Noticeably absent
What should we think about a World Series without Giants or Dodgers?
Because everyone in and around Giants World probably believes that their team should be playing in the World Series. They were the best team in the regular season. Instead, Atlanta, the team with the worst record to make the postseason, will represent the National League in the Fall Classic.
Would the Giants have beaten the Braves, had they faced them in the NL Championship Series? Given the Giants’ home-field advantage, it certainly seems like a good possibility.
Instead, due to their dramatic loss in Game 5 of the Division Series to Los Angeles, the Giants stayed home and watched the Dodgers limp through the NLCS, finally succumbing in Atlanta.
Because Giants fans — and also much of their front office — hate the Dodgers so much, many were thrilled to see the Dodgers stumble and bumble and lose.
The hatred of the Dodgers runs antithesis to the notion that you should want the team that beats you to win the championship because that means you were beaten by the best.
On paper, the Dodgers were the best team in the regular season. On the field, the Giants were the best team in the regular season. Neither will play in the World Series, due to Major League Baseball’s postseason format that forced the two best teams into a five-game divisional series instead of allowing them to meet in the championship series showcase.
Might the format be adjusted? Maybe. Rule changes and adaptations in sports are usually born of frustrating situations like the one we just witnessed, leaving the two best teams dueling in an early round series. But such a change will probably be a low priority in an offseason when a baseball work stoppage looms.
There’s also the possibility that, had they advanced, the Giants would have looked very much like the Dodgers: exhausted from their season-long battle with their archrivals that went down to the very last out.
“I don’t want to discredit the Braves by saying they’re facing a gassed team,” Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi said last week, after the Dodgers dropped the first two games to Atlanta.
But he noted that the Dodgers put everything they could into beating the Giants, including using ace Max Scherzer to close it out. And the Giants were also willing to do whatever was needed, using starter Kevin Gausman in relief in Game 5.
“They put a little more skin in that last game,” Zaidi said of the Dodgers. “And we wouldn’t have been in our freshest state, certainly, going into the NLCS.”
The intensity of the fight between the two teams was draining. A battle of worthy opponents. Anything afterward was going to be anticlimactic.
The strength of the Dodgers’ $260 million roster was their starting pitching. Yet, the front office overthought itself and, in doing so, neutralized that great weapon.
Using Scherzer to close — for the first time in his career — in the final division series game wrecked him for the championship series. The Dodgers toyed with 20game winner Julio Urías, not allowing him to start Game 5 against the Giants, forcing him into high-stress relief innings in Game 2 of the NLCS and then asking him, finally, to start Game 4. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t at his best. Then, in must-win Game 6, the Dodgers asked postseason stud Walker Buehler to pitch on short rest, for the second time in this postseason.
It all blew up in their faces, so much so that Los Angeles Times columnist Dylan Hernandez added Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman to a short list of postseason goats that includes the Red Sox’ Bill Buckner and Cubs fan Steve Bartman.
“The Dodgers were finished once Andrew Friedman and the geniuses in the front office decided the postseason was the right time to experiment,” Hernandez wrote.
Most observers would have made the Dodgers the favorite to win it all, based on