FINALLY, IT JUST MIGHT BE REAL RIVALRY
Dominated by L.A. for years, Padres ready to compete
Trent Grisham hit a fastball from Clayton Kershaw and turned to look at his teammates in the dugout as the ball flew over the right field wall. He waited to start his jog around the bases longer than some Dodgers thought was appropriate.
As he made his way from third base to the plate, Grisham heard from the visitors’ dugout. He never slowed but turned their way for a good half-dozen strides to let them hear from him.
“It felt a little different,” Grisham said of the Padres’ victory that night, their first against Kershaw since 2013. “It felt more satisfying.” Yes. Finally, it mattered. That game against the Dodgers last September lacked only fans in the stands to make it seem like a playoff contest. Many Dodgers pointed back to the Padres’ 7-2 victory as a wake-up call and a turning point in their season. They won the next two games and went on to win 10 of their final 12 and eventually the World Series.
The Grisham-Kershaw incident was among numerous times the teams chirped at each other, including a shouting match in the National League Division Series between Manny Machado and Dodgers pitcher Brusdar Graterol.
The Padres won four of the 10 meetings between the teams — who play each other in an exhibition game for the second and final time this spring here today (1:10 p.m., FSSD) — in the regular season and almost every game in the series was close.
But that’s probably not enough to be the makings of a rivalry, unless you’re grading on a curve. Because the Padres were far more competitive against the Dodgers than they had been in some time.
Including the three-game sweep in the NLDS, the Dodgers’ record against the Padres since the start of the 2013 season is 97-49.
Really, can it be a rivalry when one team wins twothirds of the time?
Can it be a rivalry when one team has won 27 of those games by five or more runs and other team has only had such a vast winning margin eight times in their 143 games?
Can it be a rivalry when one team has won the past eight NL West titles and the other team has not won the division since 2006?
Can it be a rivalry when one team has seven World Series championships and the other team is seeking its first?
Seems an easy assessment: No, not yet.
Dave Roberts was just being real.
“There’s more to a rivalry than just geography,” the Dodgers manager said earlier this month.
Roberts, who played for the Dodgers, Padres and Red Sox in his 10 big-league seasons, was responding to a query about whether Padres-Dodgers in 2020 stacked up to the YankeesRed Sox rivalry.
Anyone who has been a close follower of that rivalry would find such a comparison laughable.
Those teams have been playing each other since early in Theodore Roosevelt’s first term as president. There has been more than a century of big games, fights and name calling, not to mention the Curse of the Bambino.
The meetings took on another level of intensity in this millennium, as the Red Sox turned the tables on the Yankees by winning four World Series since 2004. The Yankees have won only once in that stretch, following their four titles in five years from 1996-2000. But one of the most epic American League Championship Series ever played was in 2004, when the Red Sox came from three games down to beat the Yankees before going on to win their first World Series title in 86 years. The Red Sox (six) or the Yankees (14) have won the AL East 20 times in the past 26 years.
So, what is more accurate to be saying at this point is that the anticipation for the 19 times the Padres and Dodgers will play each other this season is akin to what has been felt frequently in New York and Boston.
The reality is the Dodgers have been the Padres’ “rival” in the sense the Dodgers have been the team to beat and hating any team from Los Angeles is basically requisite of a San Diego sports fan.
Now, however, that disdain is accompanied by relevance. The chants of “Beat L.A.” figure to be a call to do something that matters in the grander scheme.
“We’re gonna get 19 World Series games this year,” Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner said.
There we go: Real live expectation and excitement.
The Padres for years, especially recent ones where they were incrementally better, acknowledged a different level of intensity when playing the Dodgers. How they fared in certain areas of the games was a measuring stick.
Now the Dodgers are taking the Padres seriously.
The fact is the Dodgers signed Trevor Bauer, the perceived jewel of the free agent market, about when Bauer was always going to sign. They (and everyone else in the running) waited for Bauer’s price to come down from what according to league sources was around $300 million at the start of the winter. But there can be no denying the Dodgers also felt it was a need to upgrade after all the Padres did this winter.
“We’ve definitely noticed what they’ve done,” Dodgers President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman said on the February day the Dodgers announced the signing of Bauer to a threeyear, $102 million deal. “We’re going to do everything we can to maintain our position.”
It could be argued the Padres are the Dodgers’ equal in terms of talent.
According to FanGraphs, the Dodgers’ have the highest projected WAR among batters (29.9) with the Padres third in the NL at 22.9. The Padres have the highest combined pitching WAR (21.8) with the Dodgers third in the NL at 20.9.
But with virtually all the history on the Dodgers side, there remains the fact one team is the upstart.
“It’s their reign,” Machado said last September. “And it’s their division, honestly. But we’re coming. We’re definitely coming.”
This spring, he looked forward to what just might one day be a bona fide rivalry.
“It’s going to be fun,” he said. “They’ve got a good team over there. They’ve got a good staff. It’s going to be exciting baseball, and it’s going to be exciting for the upcoming years.”