Dodgers Interview: Muncy Talks Team Chemistry Before Game 3
LOS ANGELES — Dodger Stadium gets the spotlight back on Wednesday night, and Max Muncy sounds ready for it. The series shifts to Los Angeles with the Dodgers up 2–0, the crowd set to shake the concrete, and the third baseman talking about faith, rhythm, and finishing the job.
“I think it really boils down to just the guys we have in the clubhouse with a lot of experience, a lot of really good players,” Muncy said. “We’ve been there before. We’ve accomplished it. We knew who we were as a team all year long and even though we weren’t playing up to it at certain points, we trusted in who we were.” He added that belief did not wobble when the schedule did. “Not one person faltered in there even in the rough times. There were some rough times this year, but the reality is the group of guys we have with the amount of experience and talent knew we were going to come through it.”
Last October helped shape the approach. “Having been there and done that,” Muncy said, “and understanding that a little more than halfway through the year we were starting to get some of our starting pitchers back, they were starting to get healthy. Once that happened, then it was time for the offense to come around.” He called the late-season returns a jolt. “Seeing the guys coming back off the injured list was a big boost. We’re not going into the postseason the same way as last year. It’s a completely different mindset.”
Does the rotation ease the load on the hitters? Muncy pushed back. “I wouldn’t say it takes pressure off us,” he said. “Our job as an offense is to not worry about what our pitching staff is doing. We’ve got to go out there and find a way to put pressure on the other team every single inning. Even if we’re not scoring runs, we’ve got to find a way to get pressure out there.”
He thinks the bats can go higher still. “I still think there’s another gear in there,” he said. “I don’t think we fully reached where we can be at. I think you would know” when they hit it.
His own September was choppy. “I wouldn’t say great,” Muncy admitted. “You come back for a short stint, you get injured again, you come back for a short stint, and then you’re injured again. It’s hard to find any rhythm. A big part of baseball is rhythm. Especially in the batter’s box, your mechanics can be whatever you want them to be, but if you don’t have rhythm it’s tough to compete. For me it’s still trying to find that rhythm.”
He was asked about the cauldron in Philadelphia and about keeping calm when the ninth inning tilted in Game 2. “It’s really hard,” Muncy said. “Your heart’s racing, especially in that atmosphere. You hear all throughout baseball that Philly in the postseason is one of the best environments, and experiencing it firsthand I can agree.” The infield leaned on experience to slow the game down. “We’ve got three, four guys in the infield with ten plus years. It was like, all right guys, let’s take a breath. This is a big moment, but let’s not let it get out of hand. Here’s what we need to do.” They treated the wheel play like a drill. “There’s a lot of things that can go wrong, but we kept things slow and we executed it.”
Postseason urgency is familiar around here. “Every year in spring training every team says the goal is to win the World Series,” Muncy said. “The reality is only a handful can actually say that as a realistic goal, and we’re one of those every single year. Making the postseason is not something you should ever take for granted and we definitely don’t, but we expect to be here. Once we get to this point, it’s a whole another level.” He remembered the seasons when flipping the switch was hard. “For a couple of years we rolled through the regular season and couldn’t find a way to flip that switch. The last couple years I feel like we’ve found that way.”
Home matters. “This place has an aura about it,” he said. “Biggest capacity in baseball. The lights seem a little brighter, the music seems a little louder, and that might actually be because it is a little bit louder. When those speakers in center field are cranking and the crowd is going absolutely nuts and you feel the field shaking beneath your feet, that’s a really big advantage.” He called the noise a perk of playing here. “There’s arguably no place that can get louder than Dodger Stadium, especially in the postseason with 56 or 57 thousand people screaming.”
Momentum came up at the end. “Momentum is always something that you don’t know if it’s real or not,” he said. “You definitely feel it, though. We want to finish this tonight and we don’t want to let anything slip away from us. If you don’t finish it tonight, you feel like it’s slipping away, and that’s not something you want.”
One last field note came with a grin. Bryce Harper had wondered if Dodger Stadium plays smaller now. Muncy was unconvinced. “I’ve played here a long time and I still don’t know that I fully believe that,” he said. “At night the marine layer comes in and the ball doesn’t travel as much. This has always been a tough place to hit. The infield is fast and the ball flies through the dirt, but there’s not a park big enough to hold Sho,” he laughed. “He’s hitting 50 plus and a lot of those come here.”
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