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Nothing like the sight of Dodger blue to rile and further energize the Giants’ fan base. It took a long time to get a first glimpse, the season’s 95th game, but it was worth the wait. On a festive and intense Friday night at Oracle Park, the soldout crowd was treated to pleasant weather, spirited vibes, and one doozy of a series opener.
Well, maybe except for one thing.
“I’m not going to lie,” Giants shortstop Willy Adames said. “I feel like we had too many Dodgers fans here. Maybe tomorrow we get more San Francisco fans.”
There’s a reason that could become a reality. The Giants’ marketing folks chose Saturday’s game as Barry Bonds bobblehead day, and we all know how much Giant fans love their bobbleheads. With the cool giveaway, perhaps fans might be less prone to sell their tickets on the secondary market and avoid another Dodger takeover.
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As it was, thousands of L.A. fans filled much of the lower bowl, especially in the sections behind the Dodgers’ dugout off the first-base line. After the final pitch, delivered by Camilo Doval and resulting in a Will Smith double play, all those Dodger fans were disappointed as the Giants grinded out an 8-7 win.
The Giants won for the seventh time in nine games and dealt the Dodgers their seventh consecutive defeat, their most since September 2017. Trailing the Dodgers by nine games in the standings on Independence Day, the Giants have trimmed the margin to four with two games left in the series.
Two of president of baseball operations Buster Posey’s acquisitions made a big difference as Adames homered and tripled, both directed to right-center, and Dom Smith hit his first Giants homer at Oracle to open a decisive five-run rally, an opposite-field shot to left. Jung Hoo Lee had three hits including a two-run triple, and Logan Webb earned the win despite coughing up a season-high six runs.
“This is the oldest rivalry in baseball, the original rivalry in sports,” Smith opined, “and to see the energy from the first pitch to the last pitch, it was very fun to be out there. It put a lot of pressure on the opposition. Hats off to the fans coming out and bringing that energy and making it tough on those guys until the last out.”
Doval earned the save, and nothing was easy about it. He entered with the near-impossible task of facing the 1-2-3 hitters, all intimidating: Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman. He threw first-pitch strikes to the first two batters, retiring Ohtani on a groundout but giving up a single to Betts.
Doval walked Freeman on four pitches and said after the game he was refusing to offer anything hittable to the left-handed batter — “I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.” Instead, Doval pitched aggressively to cleanup hitter Will Smith, the National League batting leader, and induced a game-ending double play.
The night before the Bonds bobblehead promotion, Ohtani hit a Bonds-esque blast into McCovey Cove, a two-run homer giving the Dodgers a 2-1 lead. Lee’s two-run triple made it 3-2, Giants, and their huge rally in the fifth made it one-sided, 8-2.
But Webb gave most of it back in the sixth when Teoscar Hernández doubled in two runs and former Giant Michael Conforto hit a two-run homer. Reliever Randy Rodríguez, who’s accompanying Webb to the All-Star Game in Atlanta after Sunday’s series finale, had a busy night — he finished the sixth and also pitched the seventh, giving up a run.
Suddenly, it was a one-run game, and Tyler Rogers and Doval threw scoreless ball in the final two innings to give the Giants their majors-leading 22nd one-run win of the season and enable their fans to finally exhale.
“It felt like a playoff game,” Adames said. “That’s how high the energy was tonight.”
Adames, signed over the winter for seven years and $182 million, slumped the first several weeks of the season and was hitting .193 with four homers in 65 games through June 7. Since then, he’s hitting .304 with seven homers over 29 games. His average is now up to .225.
“I think everything is just falling into place,” he said. “A few weeks ago, I started feeling better at the plate, taking better at-bats, putting myself in hitters’ counts, and taking advantage of that.”
Smith, who signed in early June out of the Yankees’ farm system, said he worked with Bonds before the game on the mental side of hitting. Like Bonds, Smith bats left-handed.
“It paid off,” Smith said. “A lot of it was mindset and having an intent at the plate. He’s big on setting up pitchers, playing the chess game, and being two steps ahead.”
Ohtani finished 1-for-4 and opened the game by drawing a nine-pitch walk off Webb. His next time up, with a runner at third, he crushed Webb’s first-pitch cut fastball into the bay. Manager Bob Melvin, asked why Ohtani wouldn’t be walked in that situation, said, “There was one out with Betts coming up. If the situation was two outs, maybe we’d look to walk him right there, but it’s our best pitcher on the mound, too.”
Giants DH Rafael Devers, who was acquired from Boston in mid-June and exited the second-best rivalry in the majors (Yankees-Red Sox) for the game’s No. 1 rivalry, was 0-for-2 with two walks and scored on Lee’s triple. Still hobbling around the bases, Devers had an MRI Thursday that showed lower back inflammation, and he’s taking anti-inflammatories and playing through it.