Steve Webb
LOS ANGELES, CA — It wasn’t supposed to be this way. According to pre-season pundits, the Dodgers had been dethroned as the champs of the West, and were in for a dogfight to get back to the mountaintop. And their main rival was supposed to be the little brother to the south, the San Diego Padres.
AJ Preller, the GM of the Padres, never tired of spending his owner’s money, and had added some more pieces over the off-season after their disappointing finish to 2021. Pitcher Mike Clevinger was off the IL, and would be added to a rotation that included newcomer Sean Manaea, as well as established vets Joe Musgrove, Yu Darvish, and noted Dodger slayer Blake Snell.
The team had lost All-World talent Fernando Tatis Jr. to a boneheaded motorcycle accident during the off-season, but he was going to be due back mid-season to help the Padres with their push to the pennant. And, in a move that was supposed to right the Padres’ sometimes volatile clubhouse, Preller hired experienced A’s skipper Bob Melvin to captain the ship.
And for the first couple months at least, it looked like the Padres might indeed have a shot at winning the division. Even without Tatis, the Friars were playing good baseball in the Spring, and on the 22nd of June, the were in a flat-footed tie with the Dodgers atop the NL West. June, Dodger fans will recall, was not a great month. The Dodgers only posted a record of 14-12 that month, which included such lowlights as getting swept by the lowly Pirates at home.
Yep, so if you were surveying the baseball landscape around the time that spring turned to summer, you’d have expected Padres/Dodgers contests to be hard-fought affairs, all filled with postseason implications. The Padres went into their 4-game series in Dodger Stadium in late June trailing by only 1.5 games. A good series and they would be right back into the thick of the race.
Only problem is, nobody seemed to have told the Dodgers about this plan. The Dodgers won three out of four, outscoring the Friars 17-6. They left that series with a 3.5 game lead and never looked back. A week later, the Dodgers’ lead in the division was up to 8 games and the race was effectively over.
And throughout the summer, the Padres just didn’t play great baseball. Tatis got busted for ‘roids, and the rest of the team (not named Machado) underperformed. Their record for the summer was exceedingly mediocre: 16-13 in June, 11-14 in July, 16-13 again in August. They’ve improved a bit in September, but when you’re chasing the best team in baseball, that’s just not going to get it done.
The Padres were even worse in head-to-head match-ups. After that series in early July, the Dodgers swept San Diego in August, won two of three in Dodger Stadium in early September, and then two of three again in the middle of the month at PetCo Park. Going into the final series of the year, the Dodgers had won 12 of 16 games. Even if they get swept out of San Diego (an unlikely possibility), the Dodgers have crushed the Padres for the second straight year (the Dodgers won the 2021 season series 12-7).
Even the big splash at the trade deadline didn’t seem to make a dent in the Dodgers’ dominance, or even the Padres’ fortunes. Juan Soto and Josh Bell have not been the knockout combination that folks were expecting, and it shows in the San Diego record. At the deadline, the Padres were 60-46. Going into play on Tuesday night, their record stood at 85-68. In other words, their record since the blockbuster trade has been a measly 25-22. Not horrible, but basically treading water.
So the question for the Dodgers in this series is this: do they go for the jugular, and potentially knock the Padres out of the playoffs, or do they rest guys and make pitching decisions that would let the Padres hang onto their Wild Card spot? If the team tried the latter strategy, they would basically be hoping that the Padres would have a puncher’s chance of beating either Atlanta or the Mets, and then the Dodgers would get them in a five-gamer with home field advantage and a short commute.
It’s not the worst idea in the world.
