LOS ANGELES – You may have missed Kyle Farmer on Saturday night. He was at Dodger Stadium with about everybody else in town. Nice young man. About, oh, yay tall. Put together pretty good. Twenty-seven, looks younger. Wears 65, with pride. Catches some. Hits, mostly.

In the middle of a baseball game that brought the Los Angeles Dodgers to the brink of the National League Championship Series, Kyle batted. And, well, he struck out. These things happen sometimes.

An awful lot of other stuff went on over nearly four hours and exactly 317 pitches Saturday night, like Rich Hill hoisting a handmade “Make Some Noise” sign in the home dugout after he’d pitched four innings, and Kenley Jansen forgetting which direction he walks from the mound after a strikeout, and nine more pitching changes, and the Diamondbacks trudging off hoping to sort out how to win a baseball game or three in the coming week.

So, Kyle Farmer is probably not the first man you’d think about after the Dodgers beat the Arizona Diamondbacks, 8-5, or the second, or the 12th. But there he stood in the clubhouse afterward, in the corner over where Yasmani Grandal dresses, smooshing his wet hair into something that looked presentable and maybe wondering how bad the traffic would be getting out of there. Probably very bad.

He hadn’t driven in a run or made a play or held off the Diamondbacks from the bullpen. He hadn’t electrified the crowd like Yasiel Puig had again, or Jansen had again, or his buddy Austin Barnes had. Here’s the thing about nearly four hours of baseball though — the smallest of deeds turn the game, they almost always do, and then in the muddle of what happened when and what it all means, they are lost in the mounds of postgame numbers and laundry.

Farmer is a 27-year-old Georgian who debuted in the big leagues just more than two months ago. He’d logged an at-bat in July, 11 in August and eight in September. He’d proven a capable pinch-hitter, winning a game that way in his first ever at-bat. In all, he was five for 13 as a pinch-hitter.

Still, these are the Dodgers, the Dodgers of a quarter-billion-dollar payroll, and the first right-handed bat off their bench Saturday night, the only one, if you don’t count the switch-hitting Grandal, was Farmer. It certainly spoke well of Farmer, if you want to look at it that way, that he’d managed enough over 20 big-league at-bats to be here at all.

If you like baseball, and like baseball players, and love the notion of a strikeout being more than a forgettable casualty of the game, then Farmer’s strikeout in the fourth inning was your kind of moment, one that registered then as Farmer being a bystander, but that would be inaccurate.

Kyle Farmer might have struck out in Game 2 of the NLDS, but his teammates appreciated his good at-bat. (Getty Images) More

When it was time to take their shot against Robbie Ray, and that meant pinch-hitting for Rich Hill in the fourth inning, the Dodgers had Farmer get a bat. The bases were loaded. There was one out. In spite of the trouble, Ray had rediscovered his release point, which had been problematic over his first 60 or so pitches.

In a full stadium, in October — and it was loud — Farmer approached the batter’s box, settled in, and waited on Ray. The Dodgers trailed, 2-1. This game, it appeared at the time, was going to be a slog for runs.

“I knew he has a slider and a curveball,” Farmer said. “But I never faced him before. So I didn’t know what it looked like.”

Logan Forsythe led off third, 90 feet from tying the score.

“In Triple-A, I usually took the first pitch,” Farmer said. “I think they knew that.”

Ray threw a fastball down the middle.

“I was kind of kicking myself in the butt,” Farmer said. “I probably should have jumped it.”

What happened next changed the at-bat, and may have changed the game, and possibly changed the series. Ray threw a slider that bounced in front of the plate. Farmer, eager, swung and missed it by a lot. The catcher, Chris Iannetta, blocked it. The 27-year-old rookie was in a two-strike hole against one of the better pitchers in the league. And anybody who was unfamiliar with the rookie of 20 big-league at-bats was likely to have settled on the same notion, that he may have seen some sliders in his days, but nothing like this.

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