other way

PHILADELPHIA — On the mound, he self-destructed in a second inning that nearly placed the game out of his team’s reach.

In the batter’s box, he struck out four times for only the seventh time in his career.

A two-way player for the first time in a postseason game, Shohei Ohtani didn’t save the Dodgers on Saturday night.

Instead, Ohtani was the one being saved in a 5-3 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 1 of their National League Division Series.

He was saved by Tyler Glasnow, Alex Vesia and Roki Sasaki, who combined to shut down the lethal Phillies lineup over the last three innings.

He was saved by a two-run double by Kike Hernández in the sixth inning that reduced their deficit to 3-2.

He was saved by a three-run blast by Teoscar Hernández in the seventh that moved them in front, 5-3.

Ohtani said in Japanese of Hernandez’s go-ahead homer: “It was a wonderful moment. I think it was the kind of moment that made you think, ‘This is the postseason.’”

The victory cleared a path for the Dodgers to defend a World Series title that once felt indefensible. By stealing the road win necessary to advance, the Dodgers have taken control of this best-of-five series against the Phillies, who could be the greatest obstacle in their World Series defense.

The Dodgers should have the edge in starting pitching over the next two games, as Blake Snell is scheduled to start Game 2 on Monday and Yoshinobu Yamamoto Game 3 on Wednesday at Dodger Stadium.

If a fifth game is required to decide this NLDS, Ohtani will be able to pitch on six-days’ rest.

Who could have imagined the Dodgers would be in this position after a game in which Ohtani staggered through a three-run second inning that left him looking as if he was eaten alive by the notoriously hostile Citizens Bank Park crowd?

“He’s not always going to be perfect,” Roberts said.

That being said, Roberts was quick to point out Ohtani’s contributions.

How after that brutal second inning, Ohtani pitched four scoreless innings to keep the Dodgers within striking distance. How Ohtani showed bunt and stepped out of the batter’s box in his ninth-inning at-bat as part of a plan to buy more time for Sasaki to warm up to close the game.

Ohtani sounded particularly proud of how he struck out NL home run king Kyle Schwarber for the third out of the fifth inning. The Phillies stranded two runners.

“I think it might have been a scene that decided the direction of the game,” Ohtani said.

The Dodgers scored two runs in the next innings and three in the inning after that.

“To kind of look at the at-bats that he took tonight and how he struggled offensively, but to separate that and just be a pitcher and weather that [second] inning and to go out there and give us six innings and keep us in the ballgame, I just don’t know any human that can manage those emotions,” Roberts said.

The comeback was necessary because of a second inning that started with a walk by Alec Bohm. Midway through the at-bat of the next hitter, Brandon Marsh, the Citizens Bank Park crowd started to taunt Ohtani.

Sho-hei!

Sho-hei!

Marsh singled. Ohtani responded by reaching back and throwing a 100.2-mph fastball over the heart of the plate to J.T. Realmuto, who launched a rocket into right-center field.

Heavy-footed right fielder Teoscar Hernandez failed to cut off the ball, which skipped to the outfield wall. Bohm and Marsh scored.

Realmuto reached third and scored two batters later on a sacrifice fly by Harrison Bader.

Just like that, the Dodgers were down, 3-0.

This was not the start envisioned by the Dodgers, who set up Ohtani to be the star of this series.

The Dodgers didn’t send Ohtani to the mound in either of their two games of the previous round against the Cincinnati Reds.

By starting Snell and Yamamoto in the wild-card series, the Dodgers were able to save Ohtani for Game 1 of their series against the more formidable Phillies.

The Dodgers entered the NLDS reveling in the history about to be made by Ohtani, the most valuable player as a designated hitter last season back in the October spotlight to pitch in the postseason for the first time.

“I think as he takes the mound for the bottom half [of the first inning], I’m going to take a moment just to appreciate him doing something unprecedented,” Roberts said before the game.

President of baseball operations Andrew Friedman went as far to make the case that Ohtani was underrated.

“I just don’t think the human brain can comprehend what he does and how difficult it is and how he is elite at both,” Friedman said. “The passion he has for hitting and the passion he has for pitching, it doesn’t seem like there’s enough passion to go around, but there is with him.”

Ohtani didn’t pitch last season as he was recovering from an elbow operation he underwent in 2023. Friedman recalled the diligence with which he rehabilitated.

“It wasn’t just about pitching for him,” Friedman said. “It was about pitching really well.”

Ohtani didn’t pitch really well on Saturday night, but he will have a chance to pitch really well in the days and weeks ahead.

His team gifted him the opportunity.

TAMPA, Fla. — Blake Snell nearly had a flawless return from the injured list on Saturday afternoon.

If only the Tampa Bay Rays didn’t have slugger Yandy Díaz, or a quirky short right-field wall at their temporary home at Steinbrenner Field.

Making his first start since the second week of the season, when he went down with a shoulder injury that shelved him, Snell largely looked like the ace the Dodgers thought they were getting when they signed him to a $182-million contract this offseason.

Over a five-inning outing that included eight strikeouts, no walks and a whole bunch of flailing swings by the Rays, the veteran left-hander flashed his two-time Cy Young Award-winning stuff and tantalizing late-season potential for this year.

However, in the Dodgers’ 4-0 loss to the Rays, Snell gave up three runs on a pair of long balls to Díaz — who twice took advantage of the ballpark’s short porch in right field.

“I thought, to be quite frank, he was a victim of this ballpark,” manager Dave Roberts said afterward. “There were a couple fly balls to right field that just went out. … Unfortunately, got a little bit of bad luck.”

After the Rays’ permanent home, Tropicana Field in nearby St. Petersburg, had its canvas roof shredded during Hurricane Milton this winter, the club relocated to Steinbrenner Field for this season; using the New York Yankees’ open-air, Tampa-based spring training park for its home schedule.

Since the 10,000-seat venue was modeled after Yankee Stadium in New York, its defining feature is a short right-field wall (similar to the one in the Bronx) that measures at just 314 feet down the line — eight feet shorter than the dimensions at Tropicana Field.

In the bottom of the first inning, Díaz took full advantage, golfing a 3-1 fastball the other way for a solo home run. According to MLB’s Statcast system, the ball traveled only 326 feet, and would have stayed in play at each of the league’s other 29 stadiums. But not here, and especially not on a sweltering summer afternoon with a first-pitch temperature of 91 degrees.

“I was surprised,” Roberts said of watching Díaz’s ball land in the first row of seats.

“They took advantage of the field,” added right fielder Teoscar Hernández.

Indeed, Díaz repeated the act two innings later; snapping the groove Snell had settled into after retiring seven of the next eight batters, including five on strikeouts.

On a 1-1 fastball that was up in the zone, Díaz launched one to the opposite field again, hitting a two-run blast on a 341-foot fly ball that would’ve been a homer in only two other parks (Yankee Stadium, and Daikin Park in Houston).

“The first homer to Yandy, that was not a good pitch,” Snell said. “On the second homer, I thought that was a really good pitch to him, and it was. Just a good result for him.”

Still, on the whole, Snell offered plenty of promise in his return to action Saturday.

First and foremost, he filled up the strike zone, eliminating his habit of nibbling around the plate by throwing 57 strikes in 86 pitches.

“I was in the zone more than I thought I would’ve been,” he said. “You’re just trying to feel it out again, so I like that.”

And, in another positive development, many of those strikes were of the swing-and-miss variety.

Snell racked up 19 total whiffs, tied for third-most by a Dodgers pitcher in a game this season. Seven came on 12 total swings against his changeup, a key offspeed pitch that showed no signs of rust after his four-month layoff. Five more were courtesy of his slider, with the Rays coming up empty on all five swings against it.

“I was in the zone, I was confident, I knew what I wanted to do,” Snell said. “Overall, first start back, emotions, there’s a lot that I’m dealing with to get better. … But definitely something to build on, learn from.”

In the big picture, after all, the Dodgers’ main priorities for Snell are: 1) Stay healthy; 2) Pitch better than he did at the start of the season, when his bothersome shoulder contributed to two underwhelming outings that marred the beginning of his Dodgers career.

Tampa Bay’s Yandy Díaz watches his solo home run off Dodgers pitcher Blake Snell during the first inning Saturday.

(Chris O’Meara / Associated Press)

Down the stretch this season, the Dodgers’ biggest strength might be their rotation. Yoshinobu Yamamoto is in the Cy Young Award conversation. Tyler Glasnow has looked improved since returning from his own shoulder injury. Shohei Ohtani has quickly rediscovered his premium stuff coming off a second career Tommy John procedure. And even Clayton Kershaw has been productive in his 18th season.

The biggest linchpin, though, likely remains Snell — whom the Dodgers targeted this offseason in hopes of avoiding the tightrope they walked last October, when their injury-ravaged rotation was almost completely depleted by the start of the postseason.

“Last year, we found a way to do it, not having that [rotation depth],” Roberts said. “But having the starters healthy, pitching the way they’re capable of, makes it a better quality of life for everyone.”

While the Dodgers had managed in Snell’s absence, maintaining a narrow lead in the National League West despite another prolonged stretch of patchwork pitching, Roberts acknowledged they had missed his “presence” over the first two-thirds of the season.

And after watching from afar how well Snell finished last year — when he rebounded from another extended early-season IL stint with the San Francisco Giants by posting a 1.23 ERA over his last 12 starts, including his first no-hitter exactly one year ago Saturday — Roberts was hopeful the 32-year-old could mount a similar “heater” now.

“He’s really focused,” Roberts said. “I love where his head’s at.”

The results on Saturday might not have been enough to compensate for the Dodgers’ quiet day at the plate — with their lineup managing only six hits and squandering its best opportunity to rally on Hernández’s bases-loaded, inning-ending double-play grounder in the top of the sixth.

But it nonetheless raised hopes about the potential of the team’s late-season rotation, offering a long-awaited glimpse of the kind of dominance Snell could provide to the Dodgers’ push to defend their World Series championship.

“I thought Blake threw the baseball really well today,” Roberts said. “Just kind of seeing him out there, competing, making pitches, it just makes you feel better going forward.”

LANGLEY, Va. — At CIA headquarters, beyond the handsome granite seal on its lobby floor and a wall of stars carved in honor of the agency’s fallen, experts are at work in the complex tasks of spycraft: weapons-trained officers, computer engineers, virologists, nuclear scientists.

But there are also storytellers, makeup artists, theater majors and ballerinas — Americans who probably never thought their skills would match the needs of a spy agency. Yet the CIA thought otherwise.

Though it rarely gets the spotlight, there’s a revolving door of talent between the country’s premiere intelligence agency and its entertainment industry, with inspiration and influence often working both ways.

The agency is targeting professionals at the intersection of arts and technology for recruitment, CIA officers told The Times, and continues to cooperate with entertainment giants to inspire the next generation of creative spies.

This month, the agency is assisting a New York Times bestselling author on a young adult book examining the foundations of the CIA laid during World War II. Scenes from a major upcoming film production were just shot at its headquarters, a logistical feat at an intelligence campus tucked away in the Virginia suburbs behind rings of security perimeters, where officers roam cracking down on Bluetooth signals. Another popular streaming TV series will be back at Langley to film this fall.

But their collaboration goes far deeper than that, officers said. Creative minds in Hollywood and the entertainment industry have long had a role at the Central Intelligence Agency, devising clever solutions to its most vexing problems, such as perfecting the art of disguise and harnessing a magician’s ability to cast spellbinding illusions. Indeed, in the 1950s, a magician from New York named John Mulholland was secretly contracted with the agency to write a manual for Cold War spies on trickery and deception.

These days, the officers said, creative skills are more valuable than ever in such a technologically complex world.

“You’re only limited by your own imagination — don’t self-censor your ideas,” said Janelle, a CIA public affairs officer, granted the ability to speak under her first name at the request of the agency. “We’re always looking for partners.”

An elusive history

David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst and author of “Damascus Station” and other spy thrillers, offered several theories on why the agency might be interested in fostering a robust relationship with Hollywood, calling it “a two-way street.”

“There definitely have been operational applications for espionage,” McCloskey said. “It’s probably the exception to the rule, but when it happens, it’s compelling.”

It’s easy to see why CIA leaders would be interested in Hollywood, he said, in part to shape impressions of the agency. “But their bread and butter business is receiving people to give secrets,” he continued, “and part of that is getting close to people in power.”

“The closer you are to Hollywood,” McCloskey added, “that’s a really interesting ‘in’ to having a lot of interesting conversations.”

The CIA’s mission to rescue six American diplomats out of Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, the subject of the film “Argo,” featured a detailed ruse centered around a fabricated movie project.

(CIA Museum)

Some of the CIA’s most iconic missions — at least the declassified ones — document the agency’s rich history with Hollywood, including Canadian Caper, when CIA operatives disguised themselves as a film crew to rescue six American diplomats in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, an operation moviegoers will recognize as the plot of “Argo.”

“‘Argo’ was almost too far-fetched to even believe,” said Brent, an in-house historian at CIA headquarters. “It’s almost more Hollywood than Hollywood.”

Canadian Caper was both inspired by Hollywood and relied on Hollywood talent. Agent Tony Mendez had been a graphic artist before joining the agency and helping craft the mission.

Another key player was John Chambers, the makeup artist who gave the world Spock’s ears on “Star Trek” and won an honorary Oscar for his trailblazing simian work on “Planet of the Apes.” He was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit for his work on the covert rescue effort.

The Los Angeles Times broke the story in February 1975 that business tycoon Howard Hughes had lent his ship, the Glomar Explorer, as cover for a CIA operation.

(CIA Museum)

Just a few years before, Howard Hughes, then one of the world’s richest men and a tycoon in media, film and aerospace, agreed to work with the CIA to provide cover for an effort by the agency to lift a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine off the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

Deploying Hughes’ Glomar Explorer under the guise of mineral extraction, the CIA was able to salvage most of the sub before The Times broke a story blowing its cover — “the story that sunk our efforts,” in CIA parlance.

And another mission was made possible thanks to a device invented by a professional photographer — a gadget that later became the inspiration of an over-the-top scene in the blockbuster Batman film “The Dark Knight.”

In Project Coldfeet, CIA agents gathering intelligence on a Soviet station erected on a precariously drifting sheet of ice in the Arctic needed a reliable extraction plan. But how does one pick up an agent without landing a plane on the ice?

The answer was the “skyhook”: Balloons lifted a tether attached to a harness worn by an agent high into the sky. A CIA plane snagged the tether and carried the agent off to safety.

In “The Dark Knight,” Batman makes a dramatic escape deploying the same kind of balloon-harness contraption.

‘The superhero spy’

CIA leadership often says that acceptance into the agency is harder than getting into Harvard and Yale combined. Yet the agency still has challenges recruiting the type of talent it is looking for — either in reaching those with unconventional skills, or in convincing them that they should leave secure, comparatively well-paid, comfortable jobs for a secretive life of public service.

It is no easy task managing work at the agency, especially with family, CIA officials acknowledged. Deciding if and when to share one’s true identity with their children is a regular struggle. But Janelle said the CIA tells potential recruits there is a middle ground that doesn’t require them to entirely abandon their existing lives.

A professional photographer working with the CIA invented what became known as the “skyhook,’ a surface-to-air recovery system used by the spy agency in an Arctic mission and later featured in the 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight.”

(CIA Museum)

“People don’t have to leave their companies to help their country and to work with CIA,” Janelle said. “People come here because they love their country and know they can make a difference.”

Janelle is part of a team that regularly engages with creatives who want to portray the agency or spies as accurately as possible.

“Some producers and directors reach out and they do care about accuracy,” Janelle said, “but they ultimately pick and choose what’s going to work for the film or show.”

CIA analysts have also been known to leave the agency for opportunities in the entertainment industry, writing books and scripts drawing from their experiences — so long as they don’t track too closely with those experiences.

Joe Weisberg, the writer and producer behind the television series “The Americans,” and McCloskey, who is working on a fifth novel focused on U.S. and British intelligence, were both part of the agency before launching their writing careers. And as CIA alumni, they had to submit their works for review.

“There’s a whole publication and classification-review process,” Brent said.

That process can be a bit of a slog, McCloskey said: “They quite literally redact in black ink.”

But it is far more difficult for nonfiction writers than novelists.

“There could be bits of tradecraft, or alluding to assets, or people at the agency, which are clear no’s,” McCloskey said. “But with novels, it’s not that hard to write them in a way to get them through the review board.”

Try as they may, studios often repeat the same falsehoods about the CIA, no matter how often they are corrected. Officers and agents aren’t the same thing, for one. And as disappointing as it may be for lovers of spy thrillers, the majority of officers are not licensed or trained to carry weapons.

“One thing Hollywood often gets wrong is the idea that it’s one officer doing everything, when it’s really a team sport here,” Janelle said.

Jessica Chastain, center, plays a member of the elite team of spies and military operatives who secretly devoted themselves to finding Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the Columbia Pictures 2012 film “Zero Dark Thirty.”

(Jonathan Olley / Sony Pictures)

“Zero Dark Thirty,” an Oscar-winning film released in 2012 about the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was widely acclaimed but criticized by some within the intelligence community over the credit it lends a single, fictional CIA analyst for tracking him down.

McCloskey sympathizes with the writer’s dilemma.

“I can’t have 35 people on a team. From a storytelling standpoint, it just doesn’t work,” he said, acknowledging that little in the field of espionage is accurately captured on screen, even though there are plenty of former spies available to work as consultants.

“There’s no lack of sources to get it right,” he said. “It’s that the superhero spy — the Jack Ryans and Jason Bournes — are pretty much the Hollywood representation of espionage.”

However inaccurately glorified and dramatized, the agency hopes that Hollywood’s work can keep the revolving door moving, inspiring atypical talent to join its ranks.

“We have architects, carpenters, people who worked in logistics,” Brent said. “People might not realize the range of skill sets here at CIA.”

And as Canadian Caper showed, sometimes spycraft requires stagecraft. It’s possible that what’s needed most to complete the next mission won’t be oceanography or data mining, but costume design. Or maybe another ballerina.