The gap between the Giants and Dodgers can't remain this large forever, right?

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The first starting pitcher for the Dodgers in this series will be the only guy on the planet who can match World Series exploits with Madison Bumgarner. Their second will be the perennial MVP, who’s doing his best to win the Cy Young as a cutesy lark because he can. Their third has good bone structure and a lot of strikeouts. For every walk the Giants have taken, the Dodgers have taken two. For every home run the Giants have hit, the Dodgers have hit three. The Giants have averaged 3.41 runs per game so far, the second-worst rate in the National League. The Dodgers have averaged 6.05 runs per game, which is the best rate in the majors, by far. I could keep going, and part of me wants to. It’s oddly therapeutic. The point has been made, however. The Dodgers are up. The Giants are down. All of the good things are happening to the Dodgers, very few of the good things are happening to the Giants. The Dodgers don’t have to worry much when Kyle Tucker plays like a normal everyday player; the Giants feel cooked if a single regular is underperforming expectations. The Dodgers are … Whoops! See, that’s the problem, here. It’s not a lot of fun to write about the ol’ Giants-Dodgers rivalry these days. Even in the most charitable view of the 2026 Giants, they’re a down-on-their-luck, hardscrabble wild-card team that’s just waiting to get hot. They’re not a threat to get hot enough to overtake the Dodgers. This could lead into some sort of half-rousing post about how this all makes it better and more enjoyable when the Giants actually beat the Dodgers at Oracle Park. It’s why you remember games from players like Guillermo Quíroz and Trevor Brown, or the time Buster Posey backpicked Justin Turner to save Mark Melancon’s bacon, which temporarily allowed you to forget that the Dodgers had good players and your team had Mark Melancon. It’s exceptionally fun when a bad Giants team beats a dominant Dodgers team. It’s like throwing water on a bully’s pants to make it look like he wet himself, right before he stuffs you in a dumpster and latches it. You’ll still be stuck in there when his pants dry, but hope you enjoy explaining away the pants until then, buddy. Yes, moments like those make the lopsided rivalry worthwhile for a brief, flickering moment, but it’s ineffective as a way to get anyone excited about Giants-Dodgers baseball. “This cool thing might happen. Wouldn’t it be wild if it did?”, doesn’t work when the Giants lose two games against the Dodgers for every one that they win, which is what’s happened, with a 4-9 head-to-head record against the Dodgers in each of the last two seasons. The only time they’ve had a winning record against the Dodgers in the last 10 years was in 2021, and even then, it was only a 10-9 season victory. Just like the division title, they barely squeaked it out. There’s a tiny scrap of good news, a little glimmer of … well, I wouldn’t even call it hope. It’s more like a little glimmer of not-pain on the horizon. And it’s found in the answer to a question that I get a lot, which is some variation of this: Are the Dodgers going to keep doing this forever? Will the rivalry ever be good again? The answers are no and yes, respectively. It’ll take a while. Maybe the longest while. But the Dodgers can’t keep mashing the “Golden Age” button with money and big-brained ideas, and the rivalry will get really good again as soon as the Giants get better players. Or if — wait for it — some of the players they have now play better. Combine both of the above with some prospects, and now you’ve got a stew going. The second one is obvious enough that it doesn’t need much explanation. Be careful to remember there are teams in baseball that have never even won their division (Rockies, Marlins), so it’s not like surprise division-winning seasons are handed out entirely at random. The Giants don’t have to get one just because they stuck around long enough. But, yes, a good Giants team will make these series so, so, so much more fun to look forward to. Go back to that first point, then, which is the most common question I get. It’s understandable defeatism, a reading of the Dodgers that goes something like this: money begets better players and better farm systems, which begets more money, which begets better players and better farm systems. The Dodgers just keep begetting, and some folks are sick and tired of it, frankly. Yep, they’ll be good for a while. A long while. Maybe forever, or whatever that means in our topsy-turvy modern world. They have the perpetual motion machine working, and the conveyor belt is humming. They’re also doing stuff like turning Andy Pages into a superstar when you’re not looking. But they’ll never have another Shohei Ohtani. They might want one. They might sit atop a pile of rubies and emeralds and demand that other teams bring them their Shohei Ohtani as a tribute, but there will not be another Shohei Ohtani to be found. They’ll try to build one in their underground laboratory with expensive, artisanially made parts — no 3D printing or Temu dreck for them — but they’ll always come up short. That’s because there will never be another player like Ohtani, no matter how hard they want one. It’s like, imagine being the richest person in the world, but you’re just not funny. All you want to be is funny. It’s hard to imagine, but stay with me. This hypothetical person would be haunted forever by what they cannot possess. The Dodgers will be like that after Ohtani, however far in the future that might be, but they’ll be even more haunted because they’ll remember what it was like to watch a baseball player that close to the sun, and they’ll desperately want to watch another one. There is, however, just one of these guys every forever or so. This is coming from authority because the roles were reversed once. Not in terms of overall might and financial resources, but in terms of a superhuman player. The Giants finished ahead of the Dodgers in every season from 1997 through 2003, and they did so through the grace of Barry Bonds. He was so good, so otherworldly, that he could pick a mediocre team up and turn them into a pennant-winning team, a perennial threat to win the division, if not finish with the best record in baseball. It was rad. It’ll probably never happen again. Although they probably said that about Willie Mays, and then the player who captures the same magic turns out to be his own godson. Maybe we should pry into Bonds’ personal life and seen if he’s been invited to any confirmations lately. But, no, it’ll never happen again. There was one Bonds. Hope you enjoyed it. Ohtani is like that, except instead of taking average or even slightly above-average teams as far as Bonds did, he’s gifted with all kinds of support, from the front office to an aggressive ownership group to the farm system. He’s tasked with making a great team into one of the greatest teams of all time. They’ll be in every conversation for the next 100 years, certainly. That stinks, if you’re a Giants fan. It stinks real bad. But just like Bonds, it’ll go away, and the Dodgers will become more like the Yankees, where they’ll always be good, but they’ll have seasons where they’re less than great. It’s the nature of every team, no matter how many free agents they can afford. Eventually the prospects will dry up and the veterans will decline before their time because that’s the subterfuge that baseball’s best at. It just doesn’t feel great right now, though. What with them* having all the “wins” and “a generational titan who might be the best baseball player who ever lived.” It won’t be forever. It only seems that way right now. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms