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by Cary Osborne
This isn’t just a historic first postseason series of rivals for more than a century and a meeting of titans who went beyond the century mark in wins in the regular season. The National League Division Series is a matchup of the two best pitching staffs in baseball.
And thus far, the Giants are winning the series by a hair with their pitching.
The Dodgers, after losing 1–0 to the Giants on an unusual blustery Los Angeles evening on Monday in Game 3 of the NLDS have now been shut out twice in this series.
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The Dodgers beat the Giants nine times in the regular season. In all of the nine wins they scored first in the game and put at least one run on the scoreboard by the third inning.
“It’s important (to score first), but I don’t want to say it’s everything because if it doesn’t happen then you still got to find a way to win,” said manager Dave Roberts. “But certainly I think that just the numbers speak to any team that gets a lead early, it increases your chance of winning the ballgame. So tomorrow whoever we run out there (on the mound), we got to put up a zero and try to score early.”
The Dodgers were 79–20 in the regular season when they scored first.
They scored first in Game 2 with two runs in the second inning, setting the pace for a 9–2 victory.
Though they were shut out in Game 3, it wasn’t the same story with the offense as the 4–0 loss in Game 1 when the Dodgers chased pitches out of the strike zone, struck out in bunches and didn’t draw a walk.
In Game 3, the Dodgers had multiple opponents — the Giants’ pitching, the Giants’ defense and an unrelenting wind that knocked down two potential home runs.
The toughest pill to swallow was with two outs in the ninth inning, Gavin Lux struck a 99-mph pitch from Giants reliever Camilo Doval harder, with an exit velocity of 106.9 mph. After making contact, Lux stuck his right arm out as if to begin a celebration for a score-tying home run. But the wind pushed it back in left-center field, so much that center fielder Steven Duggar stumbled on the warning track and recovered to catch the baseball about 10 feet from the wall.
Chris Taylor hit a ball with a 107 mph exit velocity in the sixth inning off reliever Tyler Rogers that Duggar chased down at the warning track. Taylor’s ball had a .920 expected batting average and Lux’s was .890.
“Those two balls right there it would have been a different outcome,” Roberts said. “But those are the elements that both teams had to play with, and that’s baseball.”
In the seventh inning, Mookie Betts smoked a Jake McGee pitch with two outs and runners on second and third base that shortstop Brandon Crawford leaped for and plucked out of the air. That one had an .870 expected batting average.
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But the Dodgers were 2-for-15 against Giants starter Alex Wood and both were singles from Albert Pujols. And the Giants threw out an array of pitchers with different looks and different pitch characteristics — first with Wood’s funky delivery and sinker/slider combo, then the funkier Tyler Rogers and his low-velocity fastball, next to Jake McGee and his rising fastball, then to high-velocity Doval.
Max Scherzer was excellent for the Dodgers. After taking a couple of innings to find his command, he ended up going seven innings, striking out 10 batters, walking one and allowing three hits. One left the yard — an Evan Longoria solo home run in the top of the fifth inning.
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Dodger starting pitchers have allowed five total runs through the three games in this series. Dodger pitchers have allowed seven runs, and thanks to a 9–2 win in Game 2 have outscored the Giants 9–7 in the series.
But in innings one through five, the Giants have outscored the Dodgers 4–2, getting the early jump.
The Dodgers will see Anthony DeSclafani, who will start for the Giants in Game 4. They faced him six times in the regular season and were 3–3 in games he pitched. In the three wins, the Dodgers scored four runs through the third inning on July 28, three runs through four innings on June 28 and 10 runs through the third inning on May 23.
Dodgers can’t capture early momentum against Giants was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.