SAN DIEGO — One-part magician and one-part savant, Fernando Tatis Jr. sailed jet-like, stretched cat-like and stuck Paul DeJong's soft, knuckling liner flypaper-like to take his team to the bottom of the eighth inning.
Walking off the mound, reliever Drew Pomeranz turned, gawked, clapped, smiled and pointed at what's become one of the most talked-about scenic viewpoints in all of San Diego.
One part dancer and one part baker, when the Padres' national coming-out party ended with a 4-zip bullpenning whitewashing of the St. Louis Cardinals on Friday night, Tatis Jr. shimmied with teammates for a photo op in front of the mound while his words, "Take the Cake," flashed in giant letters on the big-screen scoreboard behind them.
Book it: The Padres won their first postseason series in 22 years, and for the second night in a row, honking car horns jubilantly sounded late into the night on the San Diego city streets surrounding Petco Park. Whooping, hollering and cheering made it a true cacophony. And it was a long time coming: Not since the Padres ousted Atlanta in the 1998 NLCS has this city celebrated a baseball winner in October.
All parts crackling energy, Tatis Jr. is the most electric player in the game and the man who is taking the lead in plugging the Padres back into the national hardball conversation. Yes, owners Ron Fowler and Peter Seidler laid out $144 million over eight years for Eric Hosmer, $300 million over 10 years for Manny Machado and $83 million over six years for Wil Myers...but, my goodness, it is Tatis Jr. who by far leads the new brown-clad Padres in turning their opponents blue.
"Off the charts," said catcher Austin Nola, who was acquired from Seattle at the Aug. 31 trade deadline by general manager A.J. Preller, who himself is one-part mad scientist and one-part riverboat gambler. "You can watch it. It brings everybody's energy level up when he's so enthusiastic playing the game.
"I was very blessed to play in the Dominican Republic this offseason, to play for his dad and to be around the family, and it was a blessing. I learned every day from that Tatis family. It's a special family."
The last team to punch their ticket to a division series, these Padres rank first in any discussion of the most exciting young teams in baseball. Start with Tatis Jr. and move to Machado. The left side of the Padres infield is a nightly collection of defensive highlights. And after a disappointing first season with the Padres—the man himself said he played like something that looks and smells like, well, you know—Machado rededicated himself over the winter and, with no more off-the-field business distractions now that free agency is in his rearview mirror, played like an MVP.
The Padres set an MLB record by crushing grand slams in four consecutive games in August and then became the first MLB team ever to smash five grand slams in six games two days later. A new nickname, Slam Diego, was hatched.
Muscling up returned in Game 2 of this Wild Card Series with St. Louis on Thursday, when, facing elimination and trailing 6-2 going into the bottom of the sixth inning, Tatis Jr. turned on the power again. He led off with a homer, Machado followed with another, and bing, bam, boom, next thing anybody knew, the Padres, who ranked fourth in the majors in homers this season, belted five long balls over three innings to stun St. Louis 11-9 in one of the most epic games ever in San Diego.
Tatis Jr. and Myers hit two each during the onslaught, becoming the only teammates with two homers apiece in a postseason game this side of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who did it in the 1932 World Series against the Chicago Cubs (yes, the same game in which Ruth famously and allegedly called his shot).
Then came Game 3, tame by comparison but just as stunning in a wholly different way: The Padres entered this series with their top two starters injured—Mike Clevinger and Dinelson Lamet—and had already used 17 pitchers in the first two games. With no other choices, first-year manager Jayce Tingler pieced together his pitching again like a kid carefully building a Lego structure. Snap, snap, snap. Result? Nine pitchers combining to shut out the Redbirds.
The Padres became the first team to ever use eight or more pitchers in three consecutive postseason games and the first team ever to use nine pitchers in the same postseason series.
Making all this success even more improbable: Preller swapped out his entire catching staff mid-stream at the trade deadline, dispatching offensive-liability Austin Hedges to Cleveland and young Luis Torrens to Seattle and acquiring Nola and Jason Castro (from the Angels). Nola caught all 27 innings against the Cardinals, handling every pitcher as if they were longtime acquaintances.
Sometimes it seemed as if they were making it up as they went along—both against the Cardinals and throughout the season. Preller moved a total 27 players in and out at the trade deadline, and the Padres added eight new players to their major league roster. And this was a team that already was winning. And they won some more.
"They play the game like a bunch of little kids," closer Trevor Rosenthal, acquired from Kansas City, said after closing Game 2 on Thursday. That includes even the old graybeards. In inventing a way to work through Friday's winner-take-all game, Tingler summoned the 11-year veteran and bullpen mainstay Craig Stammen, 36, to make his first start since 2010.
"We had a ton of discussion, a ton of discussion," Tingler said. "What's the right move? You look at the analytics. But at the end of the day, you bank on the man. ... There is a ton of belief in the man. At the end of the day, we looked at numbers, we had a tone of options and we just gave it to a trustworthy man."
That, too, is Preller's Padres: A team that smartly and crisply blends modern analytics with old-school scouting. It's a mix that works well, and in this one singular decision, Stammen rewarded the trust.
"It felt similar to my major league debut," Stammen said. "I told myself: 'Why would you ever be nervous? This is every kid's dream, to get the ball in the playoffs against the St. Louis Cardinals.'"
He retired five of the game's first six batters and the parade to the mound commenced. And on the sad, sad day that Hall of Famer Bob Gibson died from pancreatic cancer, Cardinals ace Jack Flaherty, who counted Gibson among his mentors, brought his A-game. He tossed six complete innings, giving up just one run and striking out eight.
There was no score into the fifth when, yes, Tatis Jr. rapped a one-out double and scored two batters later when Hosmer drilled another double. The Padres added three more in the seventh and eighth.
It was Tatis Jr. who, way back in July when baseball resumed following its long COVID-19 suspension, notified the world that the Padres were "aiming for the big cake."
It was a precocious statement for someone from a club that had produced only one winning season in the past 12 (2010).
But in his brief 143 games in the majors, if there's one thing we've learned, it's never to doubt Tatis Jr. Already, now, he's equaled Mike Trout’s playoff appearances—three games—and Trout has played in 1,252 games over 10 seasons. And Tatis Jr. now has accomplished one thing poor Trout hasn't in winning a playoff series.
MLB @MLBTatis! The @Padres are 3 outs away. 👀 #Postseason https://t.co/wj1byhDEwg
Now it's on to the neutral site in Arlington, Texas, for a division series against the Dodgers. After finishing 36 games behind the Dodgers in the NL West in 2019, the Padres shaved that to a six-game deficit in this abbreviated 60-game season. Los Angeles won six of the 10 games between the two clubs this year, and even with their current momentum, the Padres know they must successfully measure themselves against the Dodgers before claiming anything as their own.
"We have prove to ourselves that we can play with those guys," Hosmer conceded. "We know we have go through them to get to the World Series."
So let the proceedings begin, and next week truly will be divisional series week: All four playoff series will be intradivision, Padres and Dodgers (NL West rivals), Braves and Marlins (NL East), Yankees and Rays (AL East) and Astros and Athletics (AL West).
The weird thing will be the Padres and Dodgers, roughly 120 miles apart, dueling in Texas. But then, nothing is normal this year, so why not?
As the Cardinals batted in the eighth Friday with their season melting away, a man stood on a high-rise balcony far beyond center field in Petco Park with a bullhorn, chanting into the night: "Here we go Padres, here we go! Here we go Padres, here we go!"
A few stories below and a few minutes later, Tatis Jr. went airborne for DeJong's ball and for the Cardinals' throats. There they went, the Padres and Tatis Jr., a beautiful future finally close enough to reach out and grab.
Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.
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October 03, 2020 at 01:08PM
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Padres Show They're MLB's Most Exciting Team in Wild Card Win over Cardinals - Bleacher Report
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