A late single by Cody Bellinger was the difference in a hard-fought pitching matchup between 109-win teams.
SAN FRANCISCO — When the chase was finished and the Los Angeles Dodgers had finally caught the San Francisco Giants, when their blue uniforms were drenched with champagne and their frayed nerves were slowly coming back together, Max Scherzer could only shake his head and marvel.
“It’s crazy,” said Scherzer, who collected the first save of his career while holding on to the Dodgers’ 2-1 Game 5 victory. “Since I’ve been here, I get it. These two cities don’t like each other, these two teams don’t like each other and it’s great to be a part of it.
“That’s what makes sports awesome, when you have two fan bases that don’t like each other, the players respect the hell out of each other, play the game right but just want to beat the crap out of each other.”
The Dodgers galloped through more than six months and 24 games against the Giants, all the way to the last strike of an N.L. division series that had been stretched to its limit. And even at that, the debates and bruised feelings will continue for years.
The last strike? With Kris Bryant on first base, two out and the 42,275 fans stuffed into Oracle Park roaring, Giants first baseman Wilmer Flores started to offer at an 87-mile-per-hour slider. He held up, but plate umpire Doug Eddings appealed to first base umpire Gabe Morales and Morales hoisted his fist for strike three.
The Dodgers leapt over their dugout railing. The Giants saw their season end.
San Francisco may have ended the Dodgers’ attempt to win a ninth consecutive N.L. West title this summer, but the Dodgers got their revenge. Next stop for Los Angeles: Atlanta, and Game 1 of the N.L. Championship Series, which is scheduled for Saturday night.
Checked swings are perhaps the most difficult of all the calls an umpire makes. There is no black-and-white rule. Rather, the rule book asks the umpire to decide whether the batter offered at a pitch. In the moment, Morales said yes.
After viewing a replay?
“He doesn’t want to say,” said Ted Barrett, the crew chief who accompanied Morales into the postgame interview room.
Giants Manager Gabe Kapler was gracious, calling it “super tough,” and saying that “you don’t want a game to end that way.” But he also maintained “there’s no need to be angry about that.”
Scherzer, who threw the pitch, said “I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at it. I just knew I needed to execute a slider down in that situation. I got it and just looked down to first base and saw he went. That’s all.”
That Scherzer was closing was a prime example not only of how backward this game was — the Dodgers pushed starter Julio Urias’s workday back to the third inning and opted to begin the game with an opener, reliever Corey Knebel — but also how they needed every single weapon at their disposal to overtake the Giants. And even that nearly wasn’t enough.
“Knowing you have, I guess, an ace in the hole is a good feeling,” Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts said. “I just wanted to try to find the ultimate leverage spot to deploy him.”
The teams traded runs in the sixth, with Mookie Betts cracking a single against Giants starter Logan Webb, stealing second and scoring on Corey Seager’s base hit. Darin Ruf responded by crushing a 452-foot homer in the bottom of the sixth against Urias evening the score at 1-1.
But the Dodgers had reason to believe they could win as the game stretched on.
First, the Giants had gone 0 for 5 with runners in scoring position against Knebel, Brusdar Graterol and Urias over the first four innings, running their streak of futility to 3 for 25 in those situations for the series.
Second, the Dodgers’ core is a deeply battle-tested group that has now won six consecutive elimination games. They fell behind Atlanta, three games to one, in last year’s N.L.C.S. before winning three in a row. Then they beat St. Louis in this year’s N.L. wild-card game. And to finally pass the Giants, they had to win two more potential elimination games.
The knockout punch was delivered by Cody Bellinger, the winner of the 2019 N.L. Most Valuable Player Award, who had fallen on hard times this summer. He had surgery on his right shoulder last November after dislocating it several times, including once while celebrating his N.L.C.S. Game 7 home run against Atlanta by bashing forearms with then-teammate Kiké Hernandez. Then in April, Bellinger suffered a hairline crack in his left fibula.
He ended up hitting .165 this season with a career-worst .542 on-base plus slugging percentage. But against Giants closer Camilo Doval, with two on and one out in the ninth inning, he turned on a 1-2 slider, driving it into right-center field for an R.B.I. single that put the Dodgers ahead to stay.
“Baseball’s tough, man,” Dodgers second baseman Trea Turner said. “You fail so much. You fail almost every day. When you’re hot, you’re hot for a week. Then you go back to failing. I appreciate how hard the game is from a hitting standpoint, from a pitching standpoint. Sometimes I think other people forget that.
“It only takes one swing of the bat to be forgiven, basically.”
Absolution came in the form of hugs, hand slaps and Champagne. Bellinger unleashed a primal scream upon reaching first base while looking into the Dodgers’ dugout. It was the moment when the season-long chase finally turned in their favor.
“I learned a lot from the season,” said Bellinger, 26.
It was only the fifth time that two teams with 100 or more regular season wins played in a winner-take-all postseason game, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. And the team with fewer regular season victories was the winner in three of the previous four games. Now, make that four of five.
“They would not lose at the end,” Scherzer said of the Giants. “We played unbelievable baseball down the end and felt we were going to win the division and they would not lose. That just shows you how great of a team they were. That’s a 107-win team? That’s nuts.”
While the Giants will go home for the winter, the Dodgers will move on. And despite starting Game 3 of this series, and closing Game 5, Scherzer remains on track to start Game 1 of the N.L.C.S. on Saturday, according to Roberts.
“It’s like being a little kid again,” Scherzer said, grinning, of October. “You just pitch whenever you get told. Every single day you have a chance to help the team and you just go out and pitch. It’s a lot like being a 12-year-old again.”
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