Flying too close to the sun. Fans endure heat at

It was so sizzling at Dodger Stadium on Saturday…

How sizzling was it?

It was so sizzling a workforce that averaged practically 50,000 followers for often meaningless regular-season video games beat the Atlanta Braves 5-3 in its first postseason sport before hundreds of empty seats — some of which had been actually too sizzling to sit in.

It was so sizzling the Dodgers set up pallets of bottled water close to the gates and anybody courageous enough to enter the stadium was given a plastic 16-ounce Dasini bottle. Gatorade also set up a cooling tent under the right-field pavilion.

It was so sizzling Nicolas Gonzalez, a fan sitting in the shade of the reserved degree, noticed a stadium attendant, overcome by heat, stretchered before the sport even began. She wasn’t the only one. By the later innings, other followers on the reserved degree had been reportedly searching for medical consideration on the concourse.

The Dodgers declined remark.

So how sizzling was it?

The sport began 45 minutes after the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning, cautioning against “extremely dangerous heat conditions” as the temperature reached 100 levels at first pitch. By the third inning, the temperature studying atop the left-field scoreboard peaked at 103 levels, matching the highest first-pitch temperature at 64-year-old Dodger Stadium.

“I’ve been coming to games my whole life and this is easily the hottest game I’ve ever been to,” said Gonzalez, 38, of Culver City. “Having a game in these conditions feels like we’re flying too close to the sun, both literally and figuratively.”

Around him, followers tried to cool themselves by waving makeshift followers. It didn’t work.

But the climate didn’t just have an effect on the means the sport was watched. It affected the means it was performed too. The cloudless skies made every pop-up an journey and the heat, dense air lowered drag, permitting batted balls to journey farther. As a end result, the groups mixed for 5 homers, accounting for all eight runs.

“That’s probably one of the hottest games that we’ve ever had here. And so shout-out to the Dodger fans; they were amazing,” said Max Muncy, who hit one of those 5 homers.

“My feet were hot. Really hot.”

The Dodgers wound up with an early afternoon sport in the center of a historic heat wave because MLB and the TV networks — in this case Fox and TBS — set conditional start instances for the 4 Division Series video games before the groups and matchups had been identified. When the San Diego Padres eradicated the Chicago Cubs in the wild-card spherical, Saturday’s early NL sport went to the Dodgers.

Left-hander Tarik Skubal, who gave up just a run on two hits in six innings to get the win in his Dodger postseason debut, said he didn’t actually discover the heat until he got here out of the sport.

“I walked back into the dugout, and I asked — I forget who, I think it was [Blake] Snell — I was like, ‘has it been this hot all game?’ It’s amazing what your brain can do in certain circumstances and moments,” he said.

“I actually didn’t think it was horrible when I was pitching.”

But then Skubal pitched in a lot hotter situations as a child growing up in northern Arizona.

“I played a Little League game in 127 [degrees]. Lake Havasu,” he said. “[Saturday’s] up there with as hot a baseball game that you can play in.

“Every team’s playing in it, right? They’re playing in the same conditions we are. It shouldn’t really impact how you are mentally or how it’s going to impact how you pitch. Just go out there and play baseball and try to drink water. That’s really it.”

At least Skubal bought to drink his water in the relative cool of the dugout between innings. Umpire Roberto Ortiz, sporting 10 kilos of protecting gear and a black-and-gray uniform, bought no such reduction. He had to stand behind the plate for 2 hours, 44 minutes and all 290 pitches, one of which smoked him in the seventh inning.

That’s why his 5 fellow umpires made a level of patting him on the back or shoulder before jogging to their positions for the first pitch.

“He stayed tough,” Dodger catcher Will Smith said of Ortiz. “I’m sure he’ll rehydrate and be ready for tomorrow.”

Speaking of tomorrow, the Dodgers, Braves and the umpires will all get some reduction for Game 2. At first pitch Sunday afternoon the Weather Channel is forecasting a temperature of just 97 levels.

“The dark silver lining,” Gonzalez, the heat-weary fan said in a nod to global warming, “is this might be the coolest October of the rest of our lives.”