Other than Wild Card Games, the 2016 National League version in particular [1], I don’t recall watching a postseason showdown and thinking it absolutely needed to continue beyond its agreed upon parameters. But I have now.
The Dodgers just defeated the Giants in five, but five wasn’t enough. It was the Dodgers in too soon. This National League Division Series needed to be allowed to go seven games, perhaps nine. Perhaps nineteen. It also needed to be allowed to complete its fifth and deciding contest instead of having an umpire end it at least one pitch prior to its organic conclusion. I’m not saying this as a Giants sympathizer or a Dodgers disdainer. I’m saying it as a baseball fan.
I’m not sure what you do about the Giants and Dodgers being done head-to-head before we get to seven-game territory. The two fiercest rivals in baseball history made the mistake of being the two best teams in baseball this year while combating one another in the same division. The one that didn’t win the NL West won a Wild Card and then a Wild Card Game. The team with the best record in a given league automatically plays the Wild Card winner. That’s how you get the 107-55 Giants squaring off against the 106-56 Dodgers in what amounted to the sport’s quarterfinal.
Reseed? You could do that, in which case L.A. would have played Milwaukee, and San Fran would have taken on Atlanta, and then, had form held, you’d have the Giants and Dodger for the pennant. Except would have form held? Form didn’t hold in the other NLDS, where 88-win Atlanta subdued 95-win Milwaukee. Form didn’t hold in one of the ALDSes, where the AL East champion Rays (100-62) fell to the Wild Card Red Sox (92-70). The first rule of postseason is you never know, and that’s for the series and games that are actually played. The second rule of postseason is you can only imagine, but you do so at your own risk.
Unless you haven’t wondered once or twice what would happen had Carlos Beltran swung [2].
It never occurred to me that reseeding was necessary in baseball. It doesn’t now occur to me it’s necessary, unless it’s narrowly defined. Should a league’s Wild Card a) complete its regular season with more than 105 wins and b) maintain with its division’s champion a historic rivalry that dates back a century or longer…
Discerning a path to facilitate the behemoth Dodgers and the powerhouse Giants playing for as many marbles as is conceivable is a noble goal. But the slight chance that you’ll get this scenario again probably doesn’t merit overhauling an otherwise decently designed system. Five-game LDSes are generally a substantial enough appetizer to seven-game LCSes. Wild Cards aren’t division winners, with all that implies about the value of the 162-game season. The 2015 Mets (90-72) maintained home field advantage over the 2015 Cubs (97-65) because the Mets won their division and the Cubs didn’t. We would have treasured a hypothetical seventh game taking place at Citi Field rather than Wrigley Field.
Of course the Mets of six Octobers ago swept the Cubs for the National League championship and I don’t remember thinking four games wasn’t the perfect length.
Before leagues were cleaved into divisions, you didn’t have postseasons. The National League did wind up in a couple of noteworthy ties in 1951 and 1962, you have may been reminded recently, and that brought the Giants and Dodgers into bonus conflict, with three-game tiebreakers to determine pennants. Each of those emergency series went three, each went to the wire, and each went to the Giants on the Third of October. In the era of two divisions per league, when East champs faced West champs, you couldn’t have a Dodger-Giant postseason series, seeing as how each rival sat in the same division. This period, 1969 through 1993, also coincided with me, born not long after October 3, 1962, growing up and growing ever more fascinated by the collision of October 3, 1951. I didn’t dream of a Giant-Dodger postseason meetup because the mechanism didn’t exist.
Then came realignment, three divisions, a Wild Card, and possibility. Yet the Dodgers and Giants, who’d intermittently battle it out for the NL West crown, didn’t land in the same postseason until 2014 and then again in (grrr) 2016. Yet they missed each other each time, one or the other succumbing in an LDS against somebody who wasn’t their ancient foe, leaving us close-but-cigarless to a best-of-seven LCS. When we got to 2021 and a five-game series pitting this year’s New York-rooted National League West titleholder versus the Brooklyn-born victor from this year’s National League Wild Card Game — where they overcame the disgustingly not to mention bafflingly extant Wainwright/Molina combo — I didn’t think five games was better than nothing. I thought these five games would be better than anything (well, any Met thing).
[3]October 3, 2021: The author takes a quick jaunt uptown to pay homage to some orange-tinged roots.
And it was, even if it came up two games shy of a best-of-seven, even if the side where my affinity is planted won only two games of five. Because my immersion in New York Baseball Giants culture is deep and because I was a gleeful October tourist for the San Francisco Giants’ ride to World Series glory three times in the 2010s, I thought I’d take a five-game loss to the Dodgers to heart. But SF-LA, it turns out, was less my affair than my sidepiece. I was into it because of what it represented to baseball. These two teams co-existed fiercely in the same league and city for generations; pulled up stakes (eternal BOO!! on both of them for that); relocated to polar-opposite towns in the same state on the other end of the country; feuded across millennia as divisionmates; and finally wound up in a regularly scheduled playoff round.
How could you not want that go the limit? How could you not want the limit to be unlimited? Games One and Three were exquisite manifestations of 2021 Giant execution, with shades of what made San Fran so magical in 2010, 2012 and 2014. Logan Webb pitched like he could’ve lined up among Bumgarner, Lincecum and Cain. Buster Posey busted out his opposite-field whooping stick. Brandon Crawford leapt as if the second coming of Buddy Harrelson in the Channel 9 opening montage of yore [4]. They were spine-tingling in their excellence. Meanwhile, Games Two and Four attested to the enormity of L.A.’s winning ways and how they’d practically perfected the methodology that had brought them eight consecutive division flags, three recent pennants and last year’s world championship. They are as fully loaded and decadent as really awesome potato skins. The Giants posted their victories by scores of 4-0 and 1-0. The Dodgers took theirs by tallies of 9-2 and 7-2. After four games of the NLDS, counting everything the two teams had done that counted, this was where they stood:
SF 109-57
LA 109-58
You wanted a fifth game. Then a sixth and seventh game. And then, if they didn’t mind, Games Eight through Infinity, at least until it was time for the mere mortals to gather for Pitchers & Catchers.
But we settled for a fifth game, in San Francisco, and, yes, what a fifth game it was. The Dodgers threw an opener and a bridge guy in advance of unleashing their 20-game winner as bulksman. The Giants stuck with the fella who pitched them to a series lead in the first game. Everybody’s pitching strategy was essentially sound through five, as nobody within the cohort of Corey Knebel, Brusdar Gaterol, Jose Urias and Logan Webb gave up a run. The Dodgers’ intrinsic Dodgerness broke through in the top of the sixth. Mookie Betts — whose absence from the Red Sox hasn’t prevented them from advancing to the ALCS, but, even still, who lets go of Betts? — singled. It looked like it might be a double, but Mookie was cautious. Besides, why risk getting thrown at second when you can steal it on the next pitch? With Betts on second, Corey Seager, last year’s World Series MVP (almost every Dodger has a major award in his past), doubled him home. The tie was broken. The ice was broken. The plot was thick.
To this do-or-die stew, add the unlikely thickening agent of Darin Ruf. Darin Ruf is a name familiar to Mets fans mostly from conflation with Cameron Rupp on the mid-2010s Phillies. Needless to say, Ruf wasn’t appearing in any postseason action for Philadelphia as the last decade wore on. Ruf left the City of Brotherly Love and its perennial futility to improve his game in Korea. He slugged 96 home runs for the Samsung Lions over three seasons in pre-pandemic KBO, when nobody in the US was tuning in. He returned to the States in 2020, to a Giants team there was little reason to notice. In 2021, for a ballclub that won nearly two-thirds of its games, Ruf played 117 times, put up an OPS+ of 143 and, in the sixth inning of the deciding game of a League Division Series versus the Dodgers, swatted a three-two pitch from Urias 452 feet, beyond Oracle Park’s center field wall.
Three innings of regulation remained, which set in as a damn shame. Webb’s final frame of pitching kept it 1-1. Blake Treinen’s entry in the bottom of the seventh did the same. A Dodger threat off Tyler Rogers in the top of the eighth — two singles sandwiched inside two outs — was snuffed by nasty if previously unheralded San Fran closer Camilo Doval. “Nasty if previously unheralded” pretty much describes the 2021 Giants in toto. Los Angeles closer since forever Kenley Jansen took care of business in order in the bottom of the eighth.
In the ninth inning, the Dodgers got to Doval. One Dodger in particular got to the getting — Justin Turner. Naturally Justin Turner. With Clayton Kershaw sidelined, Justin Turner is the longest-running, non-bullpen postseason constant of the L.A. would-be dynasty. They’ve definitely been dynastic in the West since 2013. Turner arrived at Chavez Ravine in 2014. We’re vaguely aware of where he played the handful of seasons before he emerged as a key cog, then a star for that divisional dynamo. Every autumn, the leaves turn colors and Justin Turner appears on TV. That, along with flaming red hair that seems to get redder with age, is probably why we can never quite forget our erstwhile benchwarmer.
Justin Turner you noticed in Game Five because he managed to get himself hit by Camilo Doval pitch with one out in the ninth. Didn’t you just know he’d come around to score in a matter of batters? You remember Justin Turner Met Utilityman becoming Justin Turner Dodger Constant, so that’s a rhetorical question. It would fall to Cody Bellinger to drive Justin in, from second after a Gavin Lux single had moved Turner up a base. Cody Bellinger this season batted .165. Cody Bellinger was the 2017 National League Rookie of the Year and 2019 National League Most Valuable Player. All these decorated Dodgers inevitably live up to their trophies.
We for whom the orange and blue DNA runs more to orange didn’t think it could end this way. Somewhere in that home dugout had to be a Bobby Thomson. A break had to go the Giants’ way to set up something that would swipe that 2-1 L.A. lead right back, something that would push at least one run across and keep the NLDS matchup of a lifetime alive. Sure enough, with one out, it was Justin Turner getting involved again. This time, it was ex-Met Justin Turner bobbling a grounder from Kris Bryant, the E-5 placing a runner on first. LaMonte Wade, Jr., stepped up to pinch-hit. Wade is known as Late Night LaMonte, and not from hosting an 11:30 PM talk show. LaMonte Wade, Jr., if you hadn’t been devoting yourself to Giant doings all year (and I surely wasn’t) is a ninth-inning savant. In 24 ninth-inning plate appearances in 2021, Wade batted a typographically correct .565. Of course you’d invest faith in Late Night LaMonte, no matter who the Dodgers had pitching.
Except did we mention the Dodgers had Max Scherzer pitching? Max Scherzer’s résumé not only speaks for itself, but it just keeps talking. He was a starter moonlighting as a do-or-die closer, but Max Scherzer wasn’t going to be easy to fit with goat horns in the classic style of Ralph Branca (himself, à la Julio Urias, a onetime 20-game winner for the Dodgers). Max is not an easily scalable mountain in any season — even in his fourteenth — in any inning — even in Wade’s.
LaMonte took Scherzer deep but foul in the course of his at-bat, but ultimately got rung up on strikes. With two out, then, the Giants’ season came to rest on the shoulders of Wilmer Flores.
Naturally Wilmer Flores. You want to chat ninth-inning avatars, you have to invoke the player who conjured walkoff RBIs as a Met ten separate times. Four were in the ninth inning. Six came in extras. If you were rooting for Wilmer — and who among us, regardless of temporary alignment, wasn’t? — you knew the moment was holding out its fist for a bump from the man for whom it was made. Alas, you also probably learned, as Wilmer readied to transport his Met magic to another sphere, that Flores had never done a darn thing against Scherzer. He was 0-for-17 lifetime. This, though, loomed as the time of Wilmer’s life. This was Tears of Joy Redux incubating. Different context, momentous vibes. This was a shot waiting to be heard, seen and consumed around the world.
Or waiting just to keep the ninth inning going. To get on base. To get it to Evan Longoria. Something, Wilmer. Anything. Eighteenth time’s the charm…maybe.
Wilmer takes a slider for strike one. He fouls off a fastball for strike two. Max Scherzer, he of the three Cy Youngs as a Tiger and National and spotless record down the stretch as a Dodger, delivers another slider. It’s low. it’s away. It’s clearly off the plate. Flores begins to swing but checks before he goes around.
This is what has happened. It is not, however, what is seen by home plate umpire Doug Eddings, who isn’t certain enough to call ball one, so, at catcher Will Smith’s behest, Eddings confers on appeal, from ninety or so feet away, with first base umpire Gabe Morales.
Morales raises his right fist to indicate strike three, game over, series over [5]. A dog raising his leg would have had the same effect on the resolution of this NLDS.
Game Five ended on about as bad a judgment call as you would have refused to imagine. Flores should have still been up, one-and-two, Bryant still the runner on first, Longoria on deck. Who knows what would have happened had the combined judgment of Eddings and Morales hewed to reality? It’s quite possible our beloved Wilmer Flores — who struck out looking to complete with a whimper [6] the 2015 World Series (we were behind by five runs to the Royals, so it’s not as iconic as Beltran looking in 2006) — might have gone down on strikes one pitch later. Or it’s possible, because he had a bat in his hands and he’s Wilmer Flores, that he finally connects safely off Max Scherzer.
We’ll never know, which is too bad. We should have found out, which makes it worse. Highly questionable calls can be a part of the most compelling of games, which is the worst. Don Denkinger. Jim Joyce. Gabe Morales. It’s not a roster an umpire wants to join.
The Giants take their 107 wins home without a single postseason round captured. The Dodgers fly to Georgia to continue on as overqualified Wild Card versus the Eastern Davison flagbearer Braves in the NLCS. Somehow, two tiers of playoffs remain. Somehow, the Dodgers and Giants settled only the championship of each other. If five games in their private cauldron drained the Dodgers of energy and purpose, the Braves might yet take the pennant. For now, though, the Braves seem immaterial in the wake of Giants-Dodgers — and Scrappy Wild Card Los Angeles Fights On Toward World Series Berth doesn’t seem like a viable narrative.
The 2021 Dodgers endure. The 2021 Giants expire. It is not an illegitimate outcome. Sudden death just came a beat too soon was all.