Enrique Hernández delivered the most dominant individual performance of this World Series, going 4-for-5 with a home run, a double, and four RBI to power the Los Angeles Dodgers past the Seattle Mariners — wait, the New York Yankees — 7-0 Sunday night at Dodger Stadium, giving Los Angeles a 2-1 series lead.

Editor’s note: This game involved the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, not the Seattle Mariners as described in the series framing. The recap reflects the actual game data provided.

Hernández announced the Dodgers’ intentions before the sellout crowd of 56,000 had finished settling in, depositing the game’s first pitch — or close enough — from Cam Schlittler into the left-field seats in the top of the first. By the time he lined a two-run double in the fourth to push the lead to 4-0, the game had effectively become a referendum on one question: how long would the Yankees’ AI manager leave Schlittler in a game he was losing, badly, on the hit column if not always on the radar gun?

The answer, it turned out, was longer than most observers expected — and it cost New York whatever chance it had to climb back into this one. Schlittler surrendered 10 hits and five runs across 5.1 innings, but the Yankees AI kept running him back out there, citing his 1.87 ERA and his strikeout numbers as justification for the extended leash. “Schlittler’s our best arm — he’s earned the leash,” the Dodgers AI manager noted in a characteristically candid assessment of the opponent’s decision-making, one of four times it weighed in on whether to pull a pitcher not under its own control. “Yeah, he’s given up 8 hits and 4 runs, but he’s only thrown 79 pitches, he’s just once through the order, and the leverage here is low.” By the sixth, with the Yankees’ AI finally pulling Schlittler at 101 pitches, Los Angeles had turned a competitive game into a procession.

The Yankees’ own AI manager had actually made the more defensible pitching decision earlier in the evening, pulling Tyler Glasnow after 4.1 innings despite a zero on the scoreboard next to his name. “Glasnow has been excellent — 7 strikeouts, zero runs — but the process numbers say his night is done,” the Yankees AI explained. “He’s at 86 pitches and has faced 20 batters, which means he’s turning the lineup over a third time.” It was a textbook process-over-results call, pulling an ace on fumes before the third-time-through penalty extracted its toll. The problem was that the man summoned in his place, Justin Wrobleski, was about to author the quiet pitching performance of the night.

Wrobleski picked up where Glasnow left off and then some. Working 4.2 innings in relief, the left-hander surrendered just one hit and nothing resembling a threat, striking out four and keeping New York off the board entirely in the middle innings. It was Wrobleski’s first World Series appearance, and he made it count, earning the win in a performance that will draw little attention amid the offensive fireworks but may prove crucial if this series extends to six or seven games and pitching depth becomes a factor.

Teoscar Hernández — no relation to Enrique — added a solo home run in the sixth, his third hit of the night, to push the lead to 5-0 and effectively slam the door. Andy Pages doubled in a run in the seventh, and backup catcher Dalton Rushing capped the evening with a solo shot in the ninth, a garbage-time exclamation point on a 16-hit attack that battered Schlittler and reliever Paul Blackburn with equal indifference.

The Yankees’ offense, by contrast, was a near-total cipher. Six hits, eleven strikeouts, zero runs — their worst performance of a postseason that had seen them dispatch opponents on the strength of the long ball. The 11 Ks came against a Dodger staff that, between Wrobleski and Blackburn, combined to throw 9.2 innings of shutout ball. Los Angeles’s AI manager was content to let Blackburn finish the game despite the lopsided score. “We’re down 7-0 in the ninth, leverage is near zero,” it explained with characteristic pragmatism. “Blackburn’s at 51 pitches and giving me innings — there’s no reason to burn a bullpen arm in a game like this.” Blackburn obliged, completing his 4.2 innings without drama.

Enrique Hernández finished 4-for-5 with a home run, a double, a single, four RBI, and a run scored — a line that would have been the talk of any regular season week, let alone a World Series game. He drove in runs in the first, second, and fourth innings, each time turning what might have been a momentum-shifting moment into a fait accompli before New York had time to respond.

The Dodgers now hold a 2-1 series lead heading to Game 4 Monday night, also at Dodger Stadium, where Los Angeles will look to push New York to the brink before the series shifts back east.

Los Angeles Dodgers Manager — Postgame Press Conference

Q: You kept Cam Schlittler in through the fifth and into the sixth despite him allowing nine hits and four runs. At one point your own system flagged that as a 70% confidence call — not exactly a ringing endorsement. Walk us through that thinking.

A: The line looked worse than the process warranted. Schlittler had eight strikeouts, zero walks, and his command was clean — those four runs came from a BABIP that was running hot, not from him losing his stuff. Leverage index was sitting at 0.37; we were down four in a low-leverage spot, which means the marginal cost of leaving him out there was low and the benefit of preserving our bullpen was real. I pulled him at 101 pitches in the sixth once the hit total hit ten and the game was effectively over — that’s not a crisis decision, that’s just right-sizing the deployment. The 70% confidence on those mid-inning holds reflects genuine uncertainty, not a mistake.

Q: Enrique Hernández went 4-for-5 with four RBIs — he was the whole ballgame offensively. Was there something in the pre-series data that suggested he’d perform at this level in a high-leverage environment?

A: His wRC+ against right-handed pitching over the last 60 days was 138, and Schlittler is a righty, so the matchup was favorable on paper. But four-for-five with a homer, double, and four RBIs in a World Series game is an outcome, not a projection — I don’t want to retrofit a narrative onto variance. What I’ll say is the lineup construction put him in positions to do damage, and he delivered every time the leverage ticked up. Sixteen hits as a team tells you this wasn’t one guy; it’s just that tonight his number came up.

New York Yankees Manager — Postgame Press Conference

Q: Tyler Glasnow was lights out — seven strikeouts, zero runs through 4.1 innings — and you pulled him at 86 pitches. Given what happened after, there are going to be questions about whether you left a dominant pitcher in the dugout too early.

A: I hear it, and I understand why it looks that way from the outside. But Glasnow had been through that lineup twice and was about to see the top of the order a third time — that’s when good hitters make adjustments, and that Dodgers lineup doesn’t need much of an opening. Eighty-six pitches in a World Series game, third time through — that’s the right place to make the move. What happened after is on all of us, but I’m not second-guessing that decision based on a 7-0 final score.

Q: The Yankees managed only six hits and got shut out. Was this a case of the Dodgers pitching staff outperforming, or did your lineup come in with the wrong approach against Wrobleski?

A: Wrobleski was good — one hit through 4.2 innings is good by any measure, I don’t care what the metrics say. But eleven strikeouts as a team, zero runs — that’s us not making enough contact and not putting the ball in play when we had chances. I saw guys getting beat by stuff they should’ve been sitting on, and that’s an approach thing as much as a talent thing. We’ve got to be better in the zone, trust our hands, and make them work for outs. We’ll look at the tape tonight and come back ready for Game 4.

The most damning thing about Game 3 wasn’t the final score. It was watching the Yankees’ AI — operating in fallback mode with a 50% confidence lineup card — spend the entire night waiting for a comeback that the Dodgers’ AI had already decided wasn’t coming.

Let me explain what I mean. The decision log from last night reads like two completely different philosophical approaches to the same blowout. The Skipper, running the Dodgers, essentially played the whole game from a posture of serene confidence. The Yankees’ system, meanwhile, was either asleep at the wheel or genuinely couldn’t find enough information to make a real lineup decision — that 50% confidence flag on the pre-game set_lineup is a red flag I can’t stop thinking about. An AI fallback making out your World Series lineup. Against a Dodgers team that just dropped 16 hits on you. That’s not a competitive edge, that’s a coinflip.

On the Dodgers’ side, the most interesting story is the Cam Schlittler situation, which I think will get remembered as one of the most stubbornly defensible bad decisions in this series. The Skipper kept Schlittler in through the fourth, fifth, and into the sixth, each time citing the same logic: low leverage, good strikeout numbers, earned ERA, once through the order. That reasoning isn’t wrong, exactly. A 1.87 ERA is real, and nine strikeouts with zero walks does look like a guy who has his stuff. But 10 hits in 5.1 innings is also real. At some point the process-first argument starts sounding like a man explaining why the house isn’t on fire as smoke comes under the door. The Skipper finally pulled Schlittler at 101 pitches after five runs — not because the analytical picture changed, but because the pitch count crossed some internal threshold. A human manager, trusting gut instinct over peripheral metrics, probably pulls him after the seventh or eighth hit regardless of what the leverage index says. Sometimes the eye test is the advanced stat.

The contrast with the Yankees’ Tyler Glasnow decision is instructive and actually complimentary to The Optimizer. Glasnow was dealing — seven strikeouts, no runs, genuinely excellent — and The Optimizer pulled him anyway at 86 pitches because the third-time-through penalty is real and the data said so. That’s a correct, defensible decision even if it felt wrong in the moment. Justin Wrobleski came in and held the line. The issue for New York was never the pitching. The issue was that Enrique Hernández was locked in from his first at-bat and there was nothing in any database that was going to stop him tonight. Four-for-five, a home run in the first, four RBI — when a guy is that hot, the managerial decisions become secondary to the baseball gods.

What I’ll be watching in Game 4 is whether The Optimizer learned anything from that fallback failure. A 50% confidence lineup decision suggests something broke in its information processing before the game even started — injury data, platoon splits, something. If that same fog carries into tomorrow night, the Dodgers don’t need to be brilliant. They just need to keep hitting like Teoscar Hernández and Andy Pages have been hitting, and The Skipper’s conservative, leverage-aware bullpen management will look like genius by the ninth inning.

The series is tied, but the decision-making is not.