Dodgers' rivals excel at playing spoiler

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LOS ANGELES -- If you're a San Francisco Giant and you can't make the playoffs, that doesn't mean there isn't any joy left. There's always ruining things for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Anyone who might have thought the Giants had lost interest in this crummy season of theirs, guess again. All you had to do was watch them beat the Dodgers, 1-0, in 11 innings Sunday to win a series that's crucial to the Dodgers, two games to one. Couple that with Arizona's win and the Dodgers' lead in the National League West was trimmed to 2-1/2 games heading into the final week. "Obviously there's a big rivalry here," Giants center fielder Aaron Rowand said. "I'd be lying if I said our guys don't want to be spoilers." They want it so bad they would have stood on their heads to win Sunday. Wait, I think they did. The Giants made at least five brilliant defensive plays to keep the game scoreless through 10. "Everybody got a gold glove out there," said starting pitcher Matt Cain, who worked out of a bases-loaded, no-out jam in the first inning, in part because shortstop Ivan Ochoa made a leaping stab of the first of James Loney's four line drives. Loney alone watched three Giants rob him of hits, always with men on base. Right fielder Nate Schierholtz laid out as far as he could to stab a third-inning shot down the line. Left fielder Randy Winn dirtied his uniform while plucking Loney's two-out, bases-loaded bullet off the grass in the fifth. "You hit a line drive, you think it's going to be a hit," said Loney, who offered only a strange sound while shaking his head when asked what he thought after drilling the ball repeatedly into the gloves of acrobatic Giants. "Phhh-shhhh... spell it anyway you want." It doesn't matter how it's spelled. What it means is, the pennant race is just getting interesting. There also was a great throw from Rowand, who cut down Angel Berroa at the plate in the fifth inning when he tried to score on Andre Ethier's single. On the replay, Berroa appeared to slap the plate with his hand before catcher Bengie Molina tagged him, but this wasn't going to be a Dodgers kind of day. Especially not with the Giants playing as if their postseason hopes were on the line. Heck, even a pitcher who was pinch running, Brad Hennessey, stole the first base of his career in the game-winning rally. "The guys wanted to know why I didn't pick up the base," Hennessey joked. He went to third when Eugenio Velez channeled Usain Bolt to beat out an infield hit, then scored the only run of the game on Rich Aurilia's two-out single off Takashi Saito. Not too long ago, there seemed to an assumption that the Dodgers were locked into the playoffs. That 4-1/2-game lead they held last Tuesday was supposed to be as good as gold. Not so fast with your daily planner there, kids. The reality is, you never know when this Dodgers team might wander off on a losing binge -- especially with the two teams that most enjoy sticking it to the Dodgers, San Diego and San Francisco, happily clogging the schedule the rest of the way. The Padres finish the Dodger Stadium schedule Tuesday through Thursday. The Giants then get the Dodgers at AT& T Park on closing weekend, and we mean that in the most threatening kind of way. The Giants are hoping those games still mean something, too. "Absolutely," Rowand said. "That's what makes baseball exciting." Said Cain: "Of course we want it to come down to the wire and be a part of it. That's fun." Never mind that on Sunday the Giants started five players who spent most of the year at Class AAA Fresno. They've heard of the rivalry there, too. "It's exciting to take games away from (the Dodgers) when they mean a lot to them, even if we don't have a chance," said Schierholtz, who joined the Giants on Sept. 2. "There's no other team we'd rather beat -- maybe even keep them out of (the playoffs)." Schierholtz also went to the grass to steal a hit from Berroa to end the sixth inning. That pretty much finished off the Dodgers, who went on to make 15 more consecutive outs to end the game. Giants closer Brian Wilson polished off the game in the bottom of the 11th by striking out Manny Ramirez on a 98 mph fastball, getting Loney on one more line drive to left field and fanning Casey Blake on a 99 mph fastball. Think Wilson might have been pumped up? The Padres and Giants finished the day a combined 60 games under .500 -- and, no doubt, a combined 20 out of 10 on the Thrilled-To-Play-The-Dodgers-This-Week Scale. Someone asked Ramirez, a veteran of multiple postseasons, if he had any advice for the younger Dodgers. "Don't try too hard. Take it pitch by pitch," he said, adding for good measure, "You can't take nobody for granted." Especially the nobodies right in front of them.(Contact Gregg Patton at gpatton@PE.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)