It was born of privilege greater than any of its predecessors had known and reveled in much of its time with an oversized bejeweled spinning necklace.
It made history in the beginning and for months had a ballpark rocking and a city believing.
And then it got weary and worn down and slowly devolved into irrelevance. Its ultimate demise remains shocking even though it had become expected.
On Saturday, the Padres’ 2021 season expired in front of a national television audience. It was just 155 games old.
“Pretty wild when you sit here and look eight days before the season ends and we could be eliminated today,” right fielder Wil Myers said. “It’s almost sickening. It’s a tough deal.”
Myers spoke Saturday afternoon, while the team’s postseason hopes were still on life .
The ultimate cause of death was officially a 10-8 loss to the Atlanta Braves in 10 innings at Petco Park combined with being run over by the St. Louis Cardinals, who on Saturday won a franchise-record 15th consecutive game.
“It’s definitely a downer,” third baseman Manny Machado, who hit a grand slam Saturday, said after the game. “Beginning of the year, we were not expecting this.”
Ends are always sudden. But the Padres’ season had been ailing for weeks, if not longer.
There were so many ailments, it got impossible to enumerate.
“I don’t know that there is necessarily an answer,” starting pitcher Joe Musgrove said recently. “We’ve all been searching for it for the last month-and-a-half.”
Starting pitcher Vince Velasquez allowing two runs in three innings and the bullpen surrendering runs Saturday was illustrative of the Padres’ shortcomings. They did hit three homers and score eight runs, facets that have been missing much of the summer.
“You can’t pinpoint anything,” Machado said. “It’s a long season. A lot of things happen. We didn’t play good baseball. We got injured. Can’t point out one thing.”
Padres eliminated from postseason; Tingler, Machado on a disappointing season
Time remains to unpack the forensics of a most disappointing campaign — in fact, arguably the most disappointing campaign in the 53 seasons of the major league Padres.
Virtually every preseason projection and statistical model had them winning between 94 and 98 games.
With seven games remaining, they are 78-77.
“It’s tough to put into words,” manager Jayce Tingler said of the disappointment felt in the clubhouse.
Whatever autopsies reveal, the fact is the Padres spent like never before and expected something that had never happened before — that the team with the club-record payroll, which at $175.8 million is now eighth highest in the major leagues, would win the franchise’s first championship.
That was the hope of team Chairman Peter Seidler and the other owners who pitched in to make that payroll possible. And it was expected by the people who will ultimately foot the bill for that payroll.
Even with the first 35 home games of the season played while statewide COVID restrictions limited attendance, the Padres will draw almost 2.2 million fans to Petco Park this season. That is more than they drew in seven of the previous 11 seasons in which full capacity was allowed.
The season provided plenty of promise early on, even if hindsight provides a fuller view of the inconsistency exhibited throughout.
Musgrove ended the franchise’s run of 8,205 games without a no-hitter on April 9. The Padres won four of seven games they played against the Dodgers over 10 days in April, including three of four at Dodger Stadium as Fernando Tatis Jr. hit five home runs in the final three of those. In May, the Padres went 9-0 on a homestand for the first time since 2009. That’s when the Swagg Chain made its debut.
A 4-11 start to June was followed by an 11-1 finish to the month. They limped into the All-Star break but came out of it by scoring a franchise-record 24 runs in a victory over the Washington Nationals.
They finished a 10-day trip on July 25 with a 5-4 record and a new second baseman, as General Manager A.J. Preller sent prospects to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Adam Frazier. It was expected that would be the first of many moves, including at least one for a starting pitcher.
Instead, the Dodgers got the Padres’ No. 1 target, pitcher Max Scherzer, while the Padres acquired reliever Daniel Hudson and fifth outfielder Jake Marisnick and Preller failed in a quest to unload first baseman Eric Hosmer. Not getting a starting pitcher via trade disappointed Padres players; trying to trade Hosmer angered them.
What happened on July 30, it could be argued, was the season taking a tumble from which it couldn’t quite recover.
Hours after the trade deadline ed, starting pitcher Chris Paddack suffered a strained oblique while throwing a bullpen session. And in the first inning of that night’s game, Tatis dislocated his shoulder for the third time in the regular season, which caused him to miss two weeks. Also in that game, rookie pitcher Ryan Weathers surrendered eight runs in four innings. The left-hander had a 2.73 ERA when that game began, giving Preller confidence he didn’t need to spend prospect capital to add a middle-of-the-rotation starting pitcher.
That may have been a fatal misstep, as Weathers went on to allow 23 more runs in his next five games (16 2/3 innings), Paddack wouldn’t pitch for a month and Yu Darvish would go on the injured list with a back injury aggravated during a start on Aug. 12 in Arizona.
That was the first day of a road trip that, if a single week can, defines the ’21 season’s legacy of ineptitude and injury.
The Padres were shut out 7-0 by the Marlins on Aug. 11 and then embarked on a seven-game road trip to play the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies. They went 1-6 against the NL West’s two bottom dwellers.
That concluded a 38-game stretch in which the Padres played just seven games against teams that currently possess a winning record. They went 18-20 in that span.
Now, to finish above .500, they have to go 4-3 against the Braves (one game), Dodgers (three) and Giants (three). All those teams are fighting for their division title, and the Padres have not gone 4-3 in a seven-game stretch since doing so from Aug. 30 to Sept. 7.
At that time, on Aug. 10, they were 17 games over .500 and had a 4½-game lead in the race for the National League’s second wild-card spot.
Their final meaningful gasp came Saturday, because by that time they had fallen eight games behind the Cardinals with seven games to play.
“It’s too early to tell,” Machado said when asked what has to change for the next season to be different. “… Obviously, we fell short. We are all down about it. We were expecting something that didn’t happen.”
