SAN FRANCISCO — Three hours and 19 minutes into the best game in recent memory, a heavyweight bout in which both teams probably deserved the championship belt, a winner-take-all affair that lived up to the hype heaped upon it for the past two days, the visiting bullpen door at Oracle Park slammed open.
Dodgers' first baseman Matt Beaty, who had grounded into the final out of the top of the ninth inning, knelt in the dirt, his headfirst slide barely finished. The Giants defenders jogged into their dugout. The Dodgers defenders gathered their gloves in theirs.
Max Scherzer waited for none of them. He rocketed through the outfield and onto the pitcher’s mound, a place he had spent some 500 hours, in March and April and May and June and July and August and September and October. Scherzer, 37, had thrown 2,660 major league innings, between the regular season and the playoffs, across 14 years and four teams. Only five other active pitchers have thrown more. None has entered in the ninth inning to record a save.
Until Thursday, neither had Scherzer. But Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts summoned him to preserve the Dodgers’ 2–1 lead in Game 5 of the National League Division Series against the Giants, the team they have been trying all season to run down. So Scherzer hurried.
“You gotta want to be in that situation,” he said afterward, his hair reeking from the champagne his teammates had sprayed on him after he closed out the win. “The ball was coming to me. I had to take the ball. I had to go out there with everything I got, ready to run through them. Gotta be mentally locked. Nothing was gonna stop me from winning that game. You have to believe in yourself that you got what it takes to execute pitches in those situations, not be overcooked. So I just wanted to get there as fast as possible.”
He had jogged to the bullpen after the top of the fourth inning, then spent the next four frames stalking around, trying to keep his legs loose. He knew his arm would be strong. He knew his brain could handle the pressure. But he was worried about those legs.
He watched as 24-year-old Logan Webb, the youngest pitcher in San Francisco history to start a winner-take-all game, mowed down the most fearsome lineup in the league, just as he had done six days earlier. Inning after inning, he baffled L.A. with a repertoire straight out of 2014—changeups to his arm side, sliders to his glove side, two-seamers in the middle. Over seven dazzling innings, he induced as many weak grounders to himself (four) as he allowed hits.
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