Padres' postseason odds in dire straits after wasted D-backs series
The evidence of a long, miserable day was all around Xander Bogaerts as he spoke late Saturday night in a quiet home clubhouse at Petco Park. Fernando Tatis Jr. laid on his back in front of his locker with his feet propped on the chair rolled out in front, his gaze fixed on his phone as he scrolled endlessly. Juan Soto did the same, but slouched in his chair instead of sprawled out on the carpet. Players walked to and from the training room. They dressed. Those who addressed reporters before exiting through the double doors caught themselves time and time again.
They could not try again tomorrow.
The threat of a hurricane made Saturday the pivotal day in their hopes of getting the most-anticipated season in franchise history on track, and they tripped twice.
Told that teams ahead of the Padres also continued to lose, Bogaerts shook his head while lifting his eyes toward the ceiling.
“That hurts even more,” Bogaerts said. “ … It sucks. These are the chances we need and we’re playing at home and the teams we want to reach are right in front of us and the baseball gods helping us out with them losing and we’re just not able to capitalize.”
Weather-permitting, the Padres get three more chances against a team ahead of them starting on Monday. The Marlins, fresh off their own doubleheader sweep at the hands of the Dodgers, arrive to finish finish off a 10-game homestand that began with San Diego’s postseason odds hovering at about 25 percent.
But losing two games to the wild-card hopeful Diamondbacks cut those chances to just under 12 percent, according to ESPN, despite the forces that be seemingly simultaneously smiling upon and laughing at the Padres.
The teams they’re chasing continue to flash their flaws, too.
The Padres continue to shake their head at the misfortune materializing in their hard-hit luck.
In this four-game series alone, the Padres put 29 balls in play at more than 100 miles an hour and collected just 10 hits on those missiles, a .344 batting average. The D-backs, in contrast, went 13-for-20 on 100-plus-mph balls in play (.650) in taking three of four. They went 6-for-7 on those balls in Saturday’s nightcap.
Juan Soto’s would-be, walk-off grand slam in the matinee wasn’t quite hit that hard (98.6 mph), but the time of day, trajectory (29 degrees) and the work to get to that point in the ninth inning Saturday — the home runs from Ha-Seong Kim and Manny Machado, Matt Carpenter’s first hit in weeks and the free passes to load the bases — allowed the Padres to believe their luck had changed.
It had not.
The Padres went on to collect just five hits against the Diamondbacks’ bullpen game in the nightcap. They committed two errors. Soto was thrown out on the bases a second time during the doubleheader. The Big Four combined for a 1-for-14 evening, with Bogaerts’ solo homer accounting for the only hit between them as the Padres lost for the fifth time in six meetings against a team that had lost nine straight after their initial reunion in Arizona the previous weekend.
“They outplayed us,” Padres manager Bob Melvin said. “Even the game we won, we had to come back late and score some runs. So they completely outplayed us, and going into the series at their place they weren’t playing great.”
The Padres, of course, have not been great all year.
That’s the definition of a team that has not won more than three games all year, that is seven games under .500, six games out of a wild-card spot and staring up at long, long odds to make a postseason run.
Only five teams in the last 20 years have come back from as far back as the Padres are with 37 games left to the season — the 2003 Twins, 2004 Astros, 2008 Dodgers, 2011 Rays and 2011 Cardinals — and all of them were at least a couple games below .500.
Those teams were led by the likes of Albert Pujols, Lance Berkman, Ben Zobrist, Chad Billingsley and A.J. Pierzynski.
The Padres, to a man, would say they have stars to rival and/or trump those rosters, but they haven’t been a winning team since May 10 and they’ve been saying the same things all along.
“I’m sure everyone is sick of hearing what we’re capable of,” Carpenter said. “They want to see it, but until the final out is made in the last game I’m not going to not believe in this group. At any point, if there’s any club in Major League Baseball that can go on a 15-game winning streak, it’d be this one.”
Why, exactly?
“If you have that ability and it hadn’t shown up, then eventually something’s going to have to change,” Carpenter added. “Maybe I’m optimistic by nature, but you look at the things that have happened that don’t make any sense. What is it, 0-10 in extra-inning games. … We hit our first grand slam of the season like a week ago. There’s just too many things that don’t make any sense.
“Baseball is a game that evens itself out. … Maybe we will run out of time. Maybe we won’t, but until that final out’s made I’m not going to lose hope.”
Really, what else is there to say: Keep grinding and ask those baseball gods for a lending hand or two or three or four.
“It’s never over ‘til it’s over,” Bogaerts added. “As long as there are games to played you never know what can happen. There’s many great things that have happened in this game before. A lot of teams lose divisions, big leads going into September. The schedule gets tougher. The grind gets harder.
“Anything can happen, man, I’m telling you.”
