Playoff baseball is (already) here
The San Diego Padres showed up in a 4-3 walk-off extra inning win over the Los Angeles Dodgers in front of a loud home crowd.
For all the right reasons, that felt like a playoff game.
Last night, the San Diego Padres escaped with a 4-3 walk-off win in extra innings over the Los Angeles Dodgers. It ended in one of the least predictable ways possible, with Jorge Alfaro (!) working a bases-loaded walk against Craig Kimbrel to bring home the 10th inning ghost-runner, José Azocar.
This game had everything, good and bad. A gutsy pitching performance from Blake Snell, a shaky pitching performance from Nick Martinez, an incredible defensive moment that got called back on replay, pitchers struggling with control, a Dodgers error to help San Diego take the lead, a Padres error to help the Dodgers tie the game, etc.
I instinctively went into my usual baseball stance, a foot or two away from the TV with my hands over my face, riddled with anxiety over every late-inning pitch. That’s how I knew that the playoff intensity was already here.
The Padres have now gone 8-2 in their last 10 games. The offense and the pitching is about as good as it has been all year. The defense got a little sloppy last night, but that was at the end of a 4+ hour game.
Now, I’m the guy that wrote yesterday about being scared of the Dodgers. It would be inappropriate for me to get up here and say that I’m not anymore after a very convincing win from the Padres.
The Padres have won the first game of the series against the Dodgers the last three times these teams have played. The last two times, they’ve won that game in extra innings.
In the other four games they’ve played against the Dodgers in those series, they went 0-4 and lost by a combined score of 30-11. It’s possible that all last night did is wake the Dodgers up and that they’ll come out like a house on fire tonight.
It’s also possible that the Padres have found something. That they’ve found themselves. That they have found the right mix of confidence and urgency to allow them to play their best baseball every night, something that their manager called them out for about 10 games ago.
I don’t want to say “We’ll find out tonight,” because it’s just one game and one (regular season) game rarely means much of anything in baseball. That being said, we’ll find out a lot tonight. We’ll find out if the Padres looking like actual competition for the Dodgers was the result of the Padres playing better or the Dodgers playing worse.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Bandwagon Beach to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.