October 9, 2004: José Lima’s shutout gives Dodgers a long-awaited playoff victory at Dodger Stadium

The drought at Dodger Stadium was serious. Heading into the 2004 season, a venue once flush with playoff and World Series games now came up dry year after year in October. The home team hadn’t made the playoffs since 1996; Los Angeles, in fact, hadn‘t recorded a postseason win at Dodger Stadium since Orel Hershiser shut down the Oakland A’s in Game Two of the 1988 World Series. The fault was not with the ballpark: The Dodgers hadn‘t won a postseason game anywhere since claiming the ’88 title on the road. From 1989 to 2003, the ballclub either didn’t make the playoffs or got swept out of them (as happened in back-to-back National League Division Series, in 1995 and 1996). The 15-year stretch of postseason futility was unprecedented for the Brooklyn-born franchise at Chavez Ravine.

With new owners (Frank and Jamie McCourt, taking the keys from the Fox Group1) and a new general manager (Paul DePodesta, fresh from the Oakland A’s front office, and the pages of the best-selling Moneyball), the 2004 Dodgers looked primed to deliver storylines. They didn’t, however, look primed to deliver postseason success. Writing for ESPN, baseball analyst Tom Tippett projected that the Dodgers would finish fourth in the NL West with a 77-85 record.2

Opening Day loss aside, the Dodgers got off to a fast start. Fueled by MVP candidate Adrián Beltré, putting up what would be career bests in home runs (48), RBIs (121), and batting average (.334), the Dodgers led the NL West at the All-Star break. The team kept rolling even after DePodesta overhauled the roster at the nonwaiver trade deadline, shipping out All-Star catcher Paul Lo Duca, premier set-up man Guillermo Mota, and two-thirds of its Opening Day outfield squadron, Dave Roberts and Juan Encarnación. In the next to last game of the regular season, the Dodgers clinched the NL West flag at home on a walk-off grand slam by Steve Finley, one of DePodesta’s trade-deadline acquisitions. For the first time in the twenty-first century, Randy Newman’s “Love L.A.” was played at Dodger Stadium as the home team celebrated a division title.

In the four-team field that would determine the NL’s World Series representative, the 93-win Dodgers were seeded third. They opened their best-of-five NL Division Series on the road against the top-seeded, 105-win St. Louis Cardinals. Game One at Busch Memorial Stadium3 was a blowout 8-3 win for the resident NL Central champs. Albert Pujols, Larry Walker, and Jim Edmonds each homered off Odalis Pérez and chased the one-time Dodgers All-Star in the third inning. Game Two was a variation on the same theme: Dodgers starter Jeff Weaver surrendered six runs in 4⅔ innings; the Cardinals won 8-3. And just like that, as the series decamped to Los Angeles, the Dodgers faced elimination – and the prospect of another winless postseason.

For the must-win Game Three, José Lima was summoned as the Dodgers’ starter. Once an All-Star and Cy Young vote-getter for the Houston Astros, Lima made eight starts in 2003 for the independent Atlantic League’s Newark Bears. Before the 2004 season, the not-shy right-hander turned down a guaranteed deal from the Kansas City Royals, and bet on himself to make a bigger, better splash with the Dodgers.4 “The magic is still there,” he said at camp in Vero Beach, Florida.5 True enough, the nonroster spring-training invitee made the Dodgers’ starting rotation. He posted the second-best WHIP of the staff (1.245), and the third best of his roller-coaster career. He was especially effective at Dodger Stadium. He went 9-1 at home, with a 3.08 ERA (versus a 4-4 record and 5.56 ERA on the road). Tasked with bringing his self-proclaimed “Lima Time” show to Game Three, Lima had a plan. “I’ve got to come, and give my heart to this team,” he said.6

Dodger Stadium, meanwhile, seemed to go all-out for its first postseason game in eight years. Its seats were full; the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in attendance. Even the Los Angeles weather was a Central Casting special: 70 degrees at game time. To the broadcast team calling the game for Fox, Thom Brennaman and Tim McCarver, the home team’s shot at winning the do-or-die contest hinged on whether Lima could give the Dodgers six innings against the NL’s highest-scoring team and shorten the bridge to LA’s reigning Cy Young closer, Eric Gagné.

Lima opened the game with a strike to Tony Womack. One pitch later, Womack was on first after a line-drive single to right. Walker, Pujols, and Scott Rolen were due up. Lima struck out Walker, got a groundout from Pujols, struck out Rolen, and left Womack stranded on third. In the bottom of the first, Lima’s counterpart, Matt Morris, a 15-game winner for St. Louis in the regular season, had an even easier time with the Dodgers’ offense. He set down César Izturis, Jayson Werth, and Finley on 14 pitches.

In the second, Lima and Morris posted matching performances: Lima gave up a single to Edmonds; Morris surrendered one to Shawn Green; both got inning-ending double plays. The pitchers’ paths diverged in the third. Lima got a one-two-three inning. Then, in the bottom of the frame, Dodger Stadium seemed to make Morris and the Cardinals pay for everything that had gone wrong for the boys in blue since ’88.

Morris grazed leadoff batter Alex Cora on the right hand. According to the Los Angeles Times, Cardinals manager Tony La Russa appealed to the umpires that Cora didn’t try to get out of the way of the pitch.7 But the Dodgers infielder, who racked up the fourth-most HBPs in the major leagues in 2004, stayed at first. Brent Mayne, another Dodgers trade-deadline addition, followed with a single to center. With runners on the corners and no outs, Lima came to the plate, and crouched for a sacrifice bunt. On a 1-and-0 count, he made contact. The TV broadcast showed that the batted ball bounced up and hit Lima’s bat or hand before the Dodger took off down the line.8

The Gerry Davis-led umpire crew, which conferred on the matter but didn’t have the benefit of replay, called Lima safe at first.9 (After the game, Davis said the play should’ve been ruled a foul ball.)10 Making matters worse for the Cardinals, catcher Mike Matheny, who’d jumped on the Lima ball and fired it to get Mayne, the lead runner, at second, failed to get the out call there. When the dust settled, the Dodgers had the bases loaded – and still no outs. The ballpark was a blizzard of white as fans, some sporting “It’s Lima Time!” T-shirts, whirled rally towels. Still, Morris held his ground. He again got the Dodgers’ one-two hitters, Izturis and Werth. With two outs, the bases still loaded, and the game still scoreless, Finley, the hero from the previous week, got a broken-bat hit into the left-field corner. The double scored Cora and Mayne. The Dodgers were up 2-0 – and though they’d add two more runs, thanks to solo homers in the fourth and sixth innings from Green, they’d handed Lima all the scoring he’d need.

Inning after inning, Lima kept the Cardinals off balance. St. Louis’s biggest threat came in the fifth, when Edmonds and Matheny singled. But with two outs and the Dodgers ahead 3-0, the Cardinals allowed Morris to bat. The pitcher grounded out.

As the game went on, Lima grew more animated – a fist pump after getting Walker looking in the sixth; a bigger fist pump after getting Reggie Sanders to close out the seventh with a fly ball; a roar after getting the third out, a grounder from Walker, in the eighth. The Dodger Stadium faithful grew more animated, too. They roared along with Lima. They chanted his name. And likely anticipating a “Welcome to the Jungle”-accented appearance by Gagné in the ninth, they demanded a curtain call after the Walker groundout. But it was Lima, not Gagné, who stood on the mound as the Dodgers looked for the game’s final three outs. Pitching with a hairline fracture in his right thumb,11 and rarely touching 90 mph, Lima had managed eight scoreless innings on 99 pitches, walking only one and allowing five hits. He’d need only 10 more pitches to dispose of Pujols, Rolen, and Edmonds. The Dodgers won, 4-0.

Dodger Stadium was not only back in the postseason business, it was back in the postseason-win column. The drought was over. The next night, the Dodgers would be eliminated in Game Four, with a 6-2 loss, but the Lima Time triumph was not diminished. “The best game ever,” Cora would recall in 2010 after Lima died of a heart attack at age 37. “I still remember 50,000 people going ‘Lima, Lima’ in the ninth inning.”12

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com for box scores/play-by-play information, and stats; SABR’s José Lima biography by Rory Costello; and video of game at YouTube.com.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/LAN/LAN200410090.shtml

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPMUl1gOSuk

Notes

1 Andy McCue, “Los Angeles/Brooklyn Dodgers Team Ownership History,” Society for American Baseball Research, last accessed on November 19, 2023: https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/los-angeles-brooklyn-dodgers-team-ownership-history/.

2 Tom Tippett, “Projected Standings for 2004,” ESPN, April 4, 2004, last accessed on November 19, 2023: https://www.espn.com/mlb/spring2004/news/story?id=1774245.

3 Busch Memorial Stadium (referred to as Busch Stadium II by Baseball-Reference.com) was the home of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1966 to 2005. The current (as of 2023) park for the Cardinals, Busch Stadium III, opened in April 2006.

4 Bill Shaikin, “Lima Feeling Content With Past and Future,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2004: D11.

5 “Lima Feeling Content With Past and Future.”

6 John Nadel (Associated Press), “Morris Has Chance to Finish Job,” Indiana (Pennsylvania) Gazette, October 9, 2004: 19.

7 There was no mention, or shot of, Tony La Russa disputing the Cora HBP on the Fox broadcast. Bill Shaikin, “Umpires Say They Goofed,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2004: D14.

8 The Fox broadcast refers to the ball as hitting Lima in fair territory, on the bat. “Umpires Say They Goofed.”

9 “Umpires Say They Goofed.”

10 “Umpires Say They Goofed.”

11 Jason Reid, “Thumb Injury Sidelines Lima; Jackson to Start,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2004: D5.

12 Ian Begley, “Mets’ Reyes on Lima: ‘A Great Guy,’” ESPN, May 23, 2010, last accessed on November 19, 2023: https://www.espn.com/new-york/mlb/news/story?id=5213357.