It's always the Dodgers

The Dodgers are coming to town to face the Padres and the games are about to get a lot more serious (until they're not).

If there is one thing that I have learned, it’s that the games between the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers live in a realm outside of the regular season.

It almost doesn’t matter what is happening with each individual team heading into a series (both have gone 6-4 in their last 10 games), and the results of the series have almost no bearing on what will happen after the series ends (the Padres get a day off before a three-game series at home against the 1st place Sacramento A’s), but that is because the games are significantly more important than just regular season games….especially when 1st place in the NL West is on the line, as it is tonight at Petco Park.

And, look, I’m not stupid. I understand that the Dodgers consider the Giants to be their #1 rival. That being said, the modern day rival is usually handed out to whichever team has been the biggest threat to your championship aspirations over the last few seasons. Fans hardly have a memory to go back any further than that. For the Dodgers and Padres, that team has been each other.

The Dodgers and their $300 million payroll, absurd television contract, owners with bottomless resources, and an analytics department that is the envy of MLB have been the biggest obstacle for the Padres in trying to get back to the World Series.

The Padres (with their $212 million payroll) have finished in 2nd place in the division in five of the last seven years. The Dodgers finished ahead of them all seven years, and won the division in each of those seasons except 2021 (when the Giants hired a witch).

The thing about rivals is that they are necessary. They are the result of multiple teams from the same division going after the exact same piece of glory and hardware. You’re probably not going to get to where you want to go without a rival pushing you to find your absolute peak. That’s what shows you where the ceiling is. That’s how you get to where you want to be.

Whether or not the Dodgers or their fans want to admit it, they need the Padres. This rivalry is as essential to their recent success as is their ballooning payroll. I think the Joker said it best…

The San Diego Padres are, once again, riding high. They survived a week and a half of their offense completely disappearing before it went back to its previous setting: Being carried by the bottom half of the payroll.

That was enough to get them a sweep of the Mariners in Seattle, but the baseball world is still holding its collective breath to see when and how the biggest stars in the Padres lineup (Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado & Jackson Merrill) are going to break out of their excruciatingly slow start to the season.

In a perfect world, it happens this week against the Dodgers for all three of them and the Padres win the series. That alone would be enough to put them in 1st place in the NL West, would make the dreams of Padres fans feel a little bit closer to reality, and would get A.J. Preller’s head spinning about how to add to this year’s team for a long postseason run.

But the Dodgers are always the measuring stick because they’re not usually so kind. They’re good at revealing the weaknesses of the Padres and then jabbing those weaknesses with a sharpened blade. There’s a world where Tatis/Machado/Merrill have an awful time against Yamamoto, Sheehan and Ohtani (pitching version) while Randy Vasquez can’t dance out of trouble, Griffin Canning shows that his last outing was a harbinger of doom instead of a fluke, and Michael King can’t control his wicked stuff.

The Dodgers are a good measuring stick for the Padres because the Padres are a measuring stick for the Dodgers. These organizations, from the players all the way up to the front office, put a lot more weight into these games than they do any other games this early on in a long season. This is when they attempt to find an answer to the question of “Do we have enough to beat them?”

This isn’t going to be some full-scale analytical preview of the series, but I did want to stress one thing:

The 2026 San Diego Padres have some magic.

I could go through the list of struggles (such as the team being significantly better at hitting against relievers than starters) or the injuries (Nick Pivetta and Joe Musgrove were supposed to be a part of this team), but that doesn’t capture it at all.

I could tell you that their 9th inning OPS is about 100 points higher than their next-best inning (the 5th), and I could also point out that it goes even higher in extra innings. When the moment calls for it, the Padres seem to come through more often than not. That explains why their actual win-loss record is about four full games better than their Pythagorean win-loss record. Still, that doesn’t capture it.

I think it’s the total sum of the vibes. Despite career-worst starts for the stars in the lineup, the team still seems to be having a blast. They still (collectively) seem to believe in their ability to win games, even if everyone’s stats aren’t currently great. That speaks to Craig Stammen’s ability to keep everyone loose, which is essentially how he was sold to Padres fans despite no managerial record to speak of before this season.

There’s no gimmicks needed this time. There’s no swag chain or Polaroids that I’ve seen, just a team that believes that it can win games if they’re patient and smart and determined. Tatis doesn’t look like he’s beating himself up for letting the team down all the time (just some of the time!), and he often finds ways to get important hits or walks when the team needs him to come through for an important rally.

Machado, who usually turns into a big grumpy asshole when he’s not playing well, just….hasn’t. He’s been fine! And any concerns that him and Nick Castellanos would ruin the vibes of Craig Stammen’s clubhouse seem to be gone, at least for now.

I’ve often thought that baseball teams can take on the identity of their manager. I wonder about that now, if the career middle-reliever is finding ways to get the most from role players and bench players while struggling to figure out how to get the superstars back on track. That will be the next hurdle for Stammen to overcome as he continues to earn the trust and respect of Padres fans and the rest of the baseball world.

But first, or maybe simultaneously, he gets to meet the measuring stick tonight. He gets to see if the way he is managing the Padres is enough to beat the Dodgers in a series. And we all get to find out just how much magic he carries with him. Can Stammen make this team, that has glaring weaknesses that it is trying to work around and through, believe that they can win when they’re up against Goliath?