Clayton Kershaw threw a first-pitch fastball with familiar intent.
He’s been doing this to Giants batters for 14 seasons. His start against them in the Sunday sunlight at Dodger Stadium was the 50th of his career. He ties them up. He jams them. He curves them, overpowers them, coaxes them into bailout swings. He turns them around and sits them down. Pitchers pitch. Against the Giants, Kershaw dispatches.
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Every mountain will be made level over time, and Kershaw does not throw with the same snap and hiss anymore. But he is still just 33 years old. He still received Cy Young votes last season. He still entered Sunday’s series finale with a 7-3 record and a 2.94 ERA in 11 starts. And the Giants were still his playthings until someone told him otherwise.
If you’re thinking 50 starts is an impressive number … well, it is. Kershaw is one of just 33 pitchers who have started at least 50 games against the Giants across their two coasts and 140 years. The list, as you might imagine, is luminous: Warren Spahn and Greg Maddux, Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale, Robin Roberts and Steve Carlton, Dazzy Vance and Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown. Major-league longevity is not bestowed on the mediocre or middling.
On that list of bronzed names, want to guess who has the lowest ERA?
The day the Dodgers took Kershaw with the seventh pick in the 2006 draft would go down as one of the least fortunate days in Giants history — if they hadn’t nabbed Tim Lincecum three picks later. In Kershaw’s first 49 starts plus two relief appearances against them, he pitched to a 1.79 ERA. The Giants never could figure him out. They never seemed to miss him in a series, either. It’s tough when you happen to draw an ace. It’s impossible to beat a stacked deck.
That’s the advantage the Dodgers have enjoyed in these 14 seasons. Over the 140-year history of this rivalry, Kershaw is just the third Dodgers pitcher to start 50 times against the Giants. Drysdale and Don Sutton are the others, and it’s safe to say that either of them in their primes would be a friendlier matchup. Brandon Belt is a .065 hitter in 62 at-bats against Kershaw. Brandon Crawford (.125) isn’t much better. Entering Sunday, only three Giants hitters had hit multiple home runs against Kershaw, and one of them is currently pitching for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
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So it counted as a victory in the first inning when the Giants scratched Kershaw for a run on two singles and a groundout. They hit their quota, more or less. They gave their own ace, right-hander Kevin Gausman, as much of a lead as he had a right to expect.
Then Mauricio Dubón dug into the box. And Kershaw threw that first-pitch fastball in on his hands.
It was supposed to jam him or break his bat at the handle. But Dubón turned on the 90.3 mph pitch, guided the bat head to it and lofted a drive into the glare down the left-field line. Dubón stood in the box and watched as if he’d just struck a wedge on a par-3. Kershaw whipped around with such alacrity that he ended up in a position the Giants had never put him in before: on one knee.
Dubón’s drive clanked off the pole for a two-run homer, Austin Slater added a solo shot and the Giants scored all five of their runs against Kershaw. Gausman gutted through six innings on an aching hip and the bullpen gave back nearly all of the lead while serving up two-run home runs to Max Muncy and Albert Pujols, but the Giants pulled out a 5-4 victory to take three of four in the series at Chavez Ravine.
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) May 30, 2021
The five earned runs matched the most the Giants had ever scored against Kershaw, and after all those years of Bruce Bochy scratching his head, lineup card and pen in hand, they finally have a few threats to throw at him. It might have been a curious choice to bat Dubon, a .228 hitter, in the fifth spot in the order. But his home run against Kershaw was the second of his career and it came in just his fifth at-bat versus the left-hander. Slater, who had a two-homer game against Kershaw last season, hit his third in just his 14th career at-bat against him.
FULL-full list of Giants with multiple career home runs against Clayton Kershaw:
Buster Posey, 3 (in 113 at-bats)
Austin Slater, 3 (in 14 at-bats)
Madison Bumgarner, 2 (in 23 at-bats)
Mauricio Dubón, 2 (in 5 at-bats)— Andrew Baggarly (@extrabaggs) May 30, 2021
Slater and Buster Posey are the only Giants to take Kershaw deep three times. Posey also has 98 more at-bats against him.
“I feel blessed to be able to do that against a first-ballot Hall of Famer,” said Slater, whose approach was to be aggressive and look for the slider over the plate. “I’ve been fortunate to get a few good pitches to hit off him, and being honest, I’m getting him towards the end of his career. He’s a fairly different guy when he’s not throwing 95 to 97 mph with a slider at 92-93. He would never say that, but it’s pretty obvious.
“But no matter what, you have a ton of respect for him on the mound and you know you’ve got to have your A game against him.”
SLATER 🥔 pic.twitter.com/maz60qtT5v
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) May 30, 2021
Dubón’s experience is a bit different. He came to the Sacramento area from Honduras as a baseball-mad high school kid, adopted the Giants as his favorite team and experienced all of the dread and dismay whenever Kershaw would stand on the mound and raise two arms to the sky.
“It’s surreal facing him,” said Dubón, who also scored in the fourth inning after leading off with a bunt single. “I mean, still to this day, it’s very surreal watching him. All those guys, Pujols, Kershaw, those guys are Hall of Famers. Being able to watch him and face him, it’s pretty special.
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“I had a plan, knew what I was looking for and didn’t miss it.”
Dubón fed into the rivalry a bit as he crossed the plate, mimicking Trevor Bauer’s sword-sheathing gesture from the previous weekend in San Francisco. The Dodgers swept that initial series at Oracle Park. The Giants answered while providing a reminder that summary judgment after three games is impulsive folly.
“Those guys are having fun, we’re having fun,” Dubón said. “It’s baseball. He did it over there, I did it over here. I told the guys I was going to do it. Some of the guys were laughing, saying I was not going to do it. But it’s a rivalry. I was a fan coming up and it’s a fun thing.”
The Giants were supposed to be the prone party in the rivalry this season, and although they still give up plenty of pounds on the scale, their pitching has been an equalizer and Gausman is having the best season of anyone on either team. He improved to 6-0 with a 1.40 ERA after holding the Dodgers to two hits in six shutout innings, striking out seven and throwing an astounding 62 of 72 pitches for strikes.
Gausman even retired Muncy, the hottest hitter in the majors, three times on two strikeouts and a fly ball. You could almost sense the apparition of Farhan Zaidi, floating above Dodger Stadium like Anakin Skywalker in “Return of the Jedi,” as the greatest hitter he unearthed with the Dodgers faced the ace pitcher he signed a few months after the Braves had traded him and the Reds had non-tendered him.
“He was hitting his spots,” Muncy said. “I think he only threw eight balls today, maybe? So he was pounding the zone. His stuff was good. He was getting ahead from the start. He was keeping us off balance, for sure.”
Gausman has been pitching through left hip irritation over the past few weeks and felt it while running down the first-base line. He stiffly descended from the mound while fielding a dribbler to end the sixth. When Gausman mentioned that his hip barked at him on the effort, Giants manager Gabe Kapler convinced him to call it a day.
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“He pitched brilliantly, and in a perfect world, we just keep running them out there,” Kapler said. “But we really need to listen to our pitchers and (Gausman) in particular. He’s so tough and wants the ball so much. We just have to be respectful when his body’s not responding the way he wants it to.”
Gausman will get an extra day before his next start, which fed his confidence that he won’t be skipped or pushed back.
“I haven’t missed a start yet,” Gausman said, “and I don’t plan to.”
The Giants bullpen continues to be a concern. Before the game, the club placed left-hander Caleb Baragar on the 10-day injured list with what it believes is a mild case of left elbow irritation. Then Zack Littell surrendered Muncy’s shot in the eighth. And Jake McGee committed a throwing error before serving up a pitch to Pujols, who did something you don’t see every day: He knocked Babe Ruth down a peg in the record books. With his 670th career homer, Pujols passed the Bambino for fourth place on the all-time list for extra-base hits.
But McGee didn’t allow Austin Barnes to be a hero for the second time in the series and the Giants, who began their turnaround with Mike Tauchman’s game-saving catch Friday night, parted company ahead of their archrivals in the NL West standings and having left a much different impression.
“They’re a good team,” Kershaw said. “They’re playing well. We got them up there and they got us here. That’s the way it goes sometimes.
“Buster’s playing maybe better than he ever has. That’s a big addition. And their starting pitching has been really good as well. You saw Gausman today, (Alex Wood) has been throwing the ball well, they got (Johnny) Cueto back, (Anthony) DeSclafani is throwing the ball well. So they’ve got a lot of pieces there.”
Said Muncy: “They’ve had good players. They’re playing well right now, they’re pitching well, they’re matching up well. They’ve got good bullpen pieces. They’re going to hit mistakes and that’s what they did. And they made pitches. They’re a good team. They were never a bad team, they just couldn’t put it together.”
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Dodgers manager Dave Roberts considered a question about the Giants’ ability to play matchups, maximize value at the fringes of the roster and mix a patient approach with swings intended to do damage — a photocopy of his team’s strategy, pretty much.
“It’s more difficult to navigate,” Roberts said. “They think a lot (like) how we think. Farhan is brilliant and the players, with Gabe and his coaching staff, those guys are buying in. You still gotta play good baseball, and this series, they outplayed us.
“A lot of people might have counted the Giants out. We didn’t.”
(Photo of Mauricio Dubón: Michael Owens / Getty Images)