LOS ANGELES — Dodgers players and coaches say they’ve moved on from last postseason’s drama with the Cardinals, but Dodgers fans most certainly haven’t.
In the first inning of the first game of last year’s NLCS, LA's Hanley Ramirez was hit in the ribs with a 95 mph Joe Kelly fastball. While many fans viewed this as an intentional attempt to remove Ramirez from the series, Dodgers manager Don Mattingly has stated time and again that the team didn’t see it that way. In fact, Mattingly might be a little sick of the topic.
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“There’s been three or four days of that talk of last year and everything else,” he said Friday before the start of Game 1 of this year's NLDS against the Cardinals. “I don’t think it’s something you think of as a hitter. I don’t ever remember walking up there worrying about if a guy was going to hit me or not.”
While Mattingly might find the notion of a Cardinals vendetta against Ramirez unlikely, Dodgers fans seem to overwhelmingly believe there’s something to it. In July, the belief was strengthened when Cardinals pitchers hit a certain Dodgers player twice in one game.
Who was it? Hanley Ramirez.
It seems highly unlikely that any of these pitches were intentional, but try telling that to a Dodgers fan.
Ashley Williams, who lives in Phoenix, drove 394 miles to be at Friday’s game. “I don’t trust these Cardinals,” Williams said. “Everyone is worried about it. I met at least seven other fans on my drive from Arizona, and they were all talking about (it). The general consensus is that people are starting to hate the Cardinals more than the Giants.”
Philip Beber, who attended Friday’s game with a large group of Dodgers fans, agreed. “I think you could call them the Giants of the East,” he said of the NL Central champions.
Coming from Dodgers fans, that’s about as serious an allegation as one could make.
Brian Gilstrap, who attended Friday’s game with his mother, 90-year-old Lilla Gilstrap, also agreed that the Dodgers-Cardinals rivalry is reaching a peak.
“For a long time, the Cardinals had our number. We’re finally getting one up on them,” he said. When asked what he thought about Kelly hitting Ramirez last postseason, Gilstrap replied, “I felt it was intentional. What better way to get an upper hand? And it worked. It’s dirty baseball, personally.”
Ramirez missed Game 2 and was 2-for-15 in the series.
Lilla Gilstrap has been attending Dodgers games since they played at the Coliseum, and as Brian noted, fans have long memories. “People remember, even two to three years later. If somebody gets hit, it wouldn’t surprise me. And if they do, I think it’s going to be pretty ugly. It’ll turn into a (beanball) situation,” he said.
So while Friday's events may have surprised some, plenty of Dodgers fans saw it coming a mile away.
With the Cardinals leading 1-0 in the third inning, Yasiel Puig took an Adam Wainwright pitch to the upper left arm. The stadium held its collective breath. All seemed well as Puig headed down the line to take first. Then Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez stepped to the plate, exchanged words with Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina, and, well . . . it went downhill from there.
While the benches-clearing incident that followed was tame compared to others in recent Dodgers history, tensions were high. There were no ejections and no retaliatory hits (umpires warned both dugouts after the get-together), but from that moment the game went from being the pitchers’ duel between Wainwright and Clayton Kershaw that everyone expected to a bizarre high-scoring rollercoaster, including an eight-run seventh inning that propelled the Cardinals to a wild 10-9 victory.
When asked about his interaction with Molina, Gonzalez was quick to call it “a friendly conversation," adding: “I mean, I was just basically saying like, you know, you guys keep doing this over and over and we’re not going to put up with that. You know they’re going to say it’s not on purpose but, you know, come on. It’s Wainwright, he knows where the ball’s going.”
Molina’s response? According to Gonzalez it was, “He said we gotta respect him, which, I thought that was out of context.”
While Gonzalez made it clear he doesn’t think these are accidents, Mattingly and even some Dodgers fans disagree.
“I played pro ball in the minor league system. I never hit somebody on purpose. The ball actually can get away,” said Len Davis. “When you’re a fan, you can say anything. But 95 percent of the time, it’s not on purpose.”
Charles Chavez, seated a row in front of Davis, turned around to join the conversation. “If the game’s on the line, you don’t hit somebody,” Chavez said.
Davis responded, “I’ll be serious with you, if you got a guy on base and you’re trying to win, you ain’t going to hit nobody.”
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Puig gave Wainwright a bit of a bro hug after everything settled down, so it seems he didn’t believe there was any ill intent.
Wainwright himself said after the game he wasn't trying to hit Puig.
"I walked over to Yasiel and I said, 'Hey that was my bad. I didn't mean to do that,'" Wainwright said, per The Associated Press. "I just didn't want it to be a sideshow. Obviously you don't want to wake a sleeping dog, and I didn't want our team to lose its focus. I tried to clear the air there."
But when it comes to fans, emotions tend to outweigh logic and words. And as one noted, this year’s situation is a lot different than last year’s. “Last year we were depending on Hanley,” said Ramiro, who declined to give his last name. “This year, we got a lot of guys carrying it. Right now, everybody’s hot.”
Fans seemed to believe that with Kershaw and Wainwright on the mound, Game 1 at least would be drama-free. And yet, here we are again.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to get into that. There’s no reason to get into it. It wasn’t really . . . I know it’s a good story and everybody likes writing it, but for us we got to win a game. It’s all about trying to win a game,” Mattingly said postgame.
For the players, that may well be the truth. For the fans, though, the story remains a good (and a real) one.
Erin Faulk is a documentary filmmaker and writer based in the Los Angeles area, best known for a unique brand of storytelling on Twitter. Examples of her work have appeared on Slate, Gawker, Jezebel and other sites.