Padres Answer Back, Dodgers Give One Away In 5-1 Loss

For 24 hours, the Dodgers had the Padres sitting down.

Then Wednesday night arrived, and San Diego apparently decided it had spent enough time in the chair.

The Padres answered Tuesday night's 7-0 Dodgers shutout with a 5-1 victory of their own, evening the three-game series and reminding everyone that the final week of the regular season is not exactly the time to start handing out complimentary outs. The Dodgers left 12 men on base, made throwing errors at precisely the wrong moments and generally looked nothing like the team that had taken the field 24 hours earlier.

The difference was striking.

A night earlier, Dave Roberts had summed up the Dodgers' performance rather neatly: “It was a complete baseball game. Everything was good.”

Wednesday was the flip side of that sentence. Everything wasn't bad, but enough of it was to make the Dodgers pay for it.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto was less than his usual self in his final regular-season start, and for three innings it appeared as though he might simply work his way through the Padres lineup one more time. Yamamoto retired nine of his first 10 hitters before San Diego finally found the opening it needed in the fourth inning. Dustin Harris was hit by a pitch to start the inning, and Manny Machado followed by sending a 409-foot drive into the seats in center field for a two-run homer.

The Dodgers answered in the bottom half, but even that came with a little help from the neighborhood. Teoscar Hernández reached and eventually scored on Tommy Edman's sacrifice fly, trimming the deficit to 2-1. For a moment, it looked as though the game might settle into the kind of tight, late-inning affair that has become familiar between these teams.

Instead, the Dodgers helped San Diego widen the gap.

In the fifth, Yamamoto committed his second career throwing error, putting another runner in position and giving the Padres another opportunity they didn't have to manufacture. Machado followed with a shallow sacrifice fly, and San Diego had turned a 2-1 game into a 4-1 game. The Dodgers had already spent too much of the evening leaving their own opportunities on base to expect the Padres to return the favor.

That was particularly frustrating because there were opportunities everywhere. The Dodgers collected seven hits, but couldn't string enough of them together to produce the crooked numbers that had become so routine during their recent surge. They stranded 12 runners, and the Padres were more than happy to let them keep doing it.

Shohei Ohtani's return to the lineup provided plenty of attention, but not much offensive damage. Ohtani went 1-for-4 with a walk and two strikeouts, and his first major opportunity ended with him swinging through a pitch with the bases loaded in the fourth inning. He later drove a ball deep to center to lead off the eighth, only to have it caught near the wall.

That was pretty much the story of the night for the Dodgers. Close enough to make you think something was about to happen, but never quite close enough to make it happen.

And then there was Machado, who apparently wasn't particularly interested in spending another evening sitting down.

After Tuesday's 7-0 loss, when the Dodgers held Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. to one hit between them while striking out five times, Machado came back Wednesday and supplied three runs himself. His home run gave San Diego the lead, his sacrifice fly extended it, and the Padres' offense finally had the kind of response a team fighting for its postseason life needed.

San Diego also got two scoreless innings from Bradgley Rodriguez, while Robbie Ray somehow survived a difficult opening stretch in which he needed 70 pitches to get through three innings. Ray allowed seven hits and one run in 3⅓ innings, but the Dodgers never delivered the knockout blow they had threatened to land.

Then, in the ninth, the Padres added a final reminder that the Dodgers had not exactly brought their sharpest defensive or baserunning night to the ballpark. Samad Taylor walked, stole second and then stole third on consecutive pitches from Blake Treinen. Freddy Fermin followed with an RBI single, and suddenly the 5-1 final looked entirely appropriate.

The loss snapped the Dodgers' 11-game winning streak at home and left them at 97-61. They still need one victory or an Atlanta loss to secure at least the No. 2 seed and a first-round bye, so there is no reason for anyone in the clubhouse to panic over one ugly Wednesday night.

There is, however, a reason to remember it.

The Padres came into the series having won five straight. The Dodgers answered with a 7-0 demolition Tuesday night, then watched San Diego respond Wednesday. The Padres are now 88-70 and sit alone atop the National League wild-card standings, while Arizona's 5-3 victory over Colorado kept San Diego from clinching its third consecutive postseason appearance. The Padres need one more win or an Arizona loss to punch their ticket.

So the Dodgers didn't lose anything more consequential than a game Wednesday night. But they did lose the opportunity to make the Padres spend another evening wondering where their offense went.

Instead, San Diego got its answer.

And perhaps that is the simplest way to look at it. Tuesday was the Dodgers' night. Wednesday belonged to the Padres. The rubber match now goes to Thursday, with Tyler Glasnow scheduled to face Nick Pivetta.

One more game. One more chance to get the machinery pointed in the right direction before October arrives.

Because if Tuesday was the Dodgers reminding San Diego what a complete baseball game looked like, Wednesday was the Padres providing the counter-argument:

Don't get too comfortable.