Les Dodgers est mort

 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.