The Dodgers won 106 games this year.
The Dodgers won 106 games this year, fighting through injury after injury after Trevor Bauer incident that will not be examined in detail after injury. They have a former MVP who hasn’t looked right all year, and multiple starters on the IL with season-ending injuries who would be legitimate aces on most teams in the league.
Like, do you remember how good Dustin May is? He’s really good, and he’s been out for almost the whole year. Then you add in Kershaw, and Danny Duffy, and Caleb Ferguson, and, well, we could list all the injured Dodgers but we’d be here all day.
This is not to say that the Giants didn’t deserve to win the division or that they haven’t battled through their share of injuries — oh boy, have they ever — but the Dodgers have an incredible team. It is stupid how incredible their team is. Before the season, I would have advocated breaking them up like Standard Oil because they had a monopoly on all the good players.
Not too late, MLB. Do the right thing here.
So there was no way that this series would be anything other than a grind-it-out tensionfest. There had to be a game like last night’s, where every pitch could swing the game, where every inning seems like the one where the Giants are going to give up the lead, where they spend inning after inning looking helpless at the plate and leaving you hoping that somehow, some way, the bullpen can find a way to shut down an absolute monster of a lineup.
No objective baseball observer would expect Alex Wood to outduel Max Scherzer, and yet the Giants won. No one would think that Evan Longoria, riding a 3-for-700 in the last month, would crush a homer through what must be the strongest wind the Giants have faced all year. And it was absolutely pure chance that of all the balls that could have been homers last night — one from Crawford, one from Yastrzemski, one from Chris Taylor, and especially one from Gavin Lux — it was only Longoria’s that was able to cut through the wind. This could have been different. It all could have been different.
But it wasn’t. That’s what makes baseball fun. The Giants got three hits all night, none after the fifth inning, and still won. Their pitchers — Wood, Tyler Rogers, Jake McGee, and Camilo Doval — went out there and threw up zero after zero, with some help from the wind and a ton of help from their defense. Steven Duggar ran down balls in center field that a lot of center fielders would not have been able to get to, and Donnie Barrels made a diving stop to start the 7th, and Brandon Crawford timed his leap perfectly to keep the game tied at the end of the 7th.
Also, the strike zone was trash. Absolute fucking trash. Max Scherzer was getting balls 5 inches off the plate called for strikes, and I assure you that Max Scherzer is unhittable enough throwing to a rulebook strike zone. I mean, look at this shit:
All that just added to the appeal of this game, though. It made it that much more satisfying. Because it was hard to win. It was supposed to be hard, because the Dodgers won 106 games. They were the best second place team in baseball history. They tied their franchise record for wins in a season, and this is a franchise that has played an awful lot of seasons. The Dodgers and Giants played a close, tense, tough baseball game. The outcome was in doubt until the final pitch, which on most other nights would have ended up in the stands, tying the game.
This is what you play for. This is what you want. When you play 162 games, you do it with the hope that you’ll get to this place and play these kinds of games. The Giants were the best team in baseball this year, and are now one win away from the NLCS, playing against the second best team in baseball this year. They’re earning every bit of it. Now they have to win one more, and that’s going to be hard too.