Glasnow, Dodgers Host a Giants Team Running Out of Season
The Los Angeles Dodgers welcome a San Francisco Giants squad that has little left to play for, but late-September rivalry games have a way of ignoring the standings. Tonight at Dodger Stadium — first pitch 10:10 PM ET on Apple TV — the gap between these two franchises is about as wide as it gets.
The records tell the story bluntly: the Dodgers sit at 93-60, a team that has spent the better part of this season operating in a different stratosphere, while the Giants come in at 64-89, a club that has been mathematically eliminated from relevance for some time. That 29-game separation in wins is not a gap you paper over with a hot inning or a favorable matchup — it is a structural indictment of where San Francisco is right now versus where Los Angeles has been all year.
On the mound, Tyler Glasnow is expected to start for the Dodgers, and if he takes the hill, the Giants will have their hands full. For San Francisco, Cesar Perdomo is set to take the mound — a tough assignment against a Dodgers lineup that features Freddie Freeman hitting .295 and Max Muncy slugging his way to 28 home runs and 73 RBI on the season. Muncy is the kind of hitter who can single-handedly reshape a game, and a Giants pitching staff that has struggled through a long, difficult year is not an ideal matchup for keeping him quiet. Freeman, meanwhile, is doing what Freeman does — staying disciplined, staying dangerous, and hitting for average in a lineup that already has enough power to punish any mistake.
For the Giants, the most interesting storyline is whether Bryce Eldridge can continue to flash the tools that have made him worth watching in an otherwise forgettable season. His 17 home runs and 57 RBI represent genuine production, and Jung Hoo Lee's .274 average gives San Francisco a legitimate contact option at the top of the order. The Giants are not without weapons — they are just badly outgunned tonight. Our model does not have a validated read on this game, so we are not putting a number on it. What we can say is that the talent disparity here is real, the venue favors Los Angeles, and the Dodgers have every reason to keep their foot on the gas this late in the year.