SAN DIEGO — Nights like this, when the weekend rolls around and the Los Angeles Dodgers are in town, don’t often feel like home field advantage for the San Diego Padres. So many Dodgers fans make the 125-mile drive south that Petco Park is often referred to as “Dodger Stadium South” when the two teams meet. But that was not the case on Friday and Saturday. Petco Park, which had waited 16 years to host fans for a postseason game, was packed with locals who cheered the Padres on and filled this baseball park with “Beat LA” chants that felt deafening at times. And when Josh Hader recorded the finals to cap a thrilling 5-3 win in Game 4 of the National League Division Series, the place erupted with joy.
The Padres – the same Padres who have spent most of their lives chasing the decorated franchise north – are advancing to their first NL Championship Series since 1998. They will take on upstart Philadelphia Phillies and take home field advantage for the first time in the playoffs. The Padres went on to beat the New York Mets with 101 wins in the wildcard round last weekend, then won three straight games against a 111-win Dodgers team they’ve had over the past six months had dominated.
“It took a team effort to beat a really good team,” said Padre’s third baseman Manny Machado, “and we did that tonight.”
The Padres held a lead throughout Game 3 but fell behind early in Game 4. By the time the seventh inning came, they were 3-0 down and lying on their last nine outs — while facing the bleak prospect of returning to LA and taking on Dodgers ace Julio Urias in a winner-take-all game 5
Then the Padres staged their biggest rally of the year.
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Jurickson Profar, Trent Grisham and Austin Nola — who have been bottom of the lineup all month — all made it to start the inning against the Dodgers’ bullpen. Ha-Seong Kim, the daily shortstop in place of the suspended Fernando Tatis Jr., doubled down the left field line and made it a one-run game. Juan Soto, the big midseason signing, put in a base hit down the right flank to level the score. And Jake Cronenworth, who has established himself as a cornerstone, set up a two-run two-out singles at center against left-hander Alex Vesia, giving the Padres a two-run lead they wouldn’t give up.
The Padres, an 89-win team that went No. 5 this postseason, became the fifth team to win multiple series in a single postseason against opponents who had 10 or more wins than the regular season. The Dodgers were particularly dominant towards them. LA won its last nine regular-season games against the Padres in 2021, then won 14 of 19 regular-season games in 2022 and more than doubled that many runs in head-to-head games.
The Dodgers’ loss marked the first time a team lost a playoff series to a division opponent after not losing a series to that team in the regular season, according to research by Elias Sports Bureau.
Additionally, the Padres finished as +190 underdogs at Caesars Sportsbook to win the series, making this the second-biggest betting disruption in a playoff series in the past 10 seasons. (The Washington Nationals were +195 to beat the Houston Astros in the 2019 World Series.)
“There are a lot of good players over here,” said Soto. “I’m happy to be a part of it and I think we have everything we need to achieve our goal.”
The Dodgers spent all season thinking the same thing. They set a franchise record for wins and a plus-334 run difference that became the fourth-largest in history, but they again fell short. The Dodgers have won the NL West nine times in the past 10 years — the only year they didn’t win gave them 106 wins and fell a game down by a title — but they only have one World Series championship won during this stretch at the end of the 2020 season shortened by the pandemic.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, a former Padres player and coach, called this latest loss “devastating.”
“Every player gave everything they had all year and had a great season,” said Roberts. “The great thing about baseball is the unpredictability, and the difficult thing about it is the same. Things could have gone either way today to affect the outcome of the game. It didn’t. We were beaten in a series. Nothing I I can say it will feel better. Obviously we didn’t expect to be in that position.”
This series marked the second time in postseason history that one team eliminated another after winning 22 fewer games in the regular season, most recently during the 1906 World Series.
The Padres had high expectations for entering the 2021 campaign but fell down the track in dramatic fashion. The offseason that followed brought a new manager in Bob Melvin, one of the sport’s most revered, and the thought that this franchise might finally take off.
The Padres navigated like a puzzle for most of the following season, often following dominant sections with bad ones. Their hyper-aggressive general manager, AJ Preller, traded for Soto before the trade deadline and shut out Hader, but those moves were followed by the startling revelation that Tatis, the face of their franchise, had tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance. The Padres persevered and did just enough to secure a spot in Major League Baseball’s expanded postseason field. And when the playoffs started, they were suddenly playing their fiercest baseball of the season. Her fans naturally got behind her.
“The crowd was amazing,” said Joe Musgrove, the local hero and lifelong Padres fan who fielded six innings of two-run ball in Game 4. “It was everything I could have imagined.”