Dodgers' Game 4 Win Over Giants Sets Up the Ultimate Winner-Take-All Affair

Never before in MLB history have two teams with as many combined wins as the Dodgers and Giants played one another. It will happen Thursday in Game 5.

LOS ANGELES — All season, the Giants have harbored the suspicion that they are better than the Dodgers. They might have been alone in this opinion: Los Angeles had captured the past eight division titles. It had won more games than any other team in baseball by a wide margin. It employed three former MVPs and three former Cy Young Award winners. (It would add another of each partway through the year.) Meanwhile, San Francisco was coming off a losing season.

But the Giants believed. They believed all the way to a 10–9 head-to-head record against their rivals, to a franchise-record 107 regular-season wins, to a division title nabbed on the last day of the season—and now to a decisive Game 5 of the National League Division Series.

We will find out on Thursday if they were right.

L.A. routed San Francisco 7–2 on Tuesday to give cable executives their dream scenario. “This is what baseball wants,” said manager Dave Roberts. “All the other series are done, so we’re gonna be the only show in town. If you have a pulse or you’re a sports fan, you better be watching Dodgers–Giants.”

Dodgers right fielder Mookie Betts (50) hits a two-run home run during the fourth inning against the Giants in Game 4.

Gary A. Vasquez/USA Today Sports

Both teams will bring 109 victories into the meeting—the Giants those 107 from April through September plus Games 1 and 3 of this series, the Dodgers 106 in the regular season plus the NL wild card game plus Games 2 and 4. Never before in MLB history have two teams with this many wins played each other. It will be a showtime showdown. The only shame is that it won’t come in the NLCS.

These teams share a century and 3,000 miles’ worth of history, but this will be only the third winner-take-all game they’ve played. The Giants took the first two—tiebreakers in 1951 and ’62.

They hoped to wrap this series up on Tuesday, but Dodgers righty Walker Buehler had other ideas. Pitching on three days’ rest for the first time in his career, he scattered three hits and allowed one run over 4⅓ innings. Roberts joked after the game they should send him out on short rest more often. L.A. chased San Francisco starter Anthony DeSclafani after five outs. Six players had two hits, including first baseman Cody Bellinger and centerfielder Gavin Lux, who had both scuffled a bit in this series.

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Next comes Game 5 in San Francisco on Thursday, and with it many questions. The Giants will hand the ball to Game 1 starter Logan Webb, and Game 2 starter Kevin Gausman will be available in relief, but who will join them? Giants manager Gabe Kapler used eight pitchers on Tuesday, including righty Tyler Rogers for the second straight night. Many of them struggled to throw strikes. Worse, the more looks the Dodgers get at relievers, the more lethal their hitters become.

As for Los Angeles, it will have to solve Webb, who flummoxed its lineup over 7⅔ scoreless innings last Friday. After that game, Roberts lit up his hitters in his postgame press conference, saying, “We just didn't make an adjustment all night long. I thought we had the same club all night long and that was a driver.” He blamed “guys at the top and the bottom [of the batting order] that didn’t take good at-bats tonight.” He sounded especially frustrated when he discussed Bellinger, who sometimes seems to swing at anything above his shoelaces but who insisted he has been tweaking his stroke.

“For me it's not even about the swing mechanics right now,” Roberts said before Game 2. “It's about approach and executing a plan and getting him in the zone. If we're going to swing at balls down below, it doesn't matter what kind of mechanics you have.”

The Dodgers scored nine runs that night, but afterward they could not identify any real changes they had made, and they were shut out in Game 3. They jumped on a San Francisco staff that could not command the ball on Tuesday, but they will likely not get that kind of help from Webb.

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Both sides know what to expect. This will be the 24th meeting between these two clubs this year. The Giants’ president of baseball operations, Farhan Zaidi, and manager, Kapler, both studied under Dodgers president Andrew Friedman. No two teams are more familiar with one another.

“I think we think alike,” said Roberts. “We know each other’s playbook. So now we just go to old-school, ‘We’re going to run the ball to the right and you’re going to have to stop us.’ It’s the Vince Lombardi [method]. We’re gonna play. We know what we do, they know what we do. We know who they want to have the baseball in Game 5. They know the matchup we’re trying to get. So now we just have to go out there and execute, and the best team wins.”

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