Were the Dodgers too good for their own good?

Their season of smooth sailing crashed against the seawall in San Diego.

It was Oct. 6, 1984, Game 5 of the N.L. Championship Series, and Steve Garvey imposed his own news blackout.

With one out in the ninth and Tony Gwynn on first base, Garvey propelled Lee Smith’s fastball over the centerfield wall in San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium, over the skunks that sometimes roamed the warning track, over untold piles of broken dreams.

It won the game, 7-5, and tied the best-of-5 series, 2-2, and the Padres would beat the Cubs the next day, but Garvey’s blast also unleashed a wall of noise that I hadn’t heard outdoors before.

Many sportswriters were using Texas Instruments word processors that had rubber couplers. They held the mouthpiece and earpiece of the landline phone, and the signal went through those couplers to the office. Garvey triggered a din that pretty much made that impossible, at least for a few minutes.

Scrapbook moments are rare in San Diego, particularly since the Chargers left town and the city’s myopic officials and voters still haven’t bothered to build a modern indoor arena the way Sacramento and Tulsa and even Bakersfield have.

But the echoes are still reverberating from five runs in the seventh inning Saturday night, and a 5-3 elimination of the Dodgers in the N.L. Division Series, and they may remain until Game 1 of the NLCS which, miraculously, will begin in Petco Park.

A .549 team will play a .537 team for the right to go to the World Series, as three 100-win clubs — Dodgers, Braves and Mets — go into exit interviews and staff meetings. In the American League, the $68 million Cleveland Guardians hold a 2-1 lead over the $246 million New York Yankees. Houston did sweep Seattle, but it needed 18 innings to win Game 3, and Mariners manager Scott Servais correctly pointed out that the series pivoted on three swings, two by Yordan Alvarez and the Saturday home run by Jeremy Pena.

Over the past six years, the Dodgers have won 64.5 percent of their games and one World Series trophy, from the 60-game charade of 2020. Their October stumblings have centered on a bullpen which, this time, gave up a 3-0 lead in the seventh. They entered this October without a settled closer, having invited Craig Kimbrel off the roster for this series. Manager Dave Roberts tried to match up Chris Martin against the Padres’ best hitters in the seventh, and eventually brought in lefthander Alex Vesia to face Jake Cronenworth with an 1-0 count on the board. Cronenworth, whose batwork was a sound track for the series, got the tie-breaking, two-run single. That left the Dodgers at the nonexistent mercy of San Diego relievers Robert Suarez and Josh Hader.

Something in the Dodgers’ motherboard convinced them that Evan Phillips shouldn’t be the closer, even though he gave up but one earned run in his last 27 regular season games, and posted the best WHIP (0.769) of any fulltime Dodger pitcher.

But more often that not the Dodgers lose October games because those big innings of July have already gone south for the winter, like the Dodger Stadium goose.

They hit .147 with men in scoring position vs. San Diego with no home runs. In the 2021 postseason they hit .232. In 2019 they hit .135. In 2018 they hit .192 and in 2017 they hit .225. But in 2020, the year that baseball’s Derby was cut to six furlongs, the Dodgers hit .268 in those moments.

It must be paralyzing for the Dodgers to envision the 2023 season, another 162-game irrelevancy, a marathon session with an abacus that does nothing to prepare you for the algebra of the playoffs. How many times can you bludgeon Colorado and Arizona? The Dodgers even won 14 of 19 over the Padres, who had been touting their own readiness to slay “the dragon up the I-5,” as owner Peter Seidler called the Dodgers. But when it came time for the “friendlies” to cease and for the deal to go down, the Dodgers scored 12 runs in four playoff games. For the 111-win season they averaged 5.23 per.

When Freddie Freeman signed in spring training, some said the Dodgers had the best lineup in the history of the game. They were wrong, although they’ll assign that blame to Roberts, general manager Andrew Friedman, assorted mathematicians, and eventually the players. In truth the Dodgers brushed greatness, just like Bobby Cox’s Braves and Earl Weaver’s Orioles and Tony La Russa’s Athletics. None of them won as many World Series as they felt they should have, but Florida, San Francisco and Minnesota popped up to win seven between 1987 and 2014, then disappeared again.

Who is to say what makes a difference in October? Why do some golfers make putts on Thursday and others make them on Sunday? This year, maybe the new format played a part. Because the playoffs were expanded to 12 teams, four of them got first-round byes. Two of those have been eliminated and the Yankees are one loss away.

The NCAA basketball tournament experimented with odd-team formats from 1979 through 1984 but abandoned them when too many glamour teams were getting byes and then losing to a team that had already won. They went to 64 teams, and the No. 1 seeds could then feast on a 16th-seeded nonentity in the first round, to work up a proper sweat. (In the case of the 2018 tournament, Virgnia did not sweat enough against Maryland-Baltimore County.)

For baseball to expand its postseason to 16 teams, to smooth out the competition, would be insane and obscene. Better to cut back to eight, although that train has left the station. It was clear that the four teams with byes, even the Astros, were somewhat stale. Meanwhile, San Diego, Philadelphia, Seattle and Cleveland had won a Wild Card series and sparked pandemonium at their home games.

The other issue is adversity. Pressure either sharpens steel or busts pipes, depending on which cliche you prefer. The Phillies were four games under .500 in June when they fired Joe Girardi and hired Rob Thomson. The Indians had to endure 12 doubleheaders. The Mariners were 29-39 on June 19 after they lost three consecutive games at home to the team from Anaheim. The Padres never did get Fernando Tatis Jr. back, and their fans wasted little time booing Hader and Juan Soto, the new trade additions that were supposed to render San Diego unbeatable.

The Dodgers had their problems, too, specifically when Walker Buehler, an October warrior of distinction, got hurt. But none of them affected their leisurely march through occupied Western territory. There weren’t enough emergency situations for the Dodgers, but the Padres, Phillies and Guardians had plenty. The number that no Dodger fan wanted to consider was the club’s record in one-run games: 16-15.

The Braves didn’t have a clean start and were 10 1/2 games behind the Mets on June 2. Then they caught and passed New York on the final weekend of the season to nail down the bye. Did the quest exhaust them somehow ? Certainly Spencer Strider, who struck out 202 hitters in 132 and one-third innings after he had pitched only 33 minor league games, wasn’t the same when the Phillies ambushed him in Game 3. And maybe the Mets lost their confidence when they lost that lead. Max Scherzer got outperformed by Yu Darvish in Game 1 of their Wild Card series.

If the Yankees lose to join the Mets and the Dodgers in drydock, you’ll hear the usual pointless agonizing about TV ratings, as if any fan should care. What you’ll also hear is the shouting from ballparks that weren’t supposed to be in use. Fortunately, the transmission of news content is smoother these days. San Diego’s baseball fans have also restored their connection.