Mortar, meet pestle. The New York Mets are feeling the full force of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Hitters who refuse to chase. One reliever after another after another with double encrypted security when it comes to protecting a lead.

The Dodgers are so good that they take drama out of the postseason. For the fourth time in five games they gave their opponent nothing. They won NLCS Game 3 on Wednesday with another shutout, 8-0.

They are the eighth team to throw four shutouts in a postseason, but the first to win three by eight points or more. They came up with a new way to win: the blowout shutout.

“We’re deep,” Dodgers infielder Max Muncy said. “The front office has done a fantastic job and provided us with a great team.”

The Dodgers are coming at you in waves. They tied the 2018 Milwaukee Brewers record with their third shutout of the postseason with five or more pitchers. Manager Dave Roberts has so many good options and has used them so skillfully (holding big leads helps) that Mets star Francisco Lindor has faced ten pitchers in thirteen at-bats in this series – never the same reliever twice.

The offense is no less brutal. It resulted in the Mets walking 22 batters in three games. Muncy saw 23 pitches with a jeweler’s eye on Wednesday and didn’t chase a pitch out of the zone once.

Muncy had as perfect a night as a hitter can have. He became only the second player in postseason history to go five-for-five and reach base with at least three walks and a home run. The other was Babe Ruth in Game 7 of the 1926 World Series.

“Not only do we have to move forward, but we have to stay on offense and execute on pitches,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “If we are behind in the counts, they will make us pay.”

This is not the way October should go. October is for lip biting and nail biting. It is to hold on to the thread and to the hope. It’s for that feeling in your gut that elsewhere in life you can only approach when your roller coaster car rattles to the top of the first drop: a cocktail in your gut of tension and fear. The Dodgers are ruining all the fun. They are October’s spoiler alert.

The one thing you need to know about the Dodgers is what happens when they score first. They are 72-16 when they score first, the best record in baseball. That means they have an 88% lock when playing from the front. No matter how early. Now it doesn’t matter how little. In Game 3, it was 2-0 in the second inning when Los Angeles declared the game theirs by eminent domain.

Then it’s up to Jose Quintana, the Mets’ Game 4 pitcher on Thursday, to prevent the Dodgers from scoring first. Quintana throws 58.7% of his pitches outside the zone, more than any starting pitcher in the MLB. Quintana makes a living chasing hitters, which makes the Dodgers a nightmare. They don’t hunt.

“We have some guys,” Muncy said, “who are built for this moment.”

Here was Enrique Hernández, who smoked a two-run homer in the fifth, who hit a home run every 29 at-bats in the regular season, but every 13 at-bats in the postseason.

There was Shohei Ohtani, who is so good he’s making MLB baseball obsolete. He crushed a three-run homer in the eighth that was hit so high down the line that Mendoza asked the officials to check the replay to see if there was an error. The call to the International Space Station, which would have been the only worthwhile vantage point, was canceled.

“There was no way they could undo it,” Muncy said. “That was about 100 feet above the foul pole.”

Ohtani is the outlier among outliers. The home run extended his ridiculous streak of success with runners in scoring position to 17 hits in his last 20 at bats. No one has ever put together a series like this.

The home run left his bat at 115.9 mph and with a launch angle of 37 degrees. 5,515 home runs have been hit this year. This was the only one that was hit so hard and so high. Here’s your complete list of the highest launched home runs that hit at least 110 mph:

Oh, and let’s not forget Walker Buehler, who donned his superhero cape after an injury-plagued blah season and racked up the most swings and misses in four years in four innings.

“He’s a different animal in the postseason,” Muncy said.

If there’s one pitch in an 8-0 game that can be circled as a turning point, it’s the pitch Buehler threw to Lindor with two outs and the bases loaded in the second inning. The Dodgers had a 2-0 lead, which seemed less safe at the time. The Mets had the right man at the plate and the Citi Field crowd went crazy. Lindor had just looked at a high fastball to bring the count to 3-and-2.

Buehler had thrown 74 full pitches all year. Only nine of them were knuckleballs. Only one of the 74 was a knuckle curve for a strikeout. Catcher Will Smith called for the curve. Buehler didn’t shake him all night and didn’t want to come here. Back in the day, before his second Tommy John surgery, there was no doubt about what was going to happen.

“Oh, in 2018, 2019, 2020 I would have thrown a fastball, yeah,” he said.

Roberts called him “a bully” because of the way he could intimidate hitters with his fastball at the time. Operations have robbed Buehler of that extra jump on his heater, at least for now, so the tight spot called for something different. Thanks to Smith for reading the room.

Buehler nodded, reached deep into his bag of tricks and pulled out the knuckle curve. It was smack in the middle of the zone, but Lindor, stunned, swung right through it. It was a big moment in the game and Buehler’s post-operative journey.

“Yeah, I think when you talk about the operations and the road and all that stuff, I think being able to make a big pitch in a big spot is the last thing you check off, but the one thing you want to check off especially off, he said. “And tonight that was a big deal for me.”

Buehler pitched 148 games in his Major League career. On Wednesday, he threw a higher percentage of breaking balls (45.6%) than all but one (55.6% in 2019 NLDS Game 5). Whatever it takes.

A lot of credit has been given to the Mets for how they are coming into the playoffs as the last team galvanized about comeback wins and an extensive road schedule. But in their own way, the mighty, sudden Dodgers are acquiring a similar patina of grinders. To get to New York, for example, they took a players-only flight from Los Angeles. Roberts and the rest of the staff had to fly families, including crying little ones, on a separate charter. The players then went to a players dinner.

“They make sacrifices when it comes to family time for an even stronger team mentality,” Roberts said. “If it means we have to bond even more with each other, I’m all for it.”

When Roberts held his top relievers out of a Game 2 loss, he viewed the rest of the NLCS as a five-game series with a fully stocked bullpen in which the Mets hadn’t taken a look at his high-leverage arms. The advantage Roberts had in mind suddenly became even greater as Game 3 unfolded. For example, Ohtani’s late home run saved him from having to use Daniel Hudson or Evan Phillips.

Roberts has drafted Yoshinobu Yamamoto (five shutout innings in his last start) and Jack Flaherty (coming off seven shutout innings) for the next two games with a fully loaded bullpen behind him. Batter after batter, reliever after reliever, the Dodgers are all about the daily grind. New York now knows what it has to do to survive the Dodgers’ brick-on-brick obstinacy: don’t let them score first.