo Henriquez that they would not be among the deckhands remains a mystery for another time.

But it was 37-year-old Ryan Brasier, and 36-year-old Blake Treinen and 37-year-old Daniel Hudson, who had pitched the day before, as well as more prolific tires like Anthony Banda and Michael Kopech (who had aged). this year in his time with the White Sox), and the aforementioned Vesia and presumed closer Evan Phillips and young Landon Knack, who finished the game. It was a wall of weapons strategically placed to control San Diego’s group of lefties, and the Padres couldn’t see through any of them.

“I think that’s one of the most annoying things,” Padres outfielder Jackson Merrill said afterward. “It kind of brings you back to spring training. You face one man, and then it’s a new man every time.” Very true, except there aren’t 44,000 people watching a B game in the backfield on February 27th.

Merrill is a rookie and will learn more annoying things about baseball in the years to come. That was just the annoying thing on Wednesday. Conversely, it was also a tactical tour de force for Roberts and pitching coach Mark Prior (yes, that Mark Prior), who worked their way through the vaunted Padres lineup. One would say that they did this “frantic,” but you can’t plan frantically. It just looks hectic considering the Dodgers have used an incredible 40 pitchers to win their 100 games this year, including position players Kiké Hernandez and Miguel Rojas. The only team that took advantage more, Miami, tried to lose aggressively and had more success than their wildest dreams. In fact, they managed to convince manager Skip Schumaker to use the get-out clause in his contract to escape the sadness of it all. But that’s for the 2025 MLB Preview coming soon.

The point being made here is that the Dodgers tried and could still steal a World Series with elite hitters and Costco pitchers – decent quality but sold in bulk. In some ways, Wednesday’s win by all players was the most enduring metaphor of the Dodgers’ season, even more than the Shohei-Mookie-Freddie-Teoscar show, the perfect balance between Tiffany and Kirkland Signature.

And yet there is, or at least could be, more. The Dodger rotation is still in moderate shambles, and Roberts may also have to bullpen Game 5 tomorrow night. His starting options are Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Jack Flaherty, but Yamamoto was knocked down in Game 1 and Flaherty struggled in Game 2, and both are currently unwell. In other words, 2014 Clayton Kershaw isn’t coming through that door. But everyone else seems to be.