The Padres' road troubles
The San Diego Padres are searching for some normalcy away from Petco Park as they head to Miami with a .500 road record.
There’s no two ways about it, the San Diego Padres have been terribly unlucky on road trips lately.
I don’t mean in the way that their performance has been bad, although that’s also mostly true. The Padres are 23-23 away from Petco Park this season, and 4-5 so far in the month of July.
I mean that the Padres are having a hard time simply playing games away from Petco Park. In their first road trip of the month, they faced six rain delays across six games in Cincinnati and Philadelphia.
During the current road trip, the Padres have faced rain delays, game postponements, and multiple game suspensions (once due to rain and once due to a nearby shooting).
I believe the last time the Padres went to another team’s ballpark and played a full series of scheduled games on time was over a month ago, June 14th through the 16th, in Colorado. That’s the series where the Padres got swept by the Rockies.
The rest of the Braves game
The game against the Braves last night was suspended, just a few outs shy of being called, and will need to be picked up and played at some point. When and where are the important questions.
Understanding that those questions are usually settled through negotiations between the GMs of the two teams, and occasionally sorted out by the league office when the two sides can’t come to an agreement, here’s my best guess on what will happen:
Option 1: What works best
The Braves and Padres are scheduled to play a three-game series at Petco Park in late September, and they even have an off-day after the series.
The two teams could pick up the rest of yesterday’s game before or after one of the two scheduled games and play it by road rules even though it would be in front of a home crowd for the Padres.
Option 2: Competition!
If the Braves wanted, they could refuse to give up their competitive advantage as the home team. In all likelihood, the league would side with them in any dispute and force the Padres to fly back to Atlanta to play the final 2.5 innings of the game.
That would be ridiculous, of course (and could potentially anger the MLBPA), but it is something that the Braves could push for if they are competing with the Padres for the second Wild Card spot.
I don’t think the league would push back their playoff schedule by a day for it to happen, which means the Padres would probably lose an important off-day in September flying to Atlanta for this stupid purpose.
The closest they get to Atlanta the rest of this season is St. Louis, where they’ll be leaving on September 19th with an off day on the 20th.
If they ended up flying to Atlanta to finish the game on the 20th, it would mean 17 games in 17 days for the Padres. And travel for the trip would look like this:
San Diego to Los Angeles
Los Angeles to San Francisco
San Francisco to St. Louis
St. Louis to Atlanta
Atlanta to San Diego
Oh, and they’d play the Dodgers at the beginning and end of that particular stretch of hell.
Suffice to say, Padres fans should spend the next month rooting very hard against the Atlanta Braves. The less those couple of innings matter, the more likely they are to let the Padres keep their off-days and travel schedule the way it is currently set.
All the weird things
Because yesterday’s game was supposed to be a 7 inning game, one half of a doubleheader, it has to be finished as a 7 inning game. That means that there are only 15 outs left for this one to be wrapped up, and that the rain showed up about 3 outs too early.
If the game is indeed finished at Petco Park, I believe the Padres will wear home uniforms and the Braves would wear road uniforms. However, the Braves would be batting at the bottom of each inning. That would be odd!
And, of course, rosters would change between now and then. Players who are in the box score as having played, or maybe even marked as being currently in the game, won’t even be in the stadium when the game is completed.
A quick peek at the standings
The Padres were looking to make up some ground in the NL West with two wins yesterday, but it wasn’t meant to be.
5.5 games back with 9 games left against the Dodgers and 7 games left against the Giants is not the end of the world, but it’s not great.
The Padres need to start beating up on the lesser teams they face between now and the end of August so that they can try and shrink that window. They could do a lot with a four-game sweep in Miami, starting today.
These are the wild card standings. The Padres have a very large lead over the Reds and everyone else. The chances of the Padres not ending up in the playoffs shrink smaller every day, thankfully, but that doesn’t mean they can or should stop trying to pass the Dodgers (and Giants) for home field advantage or a chance of avoiding the play-in game.