Padres slay the dragon, advance to NLCS
Let's revisit the game the Padres needed. The one that proved to them, and everyone else, that they are ready for this moment. That they were built for October.
Sorry if this is a little later than usual. I needed sleep.
The San Diego Padres are heading to the National League Championship Series to take on the Philadelphia Phillies, and the winner of that series will go on to play in the 2022 World Series. That’s amazing!
Even more amazing than that is how it happened. The Padres won a three-game road series against a 101-win New York Mets team in convincing fashion before doing the one thing that they couldn’t do all season long. Hell, the one thing they’ve really been unable to do for years. They beat the Dodgers 3-1 in a 5-game series.
A.J. Preller has been working furiously for years to try and build a roster that could compete with the Dodgers, and Peter Seidler has been willing to sign the checks and pay the penalties with that promise. Some day, this team was going to show up against the Dodgers.
In series after series this year, the Padres went in with the goal of finally showing the Dodgers that they were on the same level. And in not a single one of those six series this season did the Padres win more than a single game. And even after they swung for the fences to acquire Juan Soto and Josh Bell and Josh Hader, they still weren’t able to do it.
Here’s what I wrote in my series preview about this:
If the Dodgers can’t win a single postseason series after that level of regular season success, they will be labeled as frauds or chokers and they’ll get lambasted in the media for not coming through when the games matter most.
What has happened is in the past. It doesn’t matter now. The Padres can achieve glory in this series and the Dodgers can only, at best, avoid abject failure on a national stage. The ships have been burned. There’s only one way to go, one way to legendary status.
Here we go. Legendary status achieved with only more potential glory ahead.
What a team. What a series. What a game. Oh, we should probably talk about the game…
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