The San Diego Padres have spent most of their 55 years of existence working to be inoffensive. That effort has been the franchise’s single greatest achievement, give or take the giddy heights of Benito Santiagomania. From their fashion (the too-often maligned and indisputably distinctive color palette) to their cramped geography (surrounded by the Dodgers, Angels, Diamondbacks, the Mexican border, and the Pacific Ocean) to their average finish (76-86, 19 games behind), the Padres have largely stayed out of everyone's way.
But not anymore, and here's some anecdotal proof:
Yes, that's Manny Machado running well out of the baseline to induce and even exacerbate with his head an errant throw from Los Angeles first baseman Freddie Freeman. This happened at the start of Tuesday's six-run San Diego rally that won Game 3 of this National League Division Series and installed the Padres in the uncommon role of noisy neighbor and giant killer, all in one fell swoop. If they beat the Dodgers on Wednesday to clinch the series, the marketing department at Major League Baseball will close their laptops and head for the nearest open window. A league primed to sell Shohei Ohtani to an audience already buying him will instead get to dress up Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill, Jurickson Profar, and Kyle Higashioka.
But before anyone takes the big gravity surf, a bit of strange: In a series that has gone from routine to electrifying to hyperkinetic thanks to projectiles flying into and out of the stands, Game 4 promises us a new twist—both teams being out of pitching. The Padres are going with their best, Dylan Cease, on just three days' rest. This is almost never a good idea, even if, as in this case, the starter in question lasted only 3 1/3 innings in his previous turn. The Dodgers, for their part, are going with no starter at all—the team that seems to start every recent season with a historic bounty of starting pitching could end this one with a bullpen game. One ventures a prediction about tonight's result only if pressed, and provides one only if drunk.
We know this, though. The Padres are finally both poised and equipped to become baseball's noisiest neighbor, the people you never paid much attention to who are now grabbing you by the eyelids and demanding you pay heed. Heed can be hard to come by when the opposition is a leviathan powered by a leviathan, but a 2-1 lead is tough to ignore.
The Padres still have to finish the deal, of course, and a team with only two World Series appearances that included just nine games, eight of which went for the other guy, has no right to assume anything. That’s especially true in what seems from a distance to be a total piefight tonight. But in the face of their well-tended historical anonymity, the Padres have brought attitude as well as talent and money to bear on this challenge and crocheted it all into a captivating wrap of "You gotta see this." Machado's left turn from first to second is a small thing, but between that, Tatis's flexes, Profar's hidden ball trick, and Merrill's barely-legal insouciance, the Padres are daring to be annoying. In doing so, they have enlivened October in a way that they rarely have. Granted, this is not a deep ditch for them to hurdle given that they have missed the playoffs in 47 of those 55 years. But the only thing they can win now is the thing in front of them, so those 47 not-very-near misses don't matter much.
Game 3 was not just about Machado's diabolical sense of direction (the play was, to be fair, legal) or Tatis's debate-crushing homer. It was, 6-5 final score notwithstanding, a pitching triumph. Teoscar Hernandez's third-inning grand slam pulled the Dodgers back into a game they had seemingly been driven from an inning earlier, but the Dodgers added only one baserunner in their subsequent 21 at-bats, a two-out single by all-but-peglegged Freddie Freeman in the eighth inning that resulted in a pinch-runner (Chris Taylor), a new pitcher (closer Robert Suarez), and finally an infield popup by Hernandez. Michael King escaped the grisly third inning by retiring the last eight men he faced, and relievers Jeremiah Estrada, Jason Adam, Tanner Scott, and Suarez were nearly perfect in support.
The Padres' story does not yet deserve to be told because nobody receives poetic waxings without at least getting past the division series, but it should be noted here that these Padres were made not by being polite and wearing business-suit brown—and yes, the initials are purposely the same as the usual diaper-inspired descriptor of their uniforms—but by having an owner in the late Peter Seidler who decided to spend the Padres out of their closet. He entrusted that work to a general manager in A.J. Preller, who repeatedly swung big for players who normally wouldn't be interested in signing with the league’s resident monument to invisibility. Machado and Tatis have long-term $300 million-plus deals, Xander Bogaerts signed for $280 million, Juan Soto could have had one but chose the Yankees as a layover spot until his own free agency, and Cease and Scott were brought into the fold through bold layouts to bolster a pitching staff that was fairly recently Yu Darvish and then a dreary wait for Darvish's turn to come around again. The Padres were a low-to-mid-market spender until 2022, which was when Seidler determined that he couldn't take it with him and was willing to spring for a parade while he could.
Sadly for him, he didn't make it, but that decision is ringing out everywhere this offseason. He dared to go big with a team that had previously avoided the concept like the plague. The Padres were part of baseball's Class Of Misfit Toys, with Montreal (now Washington, after the Padres threatened to move there), Seattle (now Milwaukee) and Kansas City, and now they are on the verge of—well, something. Whatever it is, it promises to be loud, and have a lot of pitching changes.
