In 2018, the Dodgers came to town for the final series of the year in second place in the NL West. In first place were the surprising Colorado Rockies, up by just a game, but riding a 7-game winning streak that they’d put together against the .500-adjacent Diamondbacks and Phillies. They had all the momentum, their magic number was 3, and they needed either a sweep or a series win and a little help from the Giants to win the division.
The Rockies won two out of three from the Nationals. The Giants got swept by the Dodgers, the second one close until the end, and the third one an embarrassing 15-0 blowout. The Dodgers beat the Rockies in Game 163, and went all the way to the World Series, where they lost to the Red Sox, who had enjoyed one of the great regular seasons of all time. 108 wins! Imagine being anywhere close to that good. Wild, man.
In 2019, the Giants came into the final weekend totally out of it, and the Dodgers had long since clinched. Still, the Giants wanted to give Bruce Bochy a strong send-off for his final games as manager, and after having been embarrassed in the final series the year before, well, they had their pride.
Then the Dodgers swept them again, with the only close game being a 2-0 loss on the Saturday and the worst being the 8-0 laugher on Sunday, and it turns out they didn’t have their pride. Easy mistake to make!
In 2020, the Giants came into the final weekend fighting for one of the last playoff spots. They had a 4-gamer against the Padres, and needed to win 2 of them to finish at .500, which would probably be good enough to sneak into the playoffs, where they could promptly get destroyed by a good team that actually deserved to be there. They won the first, lost the second on a walk-off homer to Trent Grisham even though they were in San Francisco — if you don’t remember, it’s not important, but also it was extremely embarrassing — never really felt like they were in the third game, and then lost the last one to finish one game out of the playoffs. The bullpen was awful all weekend. The team was never going to have a passable bullpen again. It was a whole thing.
The upshot was this: the Giants were not a playoff team. The Giants were old and busted. The Padres were the new hotness. The Giants had come close, but only because it was an 8-team playoff field. If you think I’m harping on the playoffs last year being fake, it’s because it sucked and was stupid and the Giants still couldn’t make it.
In 2021, the Giants made it.
No, that’s not emphatic enough, is it? The Giants made it, on the backs of a herd of griffins, surrounded by flocks of angels, with choirs of seraphim sounding from the heavens. They parted the Red Sea, sacked Constantinople, and came up with the “That’s Chappie” tweet. They beat Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel, bested both Vizzini and the Man in Black in a battle of wits, and snapped Thanos out of existence.
That might have gotten a little embarrassingly over the top, but I’m standing by it.
For three years, the Giants, when faced with the possibility of keeping their rivals out of the playoffs, or sending their manager out right, or getting into the fake playoffs themselves, flagrantly declined. But those were different Giants teams. This year, it was the Giants blowing out their opponent on the last day of the season, watching them (probably) say goodbye to their manager with an ignominious loss, winning their way into the playoffs against the team who kept them out the last time.
If you want evidence for how far the Giants have come, well, you couldn’t do much better than…you know what? Yes you could. 107 wins is the evidence. If you want a small supplementary symbol of everything they’ve done right that they used to do wrong, that’s where this final series thing comes into play.
For years, the Giants were hopeless on the last weekend of the season. Yes, some of that is because they were playing much better teams, but this year, there is no team that is much better than the Giants. They have the best record in baseball, and it’s not like they’re some 93-win squad who somehow got there by default. They scratched and clawed and fought like hell, and beat out the greatest second-place team of all time. Dodger Stadium should hang up a banner for that one, because it’s something to be proud of.
The Giants took the last three games of the season off in 2018, and 2019, and the bullpen did in 2020. This year, they were the ones who made the Padres look like a AAA squad playing in the big leagues. Now, this is no guarantee of playoff success; the last time the Giants looked good on the last weekend of the regular season was 2016, with Madison Bumgarner, Ty Blach, and Matt Moore all earning wins against the Dodgers to help the Giants avoid a Game 163 with the Cardinals. Let’s focus on that and not what came after.
But it is inspiring and thrilling to see a team play well when they need to play well to clinch their division. There are approximately a hundred million ways that this season is better than the last several. This is just one of them, but oh boy is it a fun one.