Major League Baseball

MLB Playoffs 2021: Dodgers even NLDS as Giants' gambles backfire

Published Oct. 10, 2021 3:23 a.m. ET

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – The Dodgers held an optional workout at Oracle Park on Thursday, about 24 after their raucous wild-card win in Los Angeles. It was a blustery night, and several players and coaches stayed away from the field to prepare or rest indoors.

Mookie Betts emerged from the visiting clubhouse, though, to practice fielding hits, quickly turning, and releasing throws from right field. First-base coach Clayton McCullough hit him grounders, and Betts fielded them, rotated, and delivered. He has practiced plays like this for years, much more than most major-leaguers, but he has no plans to stop.

For much of this season, though, a hip injury meant Betts had to limit his physical outlays. He’s healthy enough now to get back to his preferred ways. And his preferred ways so often put him in position to seize on the opposition’s mistakes, as they did in Game 2 of this National League Division Series on Saturday night.

The Dodgers had just surged ahead in the top of the sixth, but the Giants were mounting a rally. They had runners on the corners with two outs when Brandon Crawford ripped a single into right field, scoring the lead runner. Running from first base, Wilmer Flores tried to reach third.

Betts saw what he was doing and started to turn his body before the ball had even nestled into his glove. He secured it and threw on target to Justin Turner at third base. Flores was out. The Giants didn’t threaten again in what became a series-tying 9-2 Dodgers victory.

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As he often does, Betts downplayed the nature of the throw as instinctual, not practiced. He said he didn’t know why he spun the way he did. He also claimed it didn’t excite him to perform such a highlight play. Then he sheepishly corrected himself. "No, that’s a lie," he said. "I do kind of get excited."

So did his Dodgers’ teammates on Saturday, knowing they had maintained control over the game, and, soon, the series.

"The Giants, they take the momentum, and it sort of builds," Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. "So when you can kind of take the wind out of their sail on a play like that, it just resets things."

Flores wished he could press reset on his decision to test Betts. It was not the Giants’ first mistake of the day.

San Francisco manager Gabe Kapler had earlier gifted the Dodgers their two second-inning runs with a perplexing decision to intentionally walk AJ Pollock, until then perhaps the sport’s worst postseason hitter in recent memory.

From the time he signed with the Dodgers until Giants starter Kevin Gausman fell behind on him, 2-0, and Kapler signaled for an intentional walk, Pollock had batted 64 times in the postseason. He hit a woeful .150 in those opportunities, his strikeout rate 33%, his OPS a historically awful .386.

Julio Urías, the man Gausman faced after walking Pollock, had only batted once over those postseasons, but his regular-season hitting during that time was far better: a .211 average and a .472 OPS.

Yes, Urías is a pitcher, and Pollock is a powerful position player who just finished a great regular season. But the eye test said – screamed – that Pollock is not the same hitter in the postseason. So Kapler’s choice defied logic. The Giants paid for it when Urías lined an RBI single into right.

"I think that opportunity pushed me a little bit harder in that spot," Urías said.

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Betts, who followed with another RBI single, compared Urías’ hit to Steph Curry seeing his first 3-pointer of the evening swish through the net.

"We just needed to see one cross the plate," he said.

Kapler offered a reasoned defense of his choice, citing Pollock’s success after 2-0 counts. It’s an age-old question: How do you weigh postseason performance, in significantly smaller samples, against regular-season performance? Kapler voted for the latter, and Pollock might have helped his argument when he notched a double and a single later in the evening, recording the second two-hit postseason game of his Dodgers career.

In Kapler’s mind, the biggest decision he made all game was whether to pinch-hit for Gausman with one out in the bottom of the fifth inning. He was inclined to try for a baserunner with the top of his lineup approaching, but Gausman’s increasing success convinced him otherwise.

That choice failed, too, because Gausman let on two of the three remaining batters he faced, both of whom scored.

In a series between nearly equivalent regular-season teams, with front offices and managers cut from the same cloth, small selections like that could determine the outcome.

There were other reasons the Dodgers won Saturday, sure: They certainly played better, particularly the position players at the bottom of the lineup. Their Nos. 6-8 hitters reached base seven times in Game 2 after failing to reach once in Game 1.

Urías finished five proficient innings. The back end of the bullpen held the line. Betts delivered the perfect, practiced throw. But the Giants enabled their success in ways they avoided all year. They must return to that form to win this series, just as the Dodgers returned to their patient ways to even this series.

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.