2024-10-12 19:30:03
LOS ANGELES — The night needed a hero.
The Dodgers got two.
And in a season in which they could so often count on so many heroes, the Padres did not get one on the night it mattered most.
“I’m sad for this team,” Jurickson Profar said. “We had everything to go all the way. But, you know, baseball. They played better than we did the past two games. We’re going home.”
The hero could have been Yu Darvish, save for one fastball and one slider that both got hit a long way and the fact that none of his teammates stepped into the breach.
Instead, at the end of a season that will, once the disappointment ebbs, be remembered as being full of magnificent performances, the Padres shrank.
The Dodgers moved onto the National League Championship Series with a 2-0 victory on Friday powered exclusively by Kike Hernández’s home run in the second inning and Teoscar Hernández’s home run in the seventh inning.
The Padres, who led the NL Division Series 2-1, did not score in the final two games and finished their 2024 by going without a run in a season-high 24 consecutive innings. It was the longest scoreless stretch in the postseason since the Braves went 26 innings in the 1991 NLCS.
“I think ‘stunning’ is appropriate, yeah,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said said of that finish. “… Had them down. They were able to come back. So congratulations to them.”
Against a starting pitcher they had their way with in their three previous meetings, including six days earlier, they managed two hits and a walk.
Then the Dodgers bullpen continued its domination this series.
“Give credit to everybody who deserves credit,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said. “They pitched good. Simple as that. We gave our best battle.”
After Yoshinobu Yamamoto worked five innings at the start, Evan Phillips retired Kyle Higashioka, Luis Arraez and Tatis on 15 pitches in the sixth and struck out Profar and Manny Machado to start the seventh.
Alex Vesia came in and struck out Jackson Merrill to end the inning.
Michael Kopech took nine pitches to run through Bogaerts, David Peralta and Jake Cronenworth in the eighth.
Blake Treinen set down pinch-hitter Donovan Solano, Arraez and Tatis on nine pitches in the ninth.
And that was it.
“It’s very hard,” Profar said. “We did a lot of unusual things. I don’t want to give credit to their pitching. We just didn’t come through.”
A season in which the Padres won 93 games led to a wild-card series sweep of the Braves in two games and then this NLDS, their second in the past three years and second against the Dodgers.
It was just 72 hours earlier that the Padres had control of the series.
“It’s the tough thing about sports,” Xander Bogaerts said. “One has to win, one has to lose. One fanbase is happy, the other is sad.”
A 7-5 loss in Game 1 was followed by a 10-2 rout of the Dodgers in Game 2 and a 6-5 victory in their return home for Game 3. They had to win just one of the next two to advance to their second NL Championship Series in three years.
They did not. Not really even close.
After the Dodgers bullpen blanked them in an 8-0 loss Wednesday at Petco Park, the Padres bused to Los Angeles to try to keep this season going.
They had a season’s worth of evidence — of comeback victories and quickly bouncing back from losses — to boost their confidence.
But for just the second time in a span of 69 games, they lost a second straight game.
No champagne. Blank stares and quiet. A drive back down Interstate 5 without another game to play.
Darvish did all he could to make the season go on. The right-hander was arguably just as good in Game 5 as he had been on Sunday in Game 2, when he allowed a run on three hits over seven innings.
His final line would not look as good, with one more run and allowed the same number of hits while getting one less out.
A 94 mph fastball down and in to Kike Hernández that the right-hander turned on and sent halfway up the bleachers beyond left field to put the Dodgers up 1-0.
Their next hit would be Tesocar Hernández’s 420-foot blast on a 2-1 pitch that broke down and in and was also pulled into the left field bleachers.
The 26 straight batters Darvish, Yamamoto, Phillips and Vesia combined to retire was a postseason record.
The Padres’ streak would go on, as none of their final 19 batters reached base.
This postseason ending before they wanted will be largely remembered for their struggles against relief pitchers.
In the five NLDS games, the Padres batted .202 and scored six runs against the Dodgers bullpen. All of those runs came in Game 2 — three against a rookie making his fourth big-league appearance and one off a pitcher who was removed from the roster the next day with a shoulder injury.
But they failed to score Friday night, as well, against Yamamoto, who had yielded 14 runs in nine innings in three games against them this year but threw more fastballs and exhibited more command than in his previous starts against them.
Their only threat Friday came in the third inning.
One-out singles by Higashioka and Arraez provided a chance for Tatis, who had done so much damage for the Padres this postseason and who has had so many big moments at Dodger Stadium.
Tatis entered the game with seven hits in 16 at-bats in the series. He had struck out in the first inning and got a favorable 3-1 count before grounding into an inning-ending double play.
The time for reflection and looking ahead will come. In this moment, there was mostly regret.
“We didn’t come through in situations,” Profar said. “We didn’t hit.”
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