Tonight kicks off the first of seven matchups this month between the Giants and their archrivals, and for the first time since 2021, these games are quite meaningful. They are also setup to be the most annoying games of the season. I know, I know, this is supposed to be an exciting moment because the Giants will be playing meaningful games against the Dodgers in the season’s final month. But I encourage you all to join me in being annoyed because, well, this series (and next week’s four-game set in LA)
is already giving me a headache.
First things first: the Giants cannot sweep their way into the NL West crown. They trail the Dodgers by 8 games with 7 left in the head-to-head. Had the Giants won The Ryan Walker Meltdown in St. Louis game, it’d be a different story, but here we are. Even if the Giants had won that game, the likelihood of a 7-game sweep against the Dodgers would be hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighly unlikely, not only because the Dodgers have been 100,000,000 times better than the Giants for most of the last 10 years but because these 2025 Dodgers are basically back at full strength.
I have a headache because Max Muncy (lifetime .260/.365/.573 against the Giants and .274/.390.568 at Oracle Park) has returned after missing nearly a month. He went 0-for-7 with a walk against the Rockies in his first two games and I have a headache thinking about him shaking off the cobwebs against Giants pitching. 32-year old no doubt Hall of Famer Mookie Betts was slugging below .400 for most of the season thanks to age-related decline and being distracted by family issues — he wasn’t an All-Star for the first time since 2015 — but in his last 69 plate appearances (16 games), he’s returned to form, slashing .381/.435/.714 with 5 homers, 4 doubles, 1 triple and 6 walks against just 4 strikeouts. Blake Snell has missed a decent chunk of the season as has Sunday’s starter Tyler Glasnow (missed all of May and June), but both are back and shoving. Clayton Kershaw is 9-2 in 78.1 IP with a 2.99 ERA (3.32 FIP) since writing a Bible verse on his hat during the Dodgers’ Pride Night as a way of taking back the rainbow.
The Dodgers’ casual indifference to the regular season thanks to league incentives combined with their overwhelming All-Star talent makes this possible, where they can basically press pause on a lot of player’s seasons without hurting the team too much. They went 10-14 in July! They’re just 61-54 since their 21-10 start. They’re not the top of the mountain in terms of wins and losses, but they’re returning to full strength just in time for a postseason run — which was their plan all along! It should not have been this easy for them to assemble a group of high upside, high injury risk players and manage the roster to the point that it turned around at the end as intended. The Dodgers flirted with two no-hitters this past week in an MLB season where there has to be a no-hitter. The two pitchers who started those games for LA will face the Giants this weekend.
I have a headache because the Giants need every molecule of their far inferior roster to scratch and claw to have a chance at maybe putting a scare into a team or two ahead of them in the standings. The Dodgers don’t need these wins and that looseness will make it easier for them to access their talent, putting down any Giants rallies or flummoxing pitch sequencing or pitching changes in leverage spots.
Because this rivalry has been dead since 2021. It died on Wilmer Flores’s check swing. For one brief season it was resuscitated and gave us hope that maybe the Giants could keep up with this arms race — but today? If Andrew Friedman woke up tomorrow with Buster Posey’s organization he would leave baseball. There is simply no comparison between these two franchises and there hasn’t been for some time. All of the fun in this rivalry has come from the Giants being David to the Dodgers’ Goliath, but Goliath has spent the last few years annihilating David’s village and bloodline. If the Dodgers lose this series, it’ll be because they were spooked by a ghost.
In June, I looked at the dire history this matchup has been trending towards. The Giants have never trailed in the lifetime series against the Dodgers, which currently stands at 1,286-1,283-17 in the regular season (1,294-1,289-17 including the postseason). The Dodgers’ unbearable talent and frictionless roster management has set them up to leap ahead in either the regular season total or the total including the postseason. It seems very likely that the Dodgers will overtake the Giants either this season or next, but for the sake of my headache I really hope it’s next season. The Giants need to win just 2 games to end the lifetime matchup in a tie, 3 to maintain the lead, but in either of those scenarios — and, certainly, impossible if the Dodgers go 6-1 or 7-0 over the next 10 days — it will be tough to overlook how the Dodgers ran down the Giants.
The Dodgers took 2 out of 3 in June and again in July to boost their record against the Giants in the 21st century to 242-210. The pivot point was 2017, when the Giants fell into a competitive abyss from which they might never escape (that 2021 hallucination excepted). The Dodgers are 83-54 against the Giants since the start of that season. So, the rivalry is quite dead and only exists in the minds of people who remember when it wasn’t so lopsided. The Giants have done well for themselves in scraping together a roster that can threaten to consider possibly competing in the Wild Card division, but the Dodgers are in a class unto themselves and there’s been no evidence the past few years to suggest that the Giants are about to flip that perception. Rafael Devers & co. being on a 13-4 run is really nice, their sweep of the Cubs at home encouraging, too, but recent history is pretty clear that the Giants have struggled against the Dodgers.
I’m gonna go take an aspirin.
Series overview
Who: Los Angeles Dodgers vs. San Francisco Giants
Where: Oracle Park | San Francisco, California
When: Friday at 7:15pm PT, Saturday at 6:05pm PT, Sunday at 1:05pm PT
National broadcasts: MLB Network simulcast for out of market (Friday)
Projected starters
Friday: Yoshinobu Yamamoto (RHP 11-8, 2.72 ERA) vs. Justin Verlander (RHP 3-10, 4.09 ERA)
Saturday: Clayton Kershaw (LHP 10-2, 3.27 ERA) vs. TBD
Sunday: Tyler Glasnow (RHP 2-3, 3.21 ERA) vs. TBD
Where they stand
Dodgers: 82-64, 1st in NL West, #3 in NL playoff seeding
Giants: 74-72, 3rd in NL West , 1.5 GB in Wild Card
Prediction time
The Giants struggled mightily against lefty Eduardo Rodriguez on Wednesday afternoon and it’s not like they’ve been getting the best of Clayton Kershaw of late, but in the second half, Kershaw has allowed more runs on the road (13 ER in 27 IP). Willy Adames has never homered off of him before but he’s seeing the ball pretty well right now, Matt Chapman’s swing is looking better (2-for-7 in his career against Kershaw), and Rafael Devers has never faced him in the regular season (1-for-4 with 3 strikeouts and a walk in the 2018 World Series). Also, Luis Matos is 1-for-2 with 3 walks and no strikeouts in his career against Kershaw. Those 3 walks have to be the only walks Luis Matos has picked up as a major leaguer, right? Anyway, I suppose anything’s possible and the Giants could win this series, but my actual prediction is that they will hit Kershaw well on Saturday night.
