Major League Baseball

Dodgers eclipse Giants via clutch moments from Dave Roberts, Max Scherzer and Cody Bellinger

Updated Oct. 15, 2021 5:30 p.m. ET

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — At 9:59 p.m. Thursday, Max Scherzer emerged from the Dodgers’ dugout with goggles on his head and a Budweiser in his hand. Hundreds of lingering Dodgers fans at Oracle Park began to serenade him with MVP chants, but he paid them no mind. He had eyes only for his wife and kids.

Thirty-five minutes earlier, the bullpen door had opened for him, and he had sprinted through it. He wasn’t far behind the Giants’ outfielders, retreating to their dugout after surrendering the lead in the top of the ninth inning. It was Scherzer’s job to send them home for the winter. He anticipated being unable to think amid the deafening sound of the crowd, and he wanted to get ahead.

Working quickly, Scherzer traversed a Justin Turner error to amass two outs. After two quick strikes on Wilmer Flores, Scherzer fired a slider below the zone and a bit outside. Flores started to swing, then stopped, easily in time. Catcher Will Smith appealed to first-base umpire Gabe Morales, who raised his right arm to signal, inexplicably, a strike.

Looking at him, Scherzer unleashed a guttural yell and a ferocious fist pump. His teammates rushed to him from their dugout, and he grabbed them all, still screaming in joy. Nobody, certainly not Scherzer, stopped for a millisecond to rethink the call the Giants and their fans will be ruing for years.

"As soon as we looked down and saw him put his hand up," the Dodgers’ Gavin Lux said, "everybody hopped over the fence, and you know — start the party."

The reigning champion Dodgers had, finally, vanquished the Giants 2-1 in Game 5 of the NLDS. It took only six-and-a-half months, a few tricks, four hits from Mookie Betts and a game-winner from Cody Bellinger, the team's worst hitter all year. As it turned out, it was all a prologue to Thursday night by the Bay.

The stage was set. In the minutes after the Dodgers evened the series Tuesday at Dodger Stadium, their manager, Dave Roberts, performed a pump fake. He said the Dodgers and Giants thought so similarly that they knew each other’s playbooks front to back.

"Now it just goes to old-school: We’re going to run the ball to the right, and you’re going to have to stop us," he said. "It’s the Vince Lombardi."

He promised Lombardi’s power sweep. In a Wednesday evening text message to Giants manager Gabe Kapler, he revealed the Air Coryell. The Dodgers would not start their announced Game 5 starter, left-hander Julio Urías, but an opener: right-handed reliever Corey Knebel. This would force the Giants to guess when Urías would enter and reconfigure their lineup accordingly.

The surprise, revealed to the public Thursday morning, was provocative; it got the people going. Roberts fielded several questions in the afternoon about whether Urías could handle the routine change, a ridiculous premise considering his postseason success in multiple roles just last year. Perhaps no elite starting pitcher in the sport is more accustomed to pitching in relief, especially in October.

For all its inevitable rousing, the decision was really designed to do one wildly unsexy thing: bump the odds on a couple late-game matchups slightly in the Dodgers’ favor. It succeeded. As Roberts said Thursday, the Giants were the best in baseball all year at obtaining the most favorable matchups for their players. LaMonte Wade Jr. hits right-handers far better than left-handers; the Giants found ways to bat him an astounding 89% of the time against right-handers. Austin Slater hits left-handers far better than right-handers; the Giants batted him 63% of the time against left-handers.

Ultimately, the maneuver meant the Giants pulled two platoon players — Mike Yastrzemski and Tommy La Stella — in the third and fourth innings. Had Urias started, both likely would have begun on the bench and entered whenever his day was done. Their early exits then meant that righty Donovan Solano, not La Stella, a lefty, batted against Kenley Jansen in the eighth, and it meant the Giants had to pinch-hit Alex Dickerson — not, say, Yastrzemski — against Blake Treinen in the seventh.

If that all sounds like a lot of work for a little edge, that’s because it is. But that’s how close this series was. The Dodgers determined that it was worth the certain criticism they’d receive if it failed. Worth the risk of disrupting their starter’s routine, to seek out that minuscule edge. And, well, it probably was.

"Our openers worked," Scherzer said. "Everybody kind of doubted it, and it worked."

For the closer, Roberts kept another, more predictable, ploy up his sleeve. He repeatedly downplayed the possibility that the Dodgers would use Scherzer in relief after his Game 3 start, but the Dodgers built him into their pitching plan. Roberts said Scherzer lobbied for inclusion; Scherzer said he did not. It was far from an obvious choice. The Dodgers could have pushed Jansen or Treinen further than an inning, and Scherzer had appeared in only one other sudden-death game on two days of rest: Game 5 of the 2017 NLDS. That went terribly. The Dodgers bet on a reversal.

They instructed him to be ready to appear after Jansen, late in the game. He went to the bullpen in the fourth inning. There he stood for the next two hours until pitching coach Mark Prior called in the eighth. Scherzer paced as the Dodgers finished their top of the ninth and ran in the very moment the rules allowed.

"You gotta want to be in that situation," he said.

Ten minutes later, the Dodgers were on to the next round. The ending was anticlimactic, but in terms of sustained suspense, Thursday’s series finale — and this series overall — very likely won’t be topped this month. It might not be until these teams meet again in October 2022 or 2023 or both.

Both teams are set up to continue contending. Both teams will push each other to improve in the offseason. Sensing the pressure, these teams made the biggest additions at July’s trade deadline: Scherzer, Trea Turner and Kris Bryant. They played through Game 162 to decide the division. And now their season series ends at 12 wins apiece, with the Dodgers going on and the Giants going home.

Thursday marked the end only because the rules required it. If the series were a best-of-seven, do you doubt that the Giants would win Friday and force a seventh game? But this had to end Thursday night, or maybe early Friday morning. It’s fitting, then, that in one of the tightest season series this sport has ever seen, the teams necessitated the outside interference of a mistaken call to end it.

Had Morales made the right choice, Scherzer probably would have obtained the necessary out. Flores hasn’t exactly had success against him in his career. But maybe not. Maybe we would still be watching the Dodgers and Giants sort this out.

There are no maybes anymore. The Giants are going their separate ways for the offseason. The Dodgers are drinking into the night and flying to Georgia to fight for their fourth World Series bid in five years.

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.