Les Dodgers est mort
Let me begin by saying that, as a boy, I grew up loving the
Dodgers even though I was raised in Northern California. This was the late 1960’s and the ‘70s, and I
preferred the Dodgers’ emphasis on pitching, defense, and speed over the Giants
emphasis on power. And for most of my
life the Dodgers have been the more successful franchise, at least until the
Giants turned their trifecta of championships in the 2010s.
But at some point, I realized that I was, as Jerry Seinfeld
said, rooting for laundry. The
ideological differences between the teams eventually disappeared as players and
management came and went. Recently, I’ve
come to look on the Dodgers as the West Coast Yankees, overdogs who win because
they have more money and then demand to be praised because they are so smart
and so determined.
My existential crisis came to a head this season as the
plucky SF Giants unexpectedly took the lead in the National League West despite
having a payroll seemingly 1% of the Dodgers.
Not that the Dodgers gave up; when they were in second place at the
trade deadline, they simply picked up Max Scherzer and Trey Turner, a future
Hall of Famer and an All-Star. Surely
that would enable them to win another division title.
But it wasn’t enough, and the 106-win Dodgers had to settle
for the Wild Card behind the 107-win Giants (the over/under on Giant wins at
the start of the season had been 75).
Beating the Cardinals in a one-game play-in game, the Dodgers and Giants
then had their first post-season meeting ever.
On the day of the first game, 5 of the 6 people I saw on ESPN said the
Dodgers would obviously win, because they had better hitting and better
pitching. Of course, if they had better
hitting and pitching, then why did the Giants win the division and the season
series with the Dodgers? As Geoffrey
Rush’s character said in Shakespeare In Love, “It’s a mystery.”
The Dodgers did win the series but had to eke out winning
two elimination games, the last one by one run thanks in part to a bad third
strike call. Now all the Dodgers had to do to get to the World Series was crush
the Atlanta Braves, who won 18 fewer regular season games. No problem.
Then the wheels came off.
The Dodgers had already lost Cy Young winner Trevor Bauer to the world’s
longest domestic violence investigation, then they lost Cy Young winner Clayton
Kershaw to injury, then in Game 6 they lost Max Scherzer to a dead arm. They
had lost Max Muncy before the post-season, then lost Trey Turner and Justin
Turner to injury. The Dodgers, whose
roster had been so overstocked that they had All-Stars coming off the bench
most games, ran out Walker Buehler on short rest because of a depleted starting
rotation and lost game 6 of the NLCS to a Braves team that won 18 fewer games
in the regular season.
Were the Braves the best team in the National League? Probably not.
Both the Giants and the Dodgers were clearly superior, but since MLB insisted
on a post-season format that had the two best teams play each other in the
first round the result was like the two fighting fish Blofeld owned in From
Russia With Love who exhausted each other, allowing the weaker but smarter fish
that stayed out of the fight to then kill the victor. Some would argue that the Brewers were a
better team and were undone by key relief pitcher and 2020 Rookie of the Year Devin
Williams stupidly breaking his hand while celebrating them winning their
division.
So, we have a World Series featuring a team with a racist
logo and name against a team that recently won a World Series by admittedly cheating. Not a great combo. It’s too bad MLB just couldn’t slip to a
Dodgers-Giants World Series, convention be damned.
