The Dodgers lost 6-2 to the Brewers in Game 3 of the 2026 NLCS and are now one loss away from elimination, down 3-0 in the series. But the collapse didn’t start when Blake Snell imploded in the seventh. It started an inning earlier, when Dave Roberts made two separate tactical mistakes that emptied his bench before the game’s biggest moment ever arrived.
The Sixth Inning: Pages Out, De Paula Burned Without Seeing a Pitch
With the Dodgers leading 2-1 in the sixth, Brewers reliever Abner Uribe lost the strike zone and issued two straight walks. Two on, nobody out — the game right there for the taking. Roberts responded by pulling Andy Pages — who finished the 2026 regular season hitting .274/.343/.468 with 23 home runs, 85 RBI, and a 6.0 WAR, one of the best years of his career — in favor of pinch-hitter Max Muncy against a pitcher who clearly couldn’t find the plate. Muncy did nothing to change the inning.
Then came the bigger problem. Roberts sent Josue De Paula, 21 years old and in his first full big-league season, up to pinch-hit. When Brewers manager Pat Murphy countered with lefty DL Hall from the bullpen, Roberts pulled De Paula back without him ever stepping into the box and sent up the right-handed Kiké Hernández instead. Hernández struck out.
The damage from those two moves: Pages was done for the night, and so was De Paula. The Dodgers closed out the sixth with exactly one position player left on the bench — catcher Hunter Feduccia. Roberts had run out of chess pieces before the most important moment of the game.
The Seventh Inning: Snell Stayed One Batter Too Long
Snell had been dominant. Six innings, nine strikeouts, two hits, one walk. The only damage was a solo home run by Jackson Chourio that put Milwaukee up 1-0 — before Will Smith tied it and then gave the Dodgers the lead with a two-run double in the sixth.
Roberts sent Snell back out for the seventh. What followed was an 11-pitch at-bat from Jake Bauers that ended with a two-run home run — Brewers 3, Dodgers 2. The very next batter, Garrett Mitchell, went back-to-back to make it 4-2. Milwaukee added two more to close it out at 6-2.
The debate over whether Snell should have been pulled before the seventh is a fair one. But it needs to be kept separate from the bench mismanagement in the sixth — those are two distinct decisions. Collapsing them into one narrative makes it too easy to let Roberts off the hook when the facts don’t support that.
The Context That Makes Everything Heavier
The Dodgers have not hit a single home run in any of the three games of this NLCS. Shohei Ohtani, the most expensive signing in baseball history, is in a deep postseason slump: .150 average, no extra-base hits, no RBI in the series. Roberts dropped him to sixth in the batting order for Game 3.
The historical picture is brutal. Of the 42 teams that have fallen behind 3-0 in a best-of-seven postseason series, only one has come back to win: the 2004 Red Sox. The bitter irony? Dave Roberts, as a player, was a central figure in that comeback — his stolen base in Game 4 is one of the most iconic moments in baseball history. He knows better than anyone what it takes to pull off the impossible, and exactly how many things have to go right.
That’s what makes Wednesday’s decisions sting so much. With the game still in his hands in the sixth, Roberts made two bad calls in a row. By the time Snell walked out for the seventh with an empty bench behind him, there was no margin left for anything to go wrong.
