Not a Blue-Plate Special

The Dodgers have one starter they trust to pitch deep into the game, and he did not. They used another starter in the seventh inning -- here it is October and they still haven’t found a reliable reliever for that inning -- and he failed. They cannot answer the power of their opponents with power of their own, and so they gave up two home runs and hit none.

And so, as the Dodgers opened the playoffs Wednesday, the New York Mets exploited their every weakness. The Dodgers threw in a costly baserunning blunder, and Carlos Delgado homered and drove in three runs as the Mets emerged with a 6-5 victory in Game 1 of the National League Division Series.

The Dodgers started their playoff ace, the Mets started a rookie, and the Dodgers lost. Bad sign, for tonight the Mets start their playoff ace and the Dodgers start a rookie. If the Dodgers do not win, on a night Tom Glavine and his 290 major league victories face Hong-Chih Kuo and his one major league victory, the Dodgers will be one game from elimination in the best-of-five series.

The baserunning disaster was replayed on ESPN and your local newscasts all night long for its novelty, with Mets catcher Paul Lo Duca tagging out Jeff Kent and then J.D. Drew as each tried to score on the same hit in the second inning. The Dodgers lost two runners and lost the game by one run.

“Traffic jams like that come back to haunt you, and this certainly did,” Manager Grady Little said.

“You can’t expect to win a ballgame in the second inning,” Kent said. “It’s easy to sit in the booth and color it that way and say, ‘If this would have happened, they would have scored and they could have won the game.’ You can’t do that.”

Indeed, the Dodgers tied the score, 4-4, in the seventh inning, with three runs against ex-Dodgers reliever Guillermo Mota, two on a double by Nomar Garciaparra.

In the bottom of the seventh, needing that one-inning bridge to Jonathan Broxton and Takashi Saito, Little skipped relievers Brett Tomko, Aaron Sele and Chad Billingsley in favor of Brad Penny.

Penny threw 11 balls in his first 17 pitches, walking two, then Delgado hit a 98-mph fastball for a run-scoring single, his fourth hit of the game, and the Mets led, 5-4. David Wright blooped the next pitch, a 97-mph fastball, for a run-scoring double, and the Mets led 6-4.

Penny, with one previous relief appearance in the last three seasons, said he was “a little over-amped.” Although he left his last start after one inning complaining of back stiffness, he said his back felt fine.

“The walks killed me,” Penny said.

Little said the outing removed any hesitation about starting Penny in Game 4.

“I’m more confident,” Little said. “I saw his stuff, with no grimacing and no pain.”

Penny will not be available in relief tonight, or when the series returns to Los Angeles, so the seventh inning remains a question mark, particularly with Joe Beimel out for the series because of a gash on his pitching hand. Little said he would have used Beimel in the seventh inning Wednesday, ahead of Penny.

The early innings should not have been a question mark Wednesday, but they were. The Dodgers scratched Derek Lowe from the final game of the regular season, with the NL West championship at stake, so they could have the chance to use him twice in the division series.

He had given up one home run in the final 64 1/3 innings of the regular season, dating to Aug. 9, but he gave up two in one inning Wednesday.

After Lowe shut out the Mets for the first three innings, Delgado hit a 470-foot bomb and Cliff Floyd a 390-foot encore in the fourth, powering the Mets to a 2-1 lead.

Lowe gave up two more runs in the sixth, on a double by Wright, and left with one out in the inning and Dodgers down 4-1.

“The middle of their order really came through,” Lowe said. “It’s never easy to lose Game 1, but hopefully tomorrow we’ll go out and give them another battle.”

In the final week of the regular season, the Dodgers rallied from at least three runs behind to win in three consecutive games, a first under the Dodgers brand. The franchise last accomplished that in 1925, as the Brooklyn Robins, with a roster that featured Hall of Famers Burleigh Grimes, Dazzy Vance and Zack Wheat.

On the first day of the playoffs, the Dodgers rallied from three runs down to tie. No happy endings, or trivia questions, this time.

bill.shaikin@latimes.com