The day began with promise and a downtown that was buzzing.
The night was damp and quiet.
And then, bedlam.
And then, more of it. And a continued march toward possible history.
The Padres sent their downtown ballpark and all of their city into a frenzy with a five-run seventh inning Saturday night that propelled them to a 5-3 victory over the hated Dodgers, clinching a trip to the National League Championship Series.
“To beat L.A., it’s huge,” said Wil Myers, a Padre since 2015, longer than any of his teammates. “It’s incredible. I tell you what, all the highs and lows I’ve been through here in San Diego, this makes it all worth it. To win this game here in front of our home crowd was unbelievable. All the games I’ve ever lost to that team up there, I don’t care about them anymore. This is the only one that matters to me.”
A third consecutive victory in the best-of-five NL Division Series made all the losing to the team up the freeway moot as far as 2022 goes.
“These guys handed it to us, took every series from us this year,” manager Bob Melvin said. “So to be able to get one more chance at it in a little different scenario. We’d been playing better leading up to it. We felt confident going in even though we had not taken a series from all year, and once we won that game over there (Wednesday in Game 2), to bring it back home. We felt really confident that we wouldn’t go back to L.A.”
Instead of a Game 5 Sunday in L.A., the Padres will have two days off.
They will host the Phillies in Game 1 of the NLCS on Tuesday at Petco Park (5:07 p.m., FS1). The Dodgers, who won 111 games and beat the Padres 14 of the 19 times they played in the regular season, will watch on TV.
“It means everything, everything,” left fielder Jurickson Profar said. “We’re so happy right now. We played a great series. We know what it means. They beat us all the time during the season. I knew it, we’re gonna win it when it’s gonna hurt. We knew it. … The way we are playing right now. Everybody one through nine is doing great right now, and we will try to keep it going.”
The Padres (89-73) were the No.5 seeds in the NL playoffs. The Phillies (87-75) were the sixth seed in the six -team field.
“They’re on fire right now, and we are on fire, so it’s going to be a great series,” Profar said. “We’re gonna give it everything to go to the World Series.”
The Padres are headed to the NLCS for the first time since 1998. They also went in 1984. Both times, they advanced to the World Series and lost there.
Saturday’s fateful inning, the kind that gets talked about for generations for what happened and the scene around it, began with the Padres down 3-0 and having not scored since the fourth inning on Friday.
Jurickson Profar led off with a walk, moved to third on Trent Grisham’s single and scored on Austin Nola’s single.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts walked to the mound and replaced Tommy Kahnle with Yency Almonte, who had in two appearances in the series struck out all five Padres he had faced.
With the crowd chanting his name, Ha-Seong Kim grounded a two-strike double down the left field line to score Grisham and move Nola to third. With the crowd chanting, “Beat L.A.,” Juan Soto followed with a line drive single that tied the game before Almonte struck out Manny Machado and got Brandon Drury on a pop fly that Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman caught in front of the steps to the Padres dugout.
After Almonte threw a ball to Jake Cronenworth, Roberts again trudged to the dugout and called for left-hander Alex Vesia. It turned out, Almonte was supposed to throw over to first to buy time for Vesia to warm up more rather than make a pitch.
Vesia, who is from Alpine, got up 1-2 on Cronenworth before throwing a ball that evened the count, and with no one covering second base, Soto ran and then shuffled to second base uncontested.
Cronenworth lined the next pitch to center field to bring in Kim and Soto as the crowd roared.
“It was deafening,” Melvin said. “Honestly, when we took the lead it was like an avalanche. And at that point in time, it really felt like there was no way we were going to lose. Our fans have been like that all year for us. No more than (Friday) at the end and certainly once we took the lead today. It felt like it was destined.”
Rain, which had previously fallen briefly and relatively lightly, began to pour in the eighth.
After Robert Suarez retired the Dodgers in order in the top of the inning, the grounds crew essentially covered the mound and batter’s boxes with fresh clay. The infield was starting to hold water as the Padres batted.
Fans were soaked. And they couldn’t care less, and they couldn’t have cared more.
“I was shivering in the owner’s box, and these fans are out there in the rain, and they were partying like crazy,” Padres Chairman Peter Seidler said. “They cheered the last six outs into existence.”
The mound was again repaired before Padres closer Josh Hader warmed up for the ninth, and the area near first base was doctored as Hader warmed up. Meanwhile, San Diego-based band blink-182’s “All the Small Things” played, and it appeared virtually everyone in the ballpark knew the lyrics and sang along.
Padres President of Baseball Operations A.J. Preller and the bulk of his staff watched from his box on the Toyota Terrace level. It had been a tense night.
“I think the one time we all laughed up in the box was when a concert broke out, basically,” Preller said later. “blink-182, the rain was coming down. We’re like, ‘Is this real? Is it not real?’ It was a lot of fun.”
Hader had to face the top of the Dodgers’ order to close it out.
He struck out Mookie Betts and Trea Turner. With the crowd in a full-throated “Beat L.A.,” he struck out Freddie Freeman.
“That’s all I heard,” Hader said. “Beat L.A. That’s all I heard.”
The victory set off a celebration not only in the ballpark but in the surrounding streets that was ongoing still as of 1 a.m.
Before batting around and blowing up one of the major leagues’ top bullpens in the seventh inning, it had been a quiet night for the Padres and the 45,139 who showed up to cheer for them to try to continue on their way to what would be a first World Series title.
At 6:25 p.m., 12 minutes before the scheduled first pitch, it was announced the game would begin at 7:07 p.m. A couple brief showers had soaked downtown earlier and rain would fall a couple times during the early innings.
The game began at 7:08, with Joe Musgrove throwing a strike to Betts.
The crowd was at the start at least as amped and engaged as the previous night. Maybe more so.
It would be almost three hours later before the Padres really gave them something to get excited about for more than a minute.
Musgrove started for the Padres and punched the air in front of him with his fist and let out a yell as he stomped off the mound at the end of the sixth inning. He had struck out Gavin Lux with a fastball on his 101st pitch of the game.
“The stadium kind of elevated a little bit,” Nola said. “The offense was down. That moment right there kind of got us up, like we’re gonna continue to put pressure. Every inning we’re putting pressure, and when you do that every inning it mounts up to the end.”
Musgrove, an El Cajon native, had allowed six hits and walked three.
It was one of those walks that began a two-run third inning. The Dodgers added a run in seventh off Steven Wilson.
Tyler Anderson, a relatively soft-throwing left-hander who baffled the league much of the season and the Padres virtually every time they met, allowed two hits and no runs in five innings.
Save for Nola being up with runners at first and second and two outs in the second inning and Wil Myers being up in the same situation in the sixth, the biggest noise midgame came from the relatively tiny contingent of Dodgers fans in attendance. It was the first time they were heard from in the two games here.
The reason to cheer derived from the lethal top three in the Dodgers’ order giving the visitors a 2-0 lead.
A one-out walk to Betts was followed by Turner’s 109.4 mph grounder that got past Machado and rolled to the left field corner. Freeman then grounded a double down the right field line at 100.5 mph past first baseman Myers to end the Dodgers’ 0-for-20 stretch with runners in scoring position and drive in Betts and Turner.
The trio batted a collective .297 with 77 home runs in the regular season. Freeman, who was 3-for-3 against Musgrove on Saturday and 5-for-9 in ’22, is almost certain to be top-five finisher in NL MVP voting and all three could finish in the top 10.
They would do the bulk of the work for the Dodgers’ third run as well. Wilson walked Betts, Turner moved him over with a bunt single and the bases were loaded when Wilson hit Freeman with a pitch.
Betts scored on a sacrifice fly before Tim Hill came in to retire the next two batters. The next/final six Dodgers would be retired as well.
The Padres’ bullpen allowed one run in 16 innings in the series. The Padres lost 5-3 in Game 1 on Tuesday, won Game 2 by the same score, came home to win 2-1 on Friday and then won the third 5-3 game in the set.
After the final out, most Padres players jumped the dugout railing and ran onto the field. There, they put on “NLCS” t-shirts and hugged and hollered for a good 10 minutes. After he had exchanged an embrace with every teammate, Machado stood in the center of the infield and waved his arms to the crowd, which repsonded by raising its collective voice.
“The fans deserved it, and we gave them a show tonight,” Machado said. “We were down. We came back to win a big game, celebrate in front of them. Nobody in this city deserves it more than those fans and we gave it to them tonight so that was awesome.”
Eventually, players and staff headed into the clubhouse for their third champagne- and beer-soaked celebration in two weeks.
“The best feeling ever,” Hader said. “But we’re not done yet.”
Hader was part of a trade deadline haul by the Padres that included Juan Soto, Josh Bell and Brandon Drury. All of them struggled to some extent, same as the Padres did for much of the year.
“I knew what we had coming over here,” Hader said. “I knew this team was stacked full of studs. It just took some time to get hot at the right time and that’s what we’re doing. We’re not done yet. We still have a lot to do, but to be able to roll into this and beat L.A., it’s amazing.”
