There was a time when BEAT LA! was the rising tide that lifted a bad season or served as a line of demarcation for the team’s competitiveness that year. Then it sort of morphed into a bellwether for the state of the franchise relative to its peers — especially when it comes to the industry’s cutting edge. Now, it’s just a series where the team and its fans are reminded that they root for a second division squadron that is the merely the sports arm of a Bay Area real estate conglomerate. There is no
juice in the Giants-Dodgers series. Only pain.
In the offseason, I examined this once storied rivalry and declared that the Dodgers had won it once and for all. The Giants do still, technically, lead the historical head-to-head 1,288-1,287, the Dodgers have won six of the last seven season series, and in the season where the Giants won it, they lost to the Dodgers in the NLDS. The Dodgers are also 242-211 against the Giants in the Oracle Park era and 114-109 in Oracle Park itself. In fact, they haven’t lost a season series in Oracle Park since 2016 (2-8). In fact, they are 36-27 over the last 9 seasons. So, it’s about as lopsided as it gets from a competitive standpoint and maybe the Giants simply enjoy that they get to have their bodies turned inside out 9 times a year by these bums.
Okay, maybe not the players, but the team itself? Why not? The Giants’ ownership group is far less interested in fielding a competitive team than the Dodgers’ owners. While the Giants have developed the surrounding real estate and picked up some other property, the Dodgers have expanded their territory internationally on top of the far more important real estate of hearts and minds. After the Giants helped shove the A’s out of Oakland, it seemed like they wiped their hands of having to try very much to hold people’s attention, thinking they could simply be Northern California’s team by virtue of being the only team in Northern California. That has almost immediately cemented a brand of mediocre at best baseball and a general staleness surrounding the team (for example: when was the last time they updated the marketing slogan?).
There’s an insidious and pernicious effect to the Giants resting on their laurels (the championship era of 2010-2016), and it’s losing a generation of baseball fans to their supposed (I’d argue former) rivals to the south. That’s right: the Dodgers could simply take over as the preferred team of Northern Californians, too. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, as regional as baseball can be. Growing up, the national reach of Atlanta Braves telecasts meant that I went to school with a lot of Braves (and Yankees) fans. Did Bay Area parents really think they’d raise Dodgers fans? And what can they do to stop it?
Because you’re not going to do better than Shohei Ohtani. He’s been constructed in a lab to appeal to children who like baseball. That he’s the best player on the planet for several years running only complicates matters. Parents and grandparents are going to look like poor sports and sourpusses trying to talk their kids down from disliking the guy and ignoring the talent. We can hate the Dodgers and call them the Bums all we want, but it’s not going to change just how far ahead of the Giants they are.
Teams had an informal Barry Bonds rule back in the day, walking him most of the time. Well, Major League Baseball literally changed their rules to accommodate Shohei Ohtani — who, by the way, has a 52-game on base streak heading into this series. He now trails only Shawn Green, who reached base in 53 straight games in 2000, and Duke Snider, who reached in 58 straight back in 1954 — and he’s back to his two-way ways following rehab from Tommy John surgery. This one guy has been the driving force behind the increased interest in MLB and while the rest of us wait for this epoch of Dodgers dominance to run out, a lot of potential Giants fans will be lost along the way. Heck, maybe even some current fairweather fans, even.
What’s so wrong with being a fairweather fan anyway? Pro sports are supposed to be entertaining. It’s a memory making business after all. Who would you rather tune in to experience every night? A team that’s trying to figure out how to compete for the third Wild Card as late into September as possible or the Dodgers?
That’s why so many loudmouthed fans want a salary cap. They think that will be the thing that finally ends the Dodgers rivalry, even though they’ve demonstrated in so many ways and on so many occasions that they’re also smarter than the other teams. The Mets have a bigger payroll than the Dodgers and not even Giants fans would want to swap places with Mets fans right now. They are not the best team in the sport right now because of contract deferrals.
The Dodgers enter this series without their closer, Edwin Diaz, because of loose bodies in his right elbow. Freddie Freeman is on the paternity list for at least the first two games of the series. Mookie Betts is on the IL with an oblique strain and has missed 13 games already. Blake Snell is on the IL because he always is. Roki Sasaki was another big Japanese import who has been a bust in his time with the Dodgers, so one might argue that the Dodgers’ 6-man rotation is shaky. Down all these important players, it hasn’t mattered very much.
- Tanner Scott was the big reliever addition they made last year and he was a disaster (4.74 ERA in 57 IP), but this year he has a 1.04 ERA in 8.2 IP (8 K 0 BB), so there’s their replacement closer.
- 25-year old Dalton Rushing is holding Freeman’s spot capably, slashing .444/.464/1.296 in 28 plate appearances with 7 home runs and 13 RBI (he also has 8 strikeouts and 0 walks). He was the Dodgers’ 2nd round draft pick in 2022. Take that, salary cap weirdos!
- Hyeseong Kim came over from Korea last season and hit .280/.315/.385 with a 7:1 strikeouts to walk ratio, but through 12 games this year (32 PA) he’s slashing .308/.406/.500 with 5 BB agains 8 K, so there’s the Betts fill-in.
- Roki Sasaki has a 6.11 ERA (and Emmet Sheehan a 5.85 ERA), but there’s Justin Wrobleski stepping in with a 1.88 ERA in 24 IP (3 starts). The Dodgers drafted him in the 11th round of the 2021 draft.
Meanwhile, 25-year old center fielder Andy Pages has a league-leading 30 hits and 21 RBI to go with a triple slash of .370/.416/.605 in 89 plate appearances. They signed him of the international market back in 2018 for a $300,000 signing bonus. Unfair? Hardly. Why is he off to a white hot start? Well, first, he’s had a solid MLB career since making his MLB debut in 2023 (.262/.310/.439 in 272 career games previous to 2026); and second, he spent the entire offseason practicing hitting against Paul Skenes — or, rather, the Trajekt version of him. I haven’t even mentioned that they signed Kyle Tucker to an obscene 4 year/$240 million deal in the offseason!
The Dodgers have the stars who get people’s attention and the talent plus depth that cultivates their ongoing interest. The Giants have tried but largely failed to do the same and in their own way. Their band of scrappy baseball rats trying to play the underdog or villain card only works if there’s equal talent. There’s a thought that this has always been the case in the rivalry, that the Giants have always been the underdogs and the scratching and clawing to get wins is the charm that makes it special. But, come on. That’s not the case. The rivalry isn’t equal when the Giants need to hit five consecutive singles to score a run and the Dodgers can score three with the swing of the bat — which, by the way, the Dodgers are tied with the Brewers and Twins (!) for three-run homers here in the early season (all three teams have done it 6 times).
The Giants’ ownership group will treat this series — and any series that features a marquee franchsie — like how Disneyland has retooled itself: it’s a premium experience, and ticket prices will be commensurate with that. The new financial modeling shows that extracting money from high spenders is a better vein of revenue than appealing to as many people as possible. There are simply going to be more premium-level fans of the Dodgers than of the Giants now and going forward, and so the mass market catering to this one team will almost certainly have the effect of creating more Dodgers fans in places nobody has seen them before and because the Dodgers have been so good for so long now are in a great position to steal the next generation of fans from the Giants.
Series overview
Who: Los Angeles Dodgers (16-6) vs. San Francisco Giants (9-13)
Where: Oracle Park | San Francisco, California
When: Tuesday & Wednesday at 6:45pm PT, Thursday at 12:45pm PT
National broadcasts: None.
Projected starters
Tuesday: Yoshinobu Yamamoto (RHP 2-1, 2.10 ERA) vs. Landen Roupp (RHP 3-1, 2.38 ERA)
Wednesday: Shohei Ohtani (RHP 2-0, 0.50 ERA) vs. Tyler Mahle (RHP 0-3, 7.23 ERA)
Thursday: Tyler Glasnow (RHP 2-0, 3.24 ERA) vs. Logan Webb (RHP 2-2, 5.40 ERA)
Players to watch
Dodgers
Max Muncy: This guy… still? Yes. The Dodgers’ third baseman by default leads the team with 8 home runs and has already had a 3-home run game (in LA vs. the Rangers) and a pair of 2-home run games (Friday and last night in Colorado). He’s hit 11 in Oracle Park, his second-most of any MLB park (after Coors, obviously) and he sports a .960 OPS in 45 career games there (185 PA).
Kyle Tucker: You know the Dodgers are good when they’re 15-6 and I’ve mentioned a bunch of players who aren’t the guy who signed a 4-year, $240 million contract in the offseason. Now, the $60 million AAV is not actually that given deferrals and a signing bonus, but this high AAV/short-term deal is a deal really only the Dodgers, Mets, and probably the Yankees could do, and them doing it isn’t necessarily something that’s unfair to the rest of the sport. Any team can do deferrals, they just have to be willing. Personally, I think high-AAV, short-term deals are the way to go for top of the market free agents, especially pitchers, and it’s simply incumbent on teams to develop good players who cost less to be able to shoulder these big spends. I also don’t agree that there should be a salary cap, but I do agree that lowering the Competitive Balance Tax AAV figure through deferrals is a loophole worth closing (in other words, teams can defer, but the AAV should be the actual AAV of the total deal).
Anyway, Tucker is hitting just .256/.347/.390 in 95 PA with the Dodgers. He has just 3 homers and a pair of doubles as extra base hits. He adds 3 stolen bases and a 12.6 BB% to 20 K% as well. In 15 career games against the Giants, he’s just 11-for-55, but in 6 career games at Oracle, he’s 6-for-24. No homers, though, only a pair of doubles. You can easily envision him becoming a spoiler late in the game, though, if the Giants somehow contain the rest of the Dodgers’ lineup.
Will Smith: It was either Smith or Ohtani for this final spot. Ohtani has 4 home runs and an .877 career OPS at ORacle Park (15 games), but Will Smith is just peskier. He has 23 RBI in 31 games (140 PA) at ORacle to go with a .322/.407/.463 line. Just 2 homers but 9 doubles, his most in any other park besides Dodger Stadium.
Giants
Rafael Devers: I’m posting this article so late in the day that I doubt anyone has read down this far, but if you’re still here, let’s see if Rafael Devers can finally get off the mat. He’s hitting .225/.266/.315 to start the season (94 PA in 22 games) and it is his worst start to a season of his 10-season career. The last time he got off to such a bad start was in 2020, when he had a .603 OPS through his first 93 PA and then a .907 OPS through his final 155. So, it was literally at this point of that season — okay, well, not exactly, since that was just a 60-game schedule that started in July — that he started to turn things around. Then again, he’s a career .156 hitter against the Dodgers (18 games, 80 PA).
Logan Webb: The Giants’ ace has looked very much not like an ace already this season when, normally, it takes the Dodgers to come into town and pants him in front of everybody. He brings a 5.40 season ERA into a matchup where he has a career 4.47 ERA, and last year it was 5.79 in 4 starts.
Erik Miller: He once struck out Shohei Ohtani in five consecutive plate appearances. If he is the Giants’ closer going forward, this will be a big series for him, and not just because of Ohtani. There’s also Max Muncy, Kyle Tucker, Dalton Rushing, and Hyeseong Kim. He has a career 7.11 ERA against the Dodgers.
Tony Vitello watch
I figure the team and media surrounding the team still feels there’s a meaningful rivalry between these two teams and so it’s in that spirit I explore how Tony Vitello could become a part of it. First, there’s nothing he can say, exactly, that might jump him into the fold. I think only a series win or a sweep helps him see how intense this could be (in theory). But I suspect his head is still swirling with the adjustment to really wrap his head around how big this once was. He’s been seeing every night how outmatched the Giants are, so maybe that’s one thing that will help him keep perspective. He’s not going to get too up or too down about what happens these next three games.
Prediction time
The Giants will probably win a game in this series, but if they don’t, it won’t be a surprise. Max Muncy will homer. One of the bullpens will blow a lead. Beat LA will be heard, but not as loudly as you remember hearing it from the crowd in the past.
