The San Diego Padres’ performance on Saturday could probably be put in a tutorial video.
Suggested title: How NOT to play a baseball game.
On a night the surging Padres were trying to bounce back from the Dodgers’ opening win in this weekend’s pivotal three-game series, one that tied the two Southern California rivals atop the National League West standings, the club instead put on an exhibition of poor, sloppy and outright comical execution.
While the once-slumping Dodgers have raised their level of play the last two nights, the Padres have made mistakes even Little League coaches would be reprimanding.
Except in their case, even the coaching appeared to be part of the problem.
In the Dodgers’ 6-0 win — a victory that restored their solo lead in the division, and clinched their head-to-head series against the Padres this season — San Diego did all it could to give the game away from the start.
In the top of the first, three of the Padres’ first four batters recorded a hit against Blake Snell, the ex-Padre left-hander making his first start against the team since leaving in free agency at the end of 2023. But twice, Dodgers catcher Will Smith caught a runner trying to steal second, gunning down Fernando Tatis Jr. after his leadoff single before getting Manny Machado on the back end of an attempted double-steal to retire the side.
Bad baserunning wasted another Padres’ chance in the second, with Smith throwing out yet another runner, Xander Bogaerts, at second. It was the Dodgers’ first game with three caught stealings since 2021, and only their second since 2011.
Meanwhile, the Padres’ pitching and defense somehow found a way to be worse.
Starting pitcher Dylan Cease began his outing with three-straight walks in the bottom of the first. After a one-out sacrifice fly from Teoscar Hernández, Cease then reloaded the bases with another free pass to Andy Pages, and followed that with a hanging full-count curveball to Michael Conforto, who ripped a two-run single into right to give the Dodgers a 3-0 lead.
Walks continued to abound in the second, with Cease putting Shohei Ohtani and Smith aboard. This time, he had appeared to work his way out of it, after Freddie Freeman hit a deep fly ball that died at the warning track in right-center. But on this night, even routine outs were no sure thing.
Sensing Tatis converging from right field, center fielder Jackson Merrill briefly hesitated while pursuing the drive, before awkwardly reaching for it with an underhanded attempt. Predictably, he couldn’t hold on, the ball hitting the heel of his mitt before falling to the ground.
The error scored two runs.
The Dodgers (70-53), who went on to get six shutout innings from Snell and a second home run in as many nights from Hernández, would never be threatened again.
To recap the first two innings one more time:
The Dodgers had just one hit, and saw their starting pitcher retire only one of the first five batters he faced — but drew six walks, were gifted a dropped ball and somehow led 5-0.
The Padres (69-54) had four hits — but apparently forgot how to throw up a stop sign, committed the costliest of imaginable errors defensively, and watched their starting pitcher throw 31 balls to only 27 strikes.
That, kids, is decidedly not how it’s done.
Not that the Dodgers seemed all too much to mind.
Over the last couple months, after all, they had been the team on the wrong end of sloppy fundamentals. What was once a nine-game division lead evaporated in the space of six weeks, thanks to unclutch offense, unreliable relief pitching and one maddening close loss after another.
But in Friday’s series opener, they had finally played clean baseball, and even more importantly, grinded out a one-run win.
“If you win the close games, that’s how you build,” Freeman theorized last week. “Then you’ll score nine, 10 runs. Then you’ll start putting some things together. But just need to find a way to win those close ones.”
So far in this series, that prediction has come true.
Not that Freeman, or anyone else with the Dodgers, could have expected the Padres to offer so much self-destructive help.
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