LOS ANGELES — All season, the Giants have harbored the suspicion that they are better than the Dodgers. They might have been alone in this opinion: Los Angeles had captured the past eight division titles. It had won more games than any other team in baseball by a wide margin. It employed three former MVPs and three former Cy Young Award winners. (It would add another of each partway through the year.) Meanwhile, San Francisco was coming off a losing season.
But the Giants believed. They believed all the way to a 10–9 head-to-head record against their rivals, to a franchise-record 107 regular-season wins, to a division title nabbed on the last day of the season—and now to a decisive Game 5 of the National League Division Series.