For Dodgers and Giants, marathon season about to turn into a sprint
Having spent almost his entire career with the Tampa Bay Rays, Matt Moore has never experienced anything like the San Francisco Giants-Los Angeles Dodgers rivalry. After all, Rays-Boston Red Sox doesn’t evoke quite the same passion among the participants and their fans.
Now, three weeks after joining the Giants in a trade, Moore will get a taste of a century-old grudge match that gets even seasoned veterans pumped.
“There’s definitely an extra hype around the game, in the clubhouses and even on the field,” said pitcher Matt Cain, a Giant since 2005. “You’re always looking for bragging rights.”
And at this stage of the season, something more tangible — separation in the National League West race. Los Angeles holds a one-game lead as the Giants come into town Tuesday for a three-game set with their top three starters lined up.
Moore is scheduled to take the ball in the series finale Thursday, the second left-hander San Francisco is throwing at the lefty-heavy Dodgers lineup after staff ace Madison Bumgarner, with righty Johnny Cueto sandwiched in between.
The Dodgers will counter with Japanese rookie Kenta Maeda and lefty Rich Hill in the first two games, with the status of Thursday’s starter in doubt because Brett Anderson is dealing with a blister.
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Moore’s fifth start in a Giants uniform represents his best chance to ingratiate himself with a fan base and teammates who have yet to see him at his best. Moore is 0-3 with a 4.70 ERA since the trade after closing out his Rays career on a roll, registering a 2.39 ERA in his final nine starts.
“The command of my fastball hasn’t been there quite like it had been all year,” said Moore, who has given up 17 walks in 23 innings as a Giant, “so it’s something that could be physical, could be effort-wise trying to get a little bit too much out of each pitch and overthrowing.”
Moore was the biggest name among the Giants’ acquisitions around the trade deadline that also included reliever Will Smith and infielder Eduardo Nunez. None has been a difference-maker.
For that matter, the Dodgers haven’t benefited much from their deadline pickups, as outfielder Josh Reddick is batting .149 with zero home runs or RBI in his 18 games wearing blue, while Hill will be making his first start Wednesday after a slow recovery from a nagging blister problem.
But whereas San Francisco has stumbled with the majors’ worst second-half record at 11-23, Los Angeles has ridden a resurgent offense — best in the NL in slugging since the break — and a surprisingly effective bullpen to the top of the division. That combination has allowed the Dodgers to erase what was an eight-game deficit June 26 — the day Clayton Kershaw reported back problems that have kept him sidelined since then — by going 28-19 in his absence.
The gloom-and-doom scenarios that naturally followed with the revelation the three-time Cy Young Award winner would be out for an extended stretch with a herniated disk have not become reality despite the Dodgers setting an NL record with 26 players placed on the disabled list.
And they’ve done it with contributions from a variety of sources, among them team home run and RBI leader Justin Turner, a healthier Adrian Gonzalez and odds-on rookie of the year favorite Corey Seager, who has a team-high on-base-plus-slugging percentage of .915.
Monday, the Dodgers saw two other rookies — Andrew Toles and Rob Segedin — connect for their first career major league home runs back-to-back as Los Angeles outslugged the Cincinnati Reds 18-9. Gonzalez tied a career high with three homers.
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“This is the first time I can call the Dodgers grinders,” reliever J.P. Howell, who helped the club win division titles in each of the last three years, told the Los Angeles Times. “We’ll tack runs on. We’ll keep rolling at all times. I can’t say it’s been like that in the past.”
Howell is one of the veterans in a revolving-door bullpen that has employed a total of 20 pitchers who somehow have combined to put together the league’s second-best ERA at 3.30.
They figure to become quite familiarized with the Giants the rest of the way. The teams play nine of their final 38 games — or 24% of their remaining schedule — against each other, including six games in the final two weeks that likely will determine the winner of a division with no other serious contenders.
Moore was thrown into the fire of a playoff series as a rookie in 2011 — he had a sensational debut with seven scoreless innings against the Texas Rangers as a 22-year-old — and returned to the postseason two years later, so he knows to keep things in perspective.
“I can’t make a concerted effort to try harder, because it would be detrimental to what I do,” Moore said. “If I say, ‘Oh, man, we’re playing the Dodgers, I have to do something special,’ then I might get outside of my capabilities. It might turn into a big hindrance.”
For much of the next few weeks, the Giants and the Dodgers will be staring in the face their biggest hindrance to a division crown.
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