Kirby Lee, Imagn Images
LOS ANGELES -- The proximity alone should have made it one of baseball’s top rivalries. And more than 50 years after it first started, a SoCal turf war finally has considerable national intrigue.
The Padres and Dodgers will meet in the National League Division Series, starting with Game 1 at Dodger Stadium on Saturday, pitting one of baseball’s hottest teams against the one that finished with MLB’s top regular-season record.
After 550 regular-season games against each other over 56 seasons, it will be the third playoff series between the Padres and Dodgers and all have come since 2020, when the pandemic created a 16-team tournament between teams from both leagues. The Dodgers swept the Padres in a best-of-five NLDS and went on to win the World Series.
That 2020 cross-country postseason engagement of more than half of baseball’s fan bases led to an expanded postseason of 12 teams starting in 2022, when the Padres and Dodgers met again. Revenge was earned when the Padres pulled off the 3-0 sweep.
Love thy neighbor, just don’t dare let them get the upper hand.
Last season, the Padres thought a crying Clayton Kershaw meme on the scoreboard would be a good idea, yet they were the ones who started to reek of chopped onions. The Dodgers responded by winning their next five games against the Padres.
The Padres would go on to lose 10 of their next 12 following the water works, barely finish above .500 at 82-80 and fail to make the playoffs. They went 4-9 against the Dodgers, turning ball into bawl.
So this season they bucked conventional thinking by bidding farewell to a trio of stars in Blake Snell, Josh Hader and Juan Soto. They added right-hander Dylan Cease to the rotation, made right-hander Robert Suarez the closer and turned loose rookie center fielder Jackson Merrill.
The Dodgers might have clinched the NL West by winning two of three against their rivals during the last week of the regular season, but the Padres took the season series by winning eight out of 13 games.
It was the first time the Padres won the season series against the Dodgers since they went 10-8 in 2010.
Cease and Merrill don’t know anything about the Padres’ past struggles against the Dodgers. They just know they are members of a balanced roster that just rolled past the Atlanta Braves in the wild-card round to dispatch any insecurities they might have developed by losing a series at Dodger Stadium last week.
Asked about playing in a hostile environment Saturday and Sunday, Merrill sounded like he was headed to a rock concert.
“It's going to be unreal,” said Merrill, a rookie-of-the-year candidate with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Paul Skenes. “I know it's going to be loud and energetic.”
Merrill’s two-run triple capped a five-run first inning and he helped seal the victory in the ninth inning by tracking down a drive to center in the ninth inning that could have helped the Braves tie the score.
“We're going to play our A game. We're going to play our Padres baseball,” said the Maryland native, who grew up a Boston Red Sox fan. “We're going to go at them.
"I just want our guys to be ready and trust each other.”
Kirby Lee, Imagn Images
The Dodgers, tertiary premium of course, have more than a 56,000-seat stadium full of rabid fans to raise the intimidation factor. They have Shohei Ohtani fresh off a 50-50 season and a likely NL MVP Award to muddle scouting reports and attack plans.
In a bit of a twist, it is actually the 21-year-old Merrill who now has more playoff games to his credit (two) than Ohtani (zero).
In 12 games against the Padres this season, seven of Ohtani’s 15 hits went for extra bases. He had a home run with seven RBIs and batted .326 with a .922 OPS. In the final three-game series against the Padres he was 6 for 11 with three doubles, three RBIs and a stolen base.
But Ohtani can’t win a series alone and the Dodgers have issues just about everywhere on the roster. That Padres series might have clinched the division for the Dodgers but it came at a cost when both shortstop Miguel Rojas (groin) and first baseman Freddie Freeman (ankle) came away with injuries. Both insist they will play this weekend.
The Dodgers will send right-handers Jack Flaherty and Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the mound in the first two games of the series, but Yamamoto has pitched four times and never more than 79 pitches since returning from a three-month absence because of a shoulder injury.
Walker Buehler could be the Game 3 starter after a rocky season when he was returning from a two-year recovery from a second Tommy John surgery. Beyond that, manager Dave Roberts could be looking at a bullpen game in front of right-handed rookie Landon Knack.
The Padres do have their own pitching concern after Joe Musgrove left Wednesday’s game with a sore elbow, but Cease is lined up to pitch Game 1 on Saturday and Yu Darvish is set to go in Game 2 on Sunday.
“It would've been easy for us to make excuses,” Roberts said. “You lose three, four, five, six, seven starters, write the season off.
"But not one person in this clubhouse did that. We never once made any excuses. We continued to stick together, to fight and now we got a ticket to the dance. Anything can happen."
