Whicker: Dodgers’ Walker Buehler was good, but beating Giants requires perfection

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.

This was the Giants’ 108th win of 2021.

“I battled as long as I could,” Buehler said. “There was a lot of excitement out there today, as there will be in our park. It is what it is, a good night for them, a bad one for us, and we’ll move on.”

It would have been a very good night for Buehler if not for one pitch in the first inning. With two out he fell behind Posey, 3-and-0, and tried a high fastball. He said he wasn’t surprised that a probable Hall of Famer took the liberty of swinging there, but in any event the ball got higher, in a hurry. Buehler got too much of the plate, and Posey unloaded, over Levi’s Landing and into the net of a boatman hanging out in McCovey Cove. It was a 2-0 lead for a crowd accustomed to getting what it wants.

Buehler looked out stoically, then gave the resin bag a hard spike.

“You’re trying to build momentum for your team,” he said. “Then I went out there and sucked the momentum out of our dugout.”

“After that, I thought he really settled in,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.

He did. From the second through the sixth innings, San Francisco did not get a runner to second base and had only four singles. Buehler was mixing slow curves to go along with all the other high-test stuff and was getting the Dodgers off the field and into the dugout quickly.

But the offense was as stymied by Webb as it was by Adam Wainwright during Wednesday’s wild-card game, and now has scored three runs in two games. Webb relied on a secret weapon called “pitching.” Changeups here, sliders there, an occasional high fastball to keep everything in line. He made the Dodgers hit four comebackers to him, three of which were outs. He also ended five innings with strikeouts, and stranded Corey Seager and Will Smith after their doubles.

No, Toto, they’re not in Colorado and Arizona and San Diego anymore.

The Dodgers were still within a bloop and a blast of tying it until Kris Bryant, whom the Giants pilfered during the Cubs’ midsummer yard sale, came up in the seventh. On a 2-and-2 count, he hit a flat slider into the townspeople in left field, and Buehler put his hands on his knees and stared at the mound. After Mike Yastrzemski hit a liner to Trea Turner, Roberts came to the mound, received a death stare from Buehler and returned with the ball. Buehler had thrown a six-hitter and given up three runs.

Second baseman Donovan Solano gloved the 27th out, from Smith’s bat, and the Giants trotted toward each other and made it seem like just another win in August.

Don’t expect the Dodgers to use Buehler on Tuesday if they trail the best-of-five series, 2-1. He would have only three days’ rest, with 207 innings on the odometer.

Unless the Dodgers win the next three games, Buehler will climb the same mound he left Friday. It is a chance he would take, make no mistake.