ANAHEIM — When elite reliever Mason Miller went from the A’s to the San Diego Padres at the trade deadline, he found himself relocating into the most intense rivalry currently in MLB.
“They told me right away, ‘Obviously, we don’t like those guys a whole lot,’” Miller said in a post-trade podcast appearance of being indoctrinated by his new teammates. “I haven’t really had a rivalry to that extent. … Not a rivalry to the sense of, the Padres and the Dodgers. I’m excited to experience that.”
There was apparently no comparable on-boarding process for the Dodgers’ trade deadline acquisitions, Brock Stewart (now on the injured list) and Alex Call.
“That’s a ‘their’ thing,” Dodgers reliever Alex Vesia said of Miller’s comments.
“I wasn’t a part of a meeting like that (with Stewart or Call) so I’m going to go with ‘No (we don’t do that).’”
That the Padres would have those feelings toward the Dodgers “doesn’t surprise me at all,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, whose own emotions are stirred by matchups with the Padres – as evidenced by his confrontations with two of their managers, Andy Green in 2017 and Mike Shildt earlier this season.
“I do think it’s one of those things where they’re very hyper-focused on us,” Roberts said. “But I guess it’s a compliment. Still, we’ve got to match their intensity because they want to beat us more than anything.”
If the dislike is mutual, the Dodgers do a much better job of hiding theirs. When told of Miller’s comment, Dodgers veteran Clayton Kershaw laughed.
“That’s fine,” the Hall-of-Fame-bound pitcher said. “I don’t feel any one way about them. I just want to win the division.
“I think every team goes through ebbs and flows when they’re good or not. In the whole time I’ve been here, it’s gone from the Giants to the Rockies to the Diamondbacks to the Padres to the Giants again. So … I think the one constant is we’re always in it. It’s just kind of the next-best team changes. Right now, it’s them.”
Right now actually, it’s the Dodgers.
When they went to bed on July 3, the Dodgers had a four-game winning streak, the best record in baseball and rested their heads on a fluffy nine-game lead over the Padres and San Francisco Giants in the division.
When they wake up Friday morning, that lead will be two days gone thanks to a 12-21 record since July 3 (a record they share with the MLB-worst Colorado Rockies in that time). As the Padres and Dodgers start a stretch in which they will play six times in 10 days, the first-place team at Dodger Stadium on Friday night will be the Padres, not the Dodgers.
“The way we’ve played the last six weeks, I feel good that we have a lead,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said earlier this week before that lead had disappeared. “We haven’t played up to our potential in any way. I see everything in shades of gray, and see very few things on extremes. But if you had said that we would have a six-week stretch where our offense would rank 30th in baseball, I would have said there was a zero percent chance. I would have been wrong.”
That happened. And Friedman’s decision not to move more aggressively at the trade deadline to shore up the bullpen might also prove to be wrong. With five high-leverage relievers on the injured list (Evan Phillips, Tanner Scott, Michael Kopech, Kirby Yates and Brusdar Graterol), the group Roberts has tellingly referred to more than once as “the guys we have” has a 4.50 ERA over the past nine games and been charged with each of the team’s past five losses.
After Wednesday’s loss to the Angels, Roberts also called the current slide “something that we’re not really accustomed to, to be quite honest.”
The closest comps would be their 1-15 stretch in late August and September of 2017 or their 16-26 stumble out of the gate in 2018.
But they led the division by 21 games when that inexplicable stretch started in 2017 and they still led by 10 games when they snapped out of it. And the 2018 stretch came at the start of the season, leaving 120 games to course correct.
“That team, as I recall, wasn’t even close to as good as this team. We were banged up, we had no pitching,” Roberts said of the 2018 team when reminded of those stretches. “This team is way more talented than that team.”
That is probably true – but only makes the current freefall more troublesome.
“Yeah. It makes it more disturbing but it also makes it more encouraging,” Roberts said, pointing to the expected returns of Scott, Yates and Kopech in the next couple of weeks.
“I would still have a hard time betting against us versus any other team. You could almost present it to any other manager of the 12 teams in the postseason. If you look at our team, how many managers would go, ‘I’ll take my team over that team over there?’”
Shildt might, after watching his team go 23-12 since July 3 to overtake the Dodgers.
For years, the Padres have been the coyote chasing the roadrunner. Since 2020, the Dodgers have won 51 of 81 regular-season meetings and two of three postseason series.
A year ago, the Padres closed to within three games of the Dodgers with six games left in the regular season. They won the first game of a three-game series in L.A. only to lose the next two. In the postseason, they held a two-games-to-one lead in the best-of-five NL Division Series with Game 4 at Petco Park. They didn’t score a run while losing the next two games and had to watch the Dodgers go on to their World Series championship.
But now, the roles have been reversed and the Dodgers are chasing the Padres.
“It’s big, but it kind of is what it is,” shortstop Mookie Betts said of the six games coming up against the Padres. “We can’t make it more than it is. It’s another series in August. Obviously, we all know that it’s big and X, Y, and Z. But we can’t make it that way. We have to look at it as the same game as today and just play our game and not try to be too high or too low.”
That work-a-day approach might no longer be appropriate for the Dodgers, who find themselves in second place after July 8 for the first time since 2021 – when they lost the division race to the Giants.
“We need to ramp up the intensity. We do,” Roberts said. “Because if we don’t then I just don’t think it’ll bode well for us.”
UP NEXT
Padres (TBA) at Dodgers (LHP Clayton Kershaw, 6-2, 3.14 ERA), Friday, 7:10 p.m., SNLA, MLB Network (out-of-market only), 570 AM