Is this the year the Padres will finally win it all?
Watching them up close six times over the past ten days. Their best player is a guy who bats seventh
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The Dodgers and Padres played six games over the past 10 days, with the Dodgers sweeping the three in Los Angeles and the Padres taking two of three in in San Diego.
The division standings now look like this:
Dodgers 74-57*
Padres 74-57
*Note: the reason I have the Dodgers ahead of the Padres here is because they hold the tiebreaker if the two teams were to finish with the same record, since they won the season series over San Diego. So when you see LA and SD “tied” in the standings, add a half game to the Dodgers’ ledger.
It’s kinda hard to get a clear view of how the Dodgers look right now, as Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw, and Shohei Ohtani are all finally healthy for the first time all year—and their ability to go deeper into games to protect the team’s exhausted bullpen should start to pay dividends very soon. (It only took four guys to collect the final nine outs of the game yesterday, instead of the usual 5-6).
If the playoffs started today I’m looking at the Dodgers rotation and thinking: this is perhaps the best group of starting pitchers since those 90’s Braves teams that featured peak Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, and Steve Avery, etc. (Though I don’t know who Avery is in this situation—maybe Glasnow?).
But I’m not ready to declare the Dodgers the obvious World Series favorites yet because they hit Michael Conforto clean-up the other day, in the year of our lord 2025. This is because Kiké Hernandez, Tommy Edman, Max Muncy, and Hyeseong Kim are all injured, and their current replacements are….Alex Freeland, Buddy Kennedy, Alex Call, and Justin Dean. This is also because Andrew Freidman is a stubborn MF who does not want to admit the Conforto signing was a disaster in more ways than one, as it forces Teoscar Hernandez to play right field instead of left field, and he has been atrocious in right. This has to be Conforto’s last week on the team and I wish him well.
The other issue is Dodgers bullpen. There’s a universe where Tanner Scott, Kirby Yates, Blake Treinen, and Michael Kopech all come back and are awesome, Kiké, Kim, Edman, and Muncy eventually join the fun and the offense takes off again, and this team plays the remaining 31 games of the season at a 25-6 clip. No pressure!
A few thoughts on the Padres, though, as they’re more interesting to me right now:.
First: they absolutely pantsed the Dodgers at the trading deadline, and I’m not talking about Mason Miller, who they gave up a top ten prospect for and who has been….just OK so far. (Though they see him as a long-term play, and potentially may even try to convert him into a starting pitcher).
The obvious place the Padres kicked the Dodgers ass was in trading for Ramón Laureano, who has been San Diego’s best player (IMO) for the last month.
