Whicker: Brandon Crawford, Giants put focus on value of defense

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As legend has it, a reporter arrived late to Dodger Stadium one night because he was involved in a serious accident at the corner of Jack and Daniels.

He walked into the press box in the fourth inning or so and demanded that a colleague “catch me up” on the action. Seizing the scorebook and shaking off the cobwebs, he noticed a small asterisk next to two plays.

“What does this mean?” he asked.

He was told that each star signified outstanding defense.

“Humpf,” he declared. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

It’s nice to maintain a high bar, or to sit at one. It’s nicer to exceed it.

The Giants split their first two National League Division Series games with the Dodgers on Friday and Saturday and are uncomfortably matched against three-time Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer in Game 3 on Monday night. But it took the Dodgers a game and a half to figure out safe spaces against San Francisco’s defense.

On Saturday, 36-year-old third baseman Evan Longoria sprawled and threw and retired Chris Taylor. Kris Bryant, playing perhaps his fourth-best position, dived to deny Trea Turner a line-drive single in center field.

On Friday, Tommy La Stella and Brandon Crawford came up with that glove-flip double play on Justin Turner that you might have 100 more chances to see again. “We don’t spend a lot of time practicing that,” Manager Gabe Kapler said, superfluously.

Giants pitcher Logan Webb, the Game 1 winner, absorbed J. Turner’s comebacker off his leg and kept his cool long enough to make the play.

This helps explain the Giants to the agnostics in our midst. They married ground-ball pitching with defensive virtuosity. Only the Phillies allowed a higher percentage of grounders than the Giants (45.1 percent), and San Francisco pitchers had the best walk percentage (6.9) in baseball. Former Dodger Alex Wood, the Game 3 starter, persuades ground balls on 50 percent of his live action.

The Dodgers actually had the best defensive efficiency in the majors, a construct invented by Baseball-Reference.com. In the sixth inning Saturday, right fielder Mookie Betts fired from right field and caught Wilmer Flores trying to take third on Crawford’s single. That killed San Francisco’s rally after one run and preserved the Dodgers’ margin at 6-2. It wound up 9-2, yet that play was disproportionately analyzed. That’s the playoffs. Defense, hidden behind the regular-season curtain, always commands the stage.

Crawford, who leads all shortstops in Fangraphs’ Revised Zone Rating, is being nominated for the National League MVP because of that. Defensive analytics are basically in the beholder’s eye, but Crawford made nine errors in 135 games without sacrificing range at age 34.

He also made an extraordinary offensive comeback. Last year Crawford endured the first 20 games without an extra-base hit. This year he hit .290 with an .895 OPS, and 24 home runs and 90 RBIs. All those numbers are career highs for a lifelong Giants fan who grew up withstanding the winds at Candlestick Park, seeking autographs from Willie Mays (successfully) and Barry Bonds (not), and holding together the infield for the 2010, 2012 and 2014 world champions.

All of that provided an unforeseen, $32 million, two-year contract extension,

“Stud,” Trea Turner, the Dodgers’ shortstop-turned-second baseman, replied when asked about Crawford. “He’s always been a good player, unbelievable defense, but this year he’s a guy you want to avoid. You don’t want to see him come up there in any situation, really.”

In a fairly fluid MVP race, it’s difficult to ignore the beating heart of a team that zoomed from a .483 win percentage to .660.

Crawford was a fourth-round pick, out of UCLA, but might have gone higher if he hadn’t declined to play a second year for Team USA, where he was being platooned with Zack Cozart. Instead he went to the Cape Cod League, with wood bats and some of the best college pitchers, and struggled.

That followed him into the draft. Three years later he was wearing a Giants jersey and standing at shortstop, on the ground where he used to watch Rich Aurilia and Omar Vizquel.

“He’s just a magician with a baseball,” UCLA coach John Savage said. “You can see some of the things he does on YouTube. At UCLA he loved to play defense, to the point where we’d have to march him to the cage to work on offense. That’s one of his goals, to start his career at shortstop and end it there. With those feet and that arm, he should have a chance.

“We’d go over to the football practice field some days and mess around, and he’d look like a Pac-12 quarterback out there. He’s just one of those athletes.”

In the fractions of a second that produce playoff defense, the athletes tend to come out, as do the stars.

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