The Dodgers needed something special from Buehler in the NLDS opener on Friday night and almost got it, but their offensive failings made it almost irrelevant.
SAN FRANCISCO — Pitchers aren’t thoracic surgeons. They get away with mistakes all the time. Fat sliders get popped up. Fastballs that miss by a foot get fouled off. Nobody notices. No pitcher is going to tell you. So it’s simplistic to say Walker Buehler delivered only two incisions that struck a vein Friday night at Oracle Park. Even if he’d reached perfection he would have walked away tied. Instead he was pretty much the swaggering W.F. Buehler we’ve seen and expected to see. He was just facing the least forgiving team in baseball, and that’s all that mattered. Buster Posey’s two-run homer in the first inning and Kris Bryant’s solo in the seventh enabled the Giants to ride Logan Webb’s basket of disappearing baseballs in Game 1 of the National League Division Series. Brandon Crawford sent a parting gift over the right-center field fence in the eighth, and San Francisco won,4-0. You will see few tidier, simpler playoff games, assuming Boston and Tampa Bay have finished Game 2 of their series yet. How often do the Dodgers allow the opposing starting pitcher to come to bat in the seventh inning, as Webb did? But then the Giants, with their 13 coaches and their mountains of data, have removed the complexity of the game all season. You pitch great, you hit when it’s needed, and when a problem arises you watch second baseman Tommy La Stella range behind the bag, flip backhanded to shortstop Crawford, and watch the UCLA product tag and throw like a double-dutch jump-roper to double up Justin Turner and end the fourth inning.
