The Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres played 30 overs of baseball over the weekend and were separated in two but three runs or less. Friday’s game stretched over 12 overs and consisted of 17 pitches and four draws. Saturday’s game ends on a Mookie Betts dive with the tie in the points standings. Sunday’s game was only decided in eighth place. The Dodgers won 2 of 3, but the Padres reached the series final to reach their losing streak of seven games against them.
The Dodgers, winners of eight straight before Sunday, have a best 13-3 record in the league, 3½ games better than the Padres in the National League West. But the teams will meet again in four days for the start of a series of four games at Dodger Stadium.
“It’s a good preview for many more – both teams play with a lot of energy and play the game as it’s supposed to play,” said Padres manager Jayce Tingler. “There’s a lot of emotion, it’s great to pull off the fans’ energy, and just the back-and-forth fights. I know for the guys playing there, it’s very easy to get up. “And there’s a lot of adrenaline rushing in the stadium, and you almost have to be locked up.”
Below is a look at what we can take away from an opening series that somehow surpasses the hype that comes in.
Includes games in abundance: Trevor Bauer bumped into his chest and roared as he drove back into the Dodgers’ excavation Sunday at the end of the sixth inning. He just passed a fast ball of 97 km / h past Fernando Tatis Jr. blew, and made another stellar outing that lowered his ERA to 2.42 and increased his total for a lead of 36 in the NL. The six starting scandals in this series – Bauer, Blake Snell, Clayton Kershaw, Yu Darvish, Walker Buehler and Ryan Weathers – combined over the weekend for a 1.60 era, which is not much surprising. These are perhaps the two best starting rotations in baseball. This means that we will probably continue these closest, intense games throughout the year.
If Snell agrees with Bauer again, he has a request.
“Bauer, he digs a lot in the hill,” Snell said. “Oh my god. It looked like something just crashed on top of the hill. It was just the biggest hole. So Bauer, we need to work on it. I know you need to get the hill or whatever, but man, my foot was killing me. ‘
Machado still owns Bauer: It’s a running joke that’s become prominent and is now ridiculous – Bauer can not get Manny Machado out. No, seriously. Machado beat Bauer in 21 careers in a career of 588 / .667 / 1,412 and then hit two singles against him driving 104 km / h. Bauer had a full score against Machado in the fourth, shaking Will Smith off and throwing an up-and-coming fast ball that was smoked past the glove of Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner. Machado had nine hits in 12 bats that ended with a Bauer-fast ball, five of which for extra dogs. It used to be a funny quirk. Now, within the context of this rivalry, this is a problem.
Bauer’s takeaway?
“I kept him in the park,” he said, “so I’m going in the right direction.”
Tatis still finds out: The start of this series coincided with Tatis’ return from a shoulder subluxation. By the end of it, it was clear that Tatis was not quite right yet. The question is whether this is the usual battle that hits players over the course of a long season and is only magnified at the start, or whether the soft left shoulder really affects its production. Tatis took a 410-foot home run to center field on Friday, but otherwise he was 0-for-12 with six goal kicks and a walk. He added two errors on Friday – giving him seven through his first six games – and would have had another on Sunday if it had not been for Eric Hosmer on first base.
Tatis also made a turn, hit a hard line and apparently just got into a potential home run on a hanging ball in the final series. Prior to Saturday’s game, Tatis underestimated the severity of his shoulder problem and expressed confidence in his ability to manage it for the next six months.
“It’s something I can do very well,” Tatis said. “I don’t think it’s going to bother me the rest of the year.”
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Clayton Kershaw believes Jurickson Profar is deliberately trying to get a catcher’s interference call and the two end up in a screaming match across the field.
No love lost: You know it’s hot when Kershaw swears. On Saturday, Kershaw made an exception for the way Jurickson Profar swung on a quick two-pointer, which made contact with Austin Barnes’ glove and was placed on first base due to the interference from the catcher. “It’s a bulls — swing!” Kershaw shouted as he and Profar ran back and forth across the field. One night earlier, Dennis Santana and Jorge Mateo hit in it on a tenth inning through the pitch, which left both banks empty. Sunday yielded no further hostility, but it was nonetheless for fireworks. There will be more of the same this season. Trust it.
Hosmer comes big: Perhaps the Padres’ most encouraging sign last year was in the form of Eric Hosmer, who batted .287 / .333 / .517 and looked much more like the elite first baseman of his Kansas City Royals days. The early part of this season showed that the 2020 numbers may not be the result of small sample sizes. Hosmer is leading a .986 OPS through its first 68 record appearances this season. On Friday, he hit a two-game single in the ninth. On Sunday, he beat the two-time singles in eighth place.
“Hos is in my opinion as good as anyone in the game at those moments,” Tingler said, “and I think a big part of that is that he wants those at-bats, he wants those moments when the game is on. “It’s the way it is and he’s just as good as anyone in the game to deliver it.”
Padres must clean it: The Padres could have won Friday’s game, had it not been for three errors, which pushed their biggest league lead to 16. Saturday’s game could have been completely different if Trent Grisham had read the defense behind him properly on Machado’s sixth innings single, which would have enabled him to score from the second point, as opposed to just one base. The margin of error against the Dodgers is too small to make such mistakes.
“We just understand that we have to play a good baseball against these guys,” Hosmer said. “We can not afford to give up mistakes, and we can not give extra bases. We just have to lock defensively on the base roads. We have to make sure we play good baseball. That’s what this series has definitely proven; I think “They also proved it in the play-offs. We know we have to be on top of our game to beat the guys.”
An essential advantage: The Dodgers spent the season through a desire not to come out of a championship obsolete, which was a major factor in their surprising effort to score Bauer. In the spring training, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts constantly preaches the importance of staying in the moment and maintaining a lead during a season that can often feel monotonous, especially for such very capable teams. The Dodgers, who led the sport with a plus-38 run differential, clearly have yet to have trouble staying focused in the early stages. But the presence of Padres may only help them during the summer. LA has a pace of 132 wins, and somehow reality doesn’t feel very far from that.
Roberts dismissed Padres ‘presence as a motivating factor, in line with the Dodgers’ clear intent to diminish this rivalry. But he acknowledged that the Padres were “a hungry group”.
“I think they looked at us and want to take us down in the National League West, and they’s talented, they can act,” Roberts said. “Lots of talent there.”