If you would have said on Game-1 of the 2021 baseball season that the National League West wouldn’t be decided until Game-162 (or hopefully Game-163), even the most ardent baseball fan would have said you were nuts.

…yet here we are.

The unfortunate part is that regardless of how well the Dodgers have played over the last month of the regular season – and they have played exceptionally well – or how well they play in Game-162 on Sunday, their division-winning fate rests in the hands (and bats and gloves) of the sub-.500 National League West third-place San Diego Padres on Sunday afternoon.

“Whatever it says on the scoreboard (between the Giants and Padres on Sunday) doesn’t affect what we have to do”, Dodgers third baseman and unofficial team captain Justin Turner said, following his team’s 8-3 win over the NL Central champion Milwaukee Brewers at Dodger Stadium on Saturday night. “Obviously, it’ll be up there, it’ll be there for everyone to see who looks at it, but the bottom line is we have to take care of our business and go out and win a ballgame, and that’s all that matters.”

All that matters indeed.

The irony is that regardless of how well the Dodgers have played over the past month (and the entire season, for that matter), the San Francisco Giants have played one game better. The Giants enter play on the final day of the 2021 regular season with an MLB-best 106-55 (.658) record, with the Dodgers entering play with an MLB-second-best 105-56 (.652) record. (Remember that three-game sweep of the Dodgers by the Giants at Oracle Park on September 3-5?).

Regardless, and getting back to that ‘have played exceptionally well’ thing, Dodgers left-hander Julio Urías was nothing short of Clayton Kershaw / Sandy Koufax-like on Saturday evening when he allowed only one run on one hit with two walks and seven strikeouts in his 6.1 innings pitched, to notch his 20th win of the season – the only pitcher in Major League Baseball to do so this season and the first Dodger to do so since Kershaw in 2014.

“Tremendous outing. We needed every bit of it,” Dodger manager Dave Roberts said of Urías’ stellar performance on Saturday. “To do it at home, to cap off a tremendous regular season for him, really proud of him. It’s a feather in his cap winning 20 games. You know those are hard to come by these days, and it’s something I know that he will always remember and be proud of. You can see that when I took him out and the ovation he got from the fans. I know that meant a lot to him.”

161 Down – (hopefully) Two to Go

Play Ball!

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