It’s difficult, even the morning after, to know how to judge the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 8-0 shutout of San Diego in Game 4 of the National League Division Series. Was it a tribute to the power of despair? The triumph of an efficient system over individual excellence? Just dumb luck, repeated eight times in a row?

However you assign the motive, let alone the value, the Dodgers pulled off the rarest of feats Wednesday night when they evened their series on an eight-pitcher shutout. Even rarer: Only one of those eight, Alex Vesia, faced more than five Padres hitters. Vesia stretched through the fourth and fifth innings in a 30-pitch marathon, with old memories sighing over the recent death of Luis Tiant, the wonderfully idiosyncratic pitcher who threw a complete game of 155 pitches three days into the 1975 World Series after throwing a complete game shutout, all at the age of 34 and celebrating each victory with a cigar the length and girth of an adult spaniel. But that was then. This is the exact opposite of that.

Wednesday was a day to honor the concept of full employment, as 51 pitchers were used in the day’s four games, including 15 in Detroit’s 3-0 shutout of Cleveland earlier in the day — one fewer pitcher than baserunners, if you count. scores at home. The average starter lasted 2 2/3 innings, and almost everything was by design. The Padres were probably hoping to get more than 10 batters out of top prospect Dylan Cease, but he was on a short rest and got kicked around by the suddenly rampant Dodger lineup, which, as we all know, spells doom for anyone not alive. like Tiant.

I mean, it’s not like pitchers can’t do that anymore when pressed. The point is that they are never pressed. There’s no solution to a pitching problem that analytics experts and the executives they monitor say can’t be addressed with more pitchers, even as that risky strategy gets riskier with each pitching change. Chances are at least one of the eight will be terrible, and then where are you, except screwed? In that sense, the Dodgers’ all-hands-on-deck shutout last night was a victory against serious odds.

It wasn’t that long ago that there was a lowly sap on every staff who had to rely on five innings in a blowout “to save the bullpen.” Now that’s an extravagance; this year, 113 position players took the mound in losing causes, none of them Shohei Ohtani. It’s just what you do these days.

And in a sense, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts did exactly what you do when you can’t afford the stool of a crafty position player: You empty your bullpen and hope for the best. He gathered the boys together before the match and explained how this would work; how he broke the news to Ben Casparius and Edgardo Henriquez that they would not be on deck is a mystery for another time.

But 37-year-old Ryan Brasier was, and 36-year-old Blake Treinen, and 37-year-old Daniel Hudson, who had thrown the day before, as well as tires with more tread, such as Anthony Banda and Michael Kopech (who is much older this year during his time with the White Sox), and the aforementioned Vesia, and supposed closer Evan Phillips, and young Landon Knack, who closed the game. It was a wall of weapons, strategically laid out to navigate San Diego’s tangle of left-handed hitters, and the Padres couldn’t discover any of them.

“I think that’s one of the most annoying things,” Padres outfielder Jackson Merrill said afterward. “It kind of takes you back to Spring Training. You face one man, and it’s a new man every time. Very true, except that there won’t be 44,000 people watching at a B game in the back field on February 27.

Merrill is a rookie and he will learn even more nasty things about baseball in the coming years. This was just the annoying thing about Wednesday. Conversely, it was also a tactical tour de force for Roberts and pitching coach Mark Prior (yes, that Mark Prior), who worked their way through the vaunted Padres lineup. You’d say they did it ‘frantically’, but you can’t make plans frantically. It just looks hectic considering the Dodgers used a whopping 40 pitchers to win their 100 games this year, including position players Kiké Hernandez and Miguel Rojas. The only team that used more, Miami, tried to lose aggressively and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They even succeeded enough to convince manager Skip Schumaker to use the opt-out clause in his contract to escape the sadness of it all. But that’s for the 2025 MLB preview, which will be available soon.

The point being made here is that the Dodgers tried to steal and could still steal a World Series with elite hitters and Costco pitchers – decent quality, but sold in bulk. In some ways, Wednesday’s win was the most enduring metaphor of the Dodgers season for everyone, even more so than the Shohei-Mookie-Freddie-Teoscar Show, the perfect balance between Tiffany and Kirkland Signature.

And yet there is more, or at least there could be. The Dodger rotation is still in mediocre patches, and Roberts might have to bullpen Game 5 tomorrow night as well. His starting options are Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Jack Flaherty, but Yamamoto got hammered in Game 1 and Flaherty struggled in Game 2, and so does the health picture at this point. In other words, 2014 Clayton Kershaw won’t get through that door. But apparently everyone is.