Padres level the series in a humdinger of a game at Dodger Stadium
Los Angeles Dodgers 3 San Diego Padres 5, 12th October 2022.
Los Angeles Dodgers 3 San Diego Padres 5, 12th October 2022.
The beautiful game of baseball has a habit of recurring and repeating patterns, and of statistical anomalies as well as statistical certainties wrapped in its own vernacular and sprinkled with the fairy dust of sporting contest. Last night (or between the UK hours of 1.37am and 5.14am) Dodger Stadium witnessed a humdinger of a game that had the “no doubters” and crushing Home Runs from the likes of Manny Machado who opened the scoring for the visiting Padres and Freddie Freeman who replied in kind immediately for the hosts in Dodger blue. Machado, on yet another of his pantomime villain returns to Dodger Stadium, was also impassable at 3rd Base with some incredible defensive plays that typified the Padres brilliant all round display, whereas Dodgers shortstop Trea Turner would blot his particular defensive copybook with one, arguably two, error charged fumbles. The lead changed hands in a tight game where the largest deficit was only ever one run until the swing and the “crack of the bat” of Jake Cronenworth in the 8th inning that ended the night’s scoring. Relief pitchers, those hurlers of sporting fireballs, came in to the game after their respective “Aces” had departed to routinely strike out every batter they faced and in a somewhat “Battle of the Bullpens”, the Dodgers blinked first, then twice, and the National League Division Series now heads to San Diego all square at 1–1, and with 3 games available to decide its victor.
Both Machado’s and Freeman’s respective home runs in the game’s 1st inning came with their team on two outs, one of the game’s statistical anomalies and a certainty to drive starting pitchers Clayton Kershaw (Dodgers) and Yu Darvish (Padres) incandescent with rage. Rage turned to boiling point for Darvish who, when spinning from his seemingly endless bag of pitching tricks, he had Max Muncy dead on a looping slow curveball that was ridiculously called a “Ball” rather than the beautifully beguiling “Strike” and indeed strike out that it was. Muncy instead remained in the batters box and waited on another curveball that he then dispatched into the bleachers for what I’m terming the “Curveball Homer” and with Kershaw dropping his looping curveballs and sweeping the grandest of sliders for strikes and strike outs, the lead changed hands at the bottom of the 2nd inning and the Dodgers had their only score line lead of the night.
From 2–1 in favour of the Dodgers at the bottom of the 2nd became a 3–2 lead in favour of the visiting Padres before the hosts levelled matters at 3–3 at the bottom of the 3rd. Clayton Kershaw was his usual dominating self, racking up strike outs but also his pitch count too as it approached 60 after a costly 3rd inning. Ha-Seong Kim and Juan Soto pinched singles before Manny Machado clubbed a RBI scoring double to level the scores at 2–2 before an under pressure Kershaw struck out Brandon Dury. Jake Cronenworth batted in Juan Soto as the Padres regained the lead only for Trea Turner to club an almost exact replica of his Game One home run yesterday down the left field line and into the bleachers, and the game was tied again, now at 3–3.
By the end of the 5th inning our main starting pitchers exited stage left with the score still tied at 3–3 after sharing 13 strike outs between the two ex Dodger Blue teammates, leaving the stage open for the battle of the two most dependable bullpens in all of baseball. The hard throwing Brusdar Graterol uncharacteristically gave up a single on his first pitch to Brandon Dury before Will Myers reached base on one of two uncharacteristic errors from Dodgers shortstop Trea Turner and with Jurickson Profar clubbing a single through the gap between 1st and 2nd base, Trent Grisham scampered home to give the Padres a 4–3 advantage and a decisive score line advantage they’d expand upon in the 8th with Cronenworth’s “bomb” over the left field fences before running with said advantage to the game’s finish line. In yet another unexpected and uncharacteristic error, Blake Treinen was the Dodger pitcher “taken deep” by Cronenworth, but where the Dodgers bullpen blinked, twice, the Padres pen held their nerve, throwing 4 scoreless innings in relief.
In between the scoring innings for the Padres (6th and 8th), both Yency Almonte and Tommy Kahnle “struck out the side in order” for the Dodgers to keep them within scoring reach of the Padres, but Robert Suarez and Nick Martinez combined to set up a 4 out “save” for the hard throwing Josh Hader and although Freddie Freeman’s towering double almost cleared the fences for his second home run of the game it didn’t, and with Will Smith’s game ending fly out came a final 5–3 score line in favour of the San Diego Padres, and their first ever win in a play-off game against their near neighbours from Los Angeles.
This was a tough if self inflicted loss for the Dodgers who left 9 runners on base, out scored the Padres in home runs, hits and perhaps most importantly, errors. The Box Score of the game suggests there was just one Dodgers error but there were in fact two (we can quibble as to how these are scored and who is correct) but the 5–3 score line fact remains as well as underlining yet another of those typical baseball statistical oddities. The Dodgers may hold sway with an enormous regular season domination over the Padres but games one and two in this series have both ended in a 5–3 score line and both games have been as tight as this score line suggests.
A tight and tense weekend of baseball in San Diego awaits!
Two after game quotes to whet your appetite?
“That’s a good ballclub over there,” said Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman. “It’s going to be going back and forth. You have two good teams going at it that have faced each other a lot. There’s really not anything to pinpoint. We just didn’t get the big hit today.”
“It’s going to be wild,” said Juan Soto (of returning home to a play off game in San Diego). “I’ve never played a postseason game there. But I bet it’s going to be pretty loud.”
Thanks for reading. My three most recently published articles are linked below and which hopefully provide a representation of what can be found within my general archives:
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