The Los Angeles Dodgers had their streak of eight consecutive National League West titles snapped by the San Francisco Giants, who won a franchise-record 107 games to capture their first division championship since 2012.
An epic regular season battle carried over into the playoffs as the longtime rivals met in the NL Division Series. Fittingly, their first ever matchup in the postseason came down to a winner-take-all Game 5 at Oracle Park.
The Giants appeared to be in the driver’s seat for a win as Logan Webb kept the Dodgers scoreless through five innings. They also had a fully rested bullpen at their disposal that included regular season standouts Tyler Rogers and Camilo Doval.
Despite the odds seemingly being against them, the Dodgers edged out a 2-1 victory to advance to the NL Championship Series for a fifth time in the past six seasons.
Giants manager Gabe Kapler was disappointed by the outcome but took solace in the fact that his team had a good game plan going into the contest, via Stephanie Apstein of Sports Illustrated:
“From a strategic standpoint, we really couldn’t have planned it better,” he says. “The game worked out in a way that was quite favorable for us.”
As Kapler noted, the script in Game 5 couldn’t have been more favorable for the Giants. However, the wheels began to fall off when Doval allowed two of the first three baserunners to reach in the ninth inning.
Bellinger then came through with a go-ahead RBI single that wound up being the decisive run. Making the loss even more painful for the Giants was an incorrect check-swing call against Wilmer Flores that ended the game.
Kapler acknowledged the missed call ending his team’s season was “super tough,” but he didn’t pin the loss on that one sequence.
In the six weeks since the disappointing defeat, Kapler was named NL Manager of the Year and signed a two-year contract extension that runs through the end of the 2024 season.
Ruf appreciated irony of check-swing calls defining Dodgers-Giants games
With the Dodgers losing a regular season game against the Giants on a missed check-swing call, Darin Ruf appreciated the irony of the tables turning in the postseason.
“Check-swings are one of the hardest calls we have,” Ruf said after the Game 5 loss. “I don’t have the benefit of multiple camera angles when I’m watching it live. When it happened live I thought he went, so that’s why I called it a swing.”
While disagreeing with the call, the Giants collectively handled the situation with dignity. “At the time I didn’t know,” Ruf said of first base umpire Gabe Morales’ call on the field.
“But obviously we’ve been able to see the replay and it didn’t look like he went, but a check swing earlier in the year helped us out too. So it’s kind of funny how it comes down to those two events. But, yeah, just, yeah.”
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