Dodgers dominate Reds in Game 1 of the NL Wild Card Series – NBC Los Angeles

Some nights at Dodger Stadium feel preordained, as though the script was written long before the first pitch. Tuesday night was one of them. The postseason always carries with it the weight of history — triumphs and collapses alike — but the Los Angeles Dodgers opened their 2025 title defense with a performance that felt both fresh and familiar: power from their stars, precision from their ace, and a crowd reminded of why October baseball matters here more than anywhere else in the world. 

Shohei Ohtani and Teoscar Hernandez both hit a pair of homers and the Los Angeles Dodgers routed the Cincinnati Reds 10-5 in Game 1 of the National League Wild Card Series on Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium.

Ohtani has a way of bending time. He doesn’t just play in a moment, he consumes it. A century and a half of baseball has conditioned us to expect the occasional falter, the humbling strikeout, the cruel reminder that even the greats are mortal. And yet, when Ohtani stepped into the box to lead off the bottom of the first inning, none of that logic seemed relevant.

Hunter Greene, the hard-throwing Cincinnati native with a 100-mph fastball, reared back and delivered. Ohtani’s swing was short, violent, and perfect — a crack of thunder that sent the ball screaming into the right-field pavilion. Statcast measured it at 375 feet with an exit velocity of 117.7 mph. Fans didn’t need the numbers. They only needed the sound.

The roar was less celebration than revelation: for six years Ohtani toiled in Anaheim with the Angels, never getting close to playing in the postseason. 

That’s why he signed with the Dodgers in free agency in the winter of 2023, for moments like this. He homered in his first postseason game with the Dodgers in 2024, and he delivered again with a pair of homers in his first postseason game of 2025. 

Ohtani went deep again with a mammoth 454-foot blast in the bottom of the 6th inning that gave the Dodgers a commanding 8-0 lead in Game 1. It was the longest homer hit by a Dodgers player in the postseason in the Statcast era, and it would be all the offense needed for starting pitcher Blake Snell.

Snell arrived in Los Angeles last winter with questions attached. Could he replicate his Cy Young dominance on a stage where expectations weigh heavier than any fastball? Could he handle October in a city where even 100+ win seasons are sometimes remembered for how they ended, not how they began?

On Tuesday night, he answered. Seven innings, two runs on just four hits, with one walk, and nine strikeouts. The Reds never solved him and they never really even came close. 

After six dominant shutout innings by Snell, the Reds finally got on the board with three hits in the top of the seventh. Elly De La Cruz beat out a fielder’s choice for the Reds first run of the game, and Tyler Stephenson followed with an RBI double a few pitches later for the 2nd. 

His fastball had teeth, his breaking ball danced, and his tempo suffocated Cincinnati’s swings before they could breathe. Snell didn’t just pitch, he dictated. By the time manager Dave Roberts pulled him after the seventh, the Reds had the look of a team beaten twice — once on the scoreboard, and once in the mind.

Teoscar Hernandez, a hero of the 2024 title campaign, was a streaky slugger during the 2025 season. Needless to say, he picked the right night to catch fire. 

He launched two homers — one in the third, another in the fifth — each landing like a hammer strike to Cincinnati’s fading hopes.

Tommy Edman, the versatile spark plug acquired at the deadline last season, added his own solo blast for the first back-to-back homers for the Boys in Blue since Game 2 of the 2024 World Series against the Yankees when Hernandez teamed up with Freddie Freeman. 

The Dodgers offense went through its share of lulls during the regular season, including a season-high seven game losing streak in July, but the five homers on Tuesday night in Game 1 of the postseason punctuated a team that rediscovered the same relentless punch that had carried them through the fall. Five total home runs, five different reminders that this lineup doesn’t need perfection to overwhelm; it only needs opportunity.

Ohtani and Hernández became the first teammates to each hit a pair of home runs in the first six innings of a playoff game since Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth did it for the New York Yankees in 1932.

For all the pyrotechnics from Ohtani and Hernández, it was Snell who became the night’s quiet axis. In the annals of Dodgers October lore, great pitching performances have always mattered most. Sandy Koufax’s shutouts. Orel Hershiser’s dominance in ’88. Clayton Kershaw’s moments of brilliance — and heartbreak. Snell, in his Dodgers postseason debut, carved out a space in that lineage.

He did it with the kind of edge that October demands. Every strikeout was a fist clenched tighter around the Reds’ chances. Every inning was a lesson in command, in presence, in how to turn a ballpark’s nervous energy into unshakable confidence.

When Ohtani homered on the first pitch he saw, when Snell carved through the Reds’ lineup like a surgeon, it wasn’t just about one win. It was about proving to the baseball world who were still the champions.

In a postseason that will inevitably ask bigger questions — Can the Dodgers’ bullpen hold up? Can their stars stay consistent enough to carry them through another long October? — Game 1 was the kind of emphatic answer that ripples far beyond the box score.

The Dodgers didn’t just beat Cincinnati 10-5. They reminded baseball of their power, their poise, and their potential.

And as fans spilled out of Chavez Ravine under a harvest moon, the thought lingered: maybe this year, with Ohtani back to the two-way sensation that hasn’t existed since Babe Ruth, and Snell anchoring a dominant starting pitching staff, the story ends the way Los Angeles always dreams it will.

With a parade, not a postmortem.