When the Padres put Mason Miller on the paternity list ahead of NLDS Game 3, it always had to be this way. It’s like Chekhov’s gun; if you show me a missing closer in the first act, you must show me a late-inning situation where he’d normally appear in the final one. The Padres beat the Brewers 4-3 to stay alive, narrowing their NLDS deficit to 2-1, in what has been easily the most entertaining series of the divisional round.
Right from the jump, the Brewers put pressure on the Padres. And right from the jump, the Padres minimized the damage. Jackson Chourio tattooed a line drive to the deep part of the ballpark to open the game. In response, Jackson Merrill took off on a perfect line and slid across the warning track to corral it.
Nick Pivetta couldn’t throw the ball past anybody; Milwaukee swung 37 times at his pitches and missed only twice. The Brewers peppered line drives left and right, making frequent loud contact. But they got less for their troubles than you’d expect, because Pivetta beguiled them and his defense stood tall behind him. Read the rest of this entry »
Ty France fell just short of playing the hero during the ninth inning of Saturday night’s Division Series opener between the Padres and Brewers, and his performance on Sunday at the center of the San Diego offense would have loomed larger if not for Mason Miller’s ninth-inning meltdown. The 32-year-old first baseman has been swinging a hot bat during the postseason, building on an impressive campaign in which he returned to the team that drafted him in 2015 and rediscovered his swing after two years of meandering around replacement level and through the rosters of four teams.
France collected two of the Padres’ five hits in Game 2 and drove in two of their three runs. He put them on the board in the first inning against starter Logan Henderson, ripping a 104.3-mph RBI single to right-center after Manny Machado worked a two-out walk and then took second on a wild pitch. After striking out in the third and being hit on the elbow guard by a Henderson changeup in the sixth, France faced Abner Uribe in the seventh with the Padres up 2-1 and Fernando Tatis Jr. (who had reached on an error) on second and Machado (who had walked again) on first. Ahead in the count 1-0, he smacked a 101.3-mph grounder to right field. Tatis raced home to run the score to 3-1, but Sal Frelick threw Machado out at third base to extinguish the rally.
Alas, the Padres couldn’t hold their two-run lead. The Brewers clawed back a run in the bottom of the seventh with a single, a walk, and a throwing error by second baseman Jake Cronenworth, then rallied for two in the ninth as Miller walked three before surrendering a walk-off single to Jackson Chourio. Read the rest of this entry »
They opened the roof. That’s the first thing you need to know about Game 2 of the NLDS between the Milwaukee Brewers and the San Diego Padres. Nobody had to worry about knocking the ball off a girder or a wire or a catwalk or a dangling chain of sausage links hanging from the ceiling. More importantly, nobody had to worry about the damn thing blowing off in the bottom of the ninth, when Jackson Chourio, one strike away from defeat, turned around a 101-mph Mason Miller fastball for a game-winning, two-RBI single. Against the most formidable reliever in baseball, after trailing since the fourth batter of the game, the Brewers turned water into, well, beer, beating the Padres 4-3 to take a 2-0 lead in the series. It marked the first time in more than a month that the Padres have lost two games in a row.
American Family Field presents quite a beautiful backdrop when it’s open to the sky and full of natural light. It feels vibrant and alive. It’s also not the friendliest place for hitters, who get to shift their worries from the roof to the shadows. The 3:09 PM local start time meant that when Logan Henderson threw the first pitch of the game, his shadow, already much longer than his six-foot-tall frame, stretched all the way across the mound and onto the infield grass toward third base. It twitched and wriggled as he went into his delivery, as if it believed this might be its chance to escape once and for all.
No player was more grateful for the open sky than Ty France, who on Saturday night experienced an even more unfriendly side of American Family Field. As you surely know by now, France flew out to deep left field by way of a ricochet off something or other up there by the roof. There’s somedebate as to whether that ball would have both cleared the fence and stayed fair, but regardless, France certainly played like a man with a score to settle. He went 2-for-3 with two RBI singles and a hit-by-pitch, pushing his batting average this postseason to a respectable .487. Read the rest of this entry »
The Brewers earned a 3-2 victory over the Padres in Game 1 of the NLDS on Saturday. With this year’s presumptive Cy Young winner starting for the Brewers and a former Cy Young winner (and still an above-average starter) going for the Padres, a low-scoring affair was not a surprising outcome. Still, the game script didn’t exactly play out as anticipated. Instead, the contest took on a late-inning feel almost from the beginning, and with both emotions and the leverage index consistently running high, perhaps the best way to tell the story of Game 1 is via reactions sourced from one of the most emotive players in either dugout — Milwaukee outfielder Sal Frelick.
The Frelick shown above was struggling to process an unusual double play that he initiated during last year’s NLCS, but that confused sentiment also applies to the experience of watching Brewers starter Jacob Misiorowski allow three consecutive singles during the second inning on Saturday. In over half of Misiorowski’s 30 starts this season, he allowed three or fewer hits across the entire outing, making three hits over three plate appearances feel fairly baffling. The trouble began with a one-out, infield single off the bat of shortstop Xander Bogaerts. The hit was the culmination of a six-pitch skirmish. Bogaerts took the first four pitches he saw (two four-seamers were called balls, while another four-seamer and a cutter were called strikes). He fouled off a 2-2 fastball, then rolled over a slider for a groundball that forced shortstop Cooper Pratt to range far enough to his right that by the time he made the diving stop, he couldn’t get the throw to first in time to beat Bogaerts to the bag.
Though Misiorowski got the type of batted ball that pitchers are usually pleased with, the whole interaction with Bogaerts highlighted a burgeoning problem for the Milwaukee righty. For the flamethrower’s fastball to function, he needs hitters to swing through it, and relatedly, he needs hitters to be willing to offer at it, even when it’s a touch out of the zone. On the season, his four-seamer averaged a 40.2% whiff rate and a 34.3% chase rate. But on Saturday night, it was generating whiffs only 14.3% of the time and getting hitters to chase just 24.1% of the time. Bogaerts was content to watch three heaters from The Miz and then fouled off the fourth. Since the San Diego batters were often fouling off fastballs in the zone and laying off the pitch when it missed the zone, Misiorowski pivoted to his 96-mph cutter as a pitch he could more reliably throw in the zone for called strikes in order to counter the obnoxiously patient Padres. Read the rest of this entry »
Kirby Lee, Denis Poroy, Vincent Carchietta and Brad Penner-Imagn Images
In basketball, the biggest offensive threat is usually guarded by the other team’s best defender. A football team’s most dynamic wide receiver has to worry about lining up across from an All-Pro cornerback. But in this sick and twisted sport, sometimes good-on-good instead becomes good-on-whoever-we-have-available. For the 2026 crop of Division Series, there is no shortage of micro matchups — both because the soft underbelly of every roster typically gets exposed in the postseason, and because every organization’s horde of spreadsheet nerds will be combing through information looking for advantages — that may or may not seal a team’s fate.
San Diego Padres vs. Milwaukee Brewers: Run Game vs. Run Game
The Padres and Brewers series will feature a lot of things: two cities that love beer, a blinding amount of yellow arm sleeves and rally towels, and a bunch of basepath thievery.
Both of these teams finished top five in total stolen bases this year, each employing a crew of bandits that will surely look to continue their heist. The Padres were one of just five major league teams to have multiple players swipe at least 25 bags, as Fernando Tatis Jr. and Jackson Merrill took 38 and 27, respectively. Xander Bogaerts, who was not much of a basestealer until arriving in San Diego in 2023, has also joined the party. His 22 steals in 2026 — during his age-33 season, impressively — marked a new single-season best, topping the previous career high of 20 he set in 2025. And while neither received enough playing time to put up those kinds of numbers, speedy outfielders Samad Taylor and Jase Bowen both have elite sprint speed and solid base-stealing acumen. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve written a lot of playoff series previews over the years. You can go about them in a number of ways. Highlight some key players from each team, perhaps, or touch on one particularly interesting matchup. If you’re feeling frisky, series previews can tell a narrative story, or even get experimental and weird. But one thing I don’t think I’ve ever tried before is looking at the series through the lens of failure.
That sounds negative, defeatist, not in keeping with the kind of escapism we come to baseball for. But that’s only if you don’t think about it too long – because one team’s failure is another team’s success. If the Padres get eliminated, the Brewers don’t, and vice versa. It’s a zero-sum game. So let’s figure out how things could go wrong for the San Diego Padres and the Milwaukee Brewers, and use that to shine a light on what each team will be trying to do to the other as they square off in the NLDS.
How the Brewers Might Fail
Milwaukee has the best starter in baseball in Jacob Misiorowski, and by virtue of earning a first-round bye, they’ll deploy him on full rest to open the series. That means he’ll also be available to pitch on five days’ rest in a potential Game 5. It’s a huge advantage right from the jump; Milwaukee’s ace is better than San Diego’s ace, Michael King, and King won’t appear until Game 2 of this series.
But when a single starter is a major reason for one team’s advantage, failure is always just around the corner. Misiorowski gets my vote for the best pitcher in baseball right now, and he’s going to win the NL Cy Young in a landslide. But even as he cruised to a 1.80 ERA, he was hardly perfect. He got tagged for five runs twice this year, and for three runs five more times. Read the rest of this entry »
On Wednesday night, the San Diego Padres eliminated the Chicago Cubs from the playoffs with a 4-1 win. A sold-out, frenzied crowd watched the Friars get to Kevin Gausman early, scoring two runs in the second after a double from Ty France, singles from Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts, and a sacrifice fly from Ethan Salas. A two-run homer from pinch-hitter Gavin Sheets in the fourth put San Diego up by three, and from there, the Cubs barely threatened. It was just the latest big moment in a summer full of them for the Padres: A team that saw its playoff odds drop to 7% in late July will now head to Milwaukee for the NLDS.
When you think about this generation of the San Diego Padres, a number of descriptors may spring to mind. “Exciting” works, for all the stars they’ve rostered and playoff runs they’ve made. “Unpredictable” captures the spirit of a front office bold enough to empty the farm year after year, postseason probability be damned. “Competitive” — you heard all those F-bombs during the game last night, yes? — applies, as might “brash,” particularly if you’re from Los Angeles or Phoenix.
But watching this game, I kept thinking about how poised they looked. It’s an unfamiliar feeling watching this group: Fernando Tatis Jr. is many wonderful things, but there’s very little mellow to him or the team he headlines. In an emotional game, though, which is exactly how they looked, and nobody epitomized that more than San Diego’s young catcher. Read the rest of this entry »
Major league baseball’s postseason derives its spine-tingling intrigue from many sources. There’s the tension — and inherent cruelty — of a months-long season coming down to a handful of games. Perhaps nothing in sports is better than a tightly-contested postseason game entering its final innings, the score so close and the stakes so high that it’s impossible to look away, while also leaving even the most devoted fans wondering if they can bear to watch. From these theatrics we often get epic performances and precise execution. Cam Schlittler dismantling the Red Sox with coiling curveballs and unfair fastballs in front of a bloodthirsty Yankee Stadium crowd, for instance. Grant Taylor’s dastardly 3-2 slider to strike out the potential tying run and end the eighth inning in Tuesday’s Game 1 against the Astros also comes to mind, as does the Braves’ note-perfect double play to squash the Phillies’ ninth-inning rally in their opening round first game.
But sometimes, well, sometimes a similar type of joy comes from the baseball equivalent of a windmill dunk.
The scene? Petco Park, Game 1 of the National League Wild Card Series between the Chicago Cubs and San Diego Padres. The Padres hold a comfortable 7-0 lead in the bottom of the seventh inning. The actor? Fernando Tatis Jr., arguably the most exhilarating player in the game when he’s hitting all his marks. Looking to extend the lead — or maybe just have a little fun — Tatis takes off from first base on a 2-1 pitch and is rewarded with a curveball in the dirt, a basestealer’s delight. Tatis not only beats the throw to second, it pings off his sliding leg and into no man’s land, dribbling slowly into shallow left field as the Friar Faithful slowly ascertain what’s about to happen. Tatis is going turbo mode.
Moments like this bring fans to their feet and opponents to their knees. Tatis — who reached first on an infield single, and saw the opportunity to turn that hit’s 49.7 mph exit velocity into a run — seemed hellbent on scoring as soon as the ball caromed away from the Cubs’ infield. Is stealing a base with a touchdown-sized lead sort of reckless and unnecessary? Sure. But these are the playoffs, where it’s never a bad idea to add on, especially when presented with the opportunity to exploit a catcher like Carson Kelly, who struggled with the running game all year. We can assume Tatis merely read the scouting report and was putting that knowledge to good use. But once he took second, surely he’d chill there (with no outs!) and give the heart of the Padres’ order a chance to drive him in. Right? Wrong:
Tatis did not stop at third, and probably didn’t even consider doing so. Why would he? Because his third base coach explicitly told him to, long before Tatis even reached third base? That’s super boring. And Tatis, ever the entertainer, sensed that this blowout needed a little extra oomph before people started leaving to beat the traffic. Flying into third base, completely ignoring Bob Henley’s stop sign, and rounding for home are the sorts of moves that only the game’s great showmen have the ability to recognize, and even fewer have the aplomb to pull off. Lurking backlash for running up the score be damned (thankfully, the internet seemed to agree that this play was so awesome that he was spared any criticism), Tatis wants to remind everyone that he’s capable of things other ballplayers are not.
The Padres’ rambunctious right fielder, who has an 89th-percentile sprint speed, correctly identified that his speed would provide much more exhilaration in this situation than scoring from second on a Dustin Harris single would. Again, pretty unnecessary given the circumstance, but people don’t pay postseason ticket prices to see the mundane. They want to see superstars do superstar things, punctuated with the type of emotional outburst that makes postseason baseball so special. Does one man’s primal scream after diving across home plate register as much of a sound when 47,000 San Diegans are also screaming? Probably not, but it makes for one hell of a highlight:
None of this even accounts for the fact that Tatis started this baseball bash with a leadoff home run, giving him seven in 17 playoff games and boosting his lifetime postseason OPS to a nirvanic 1.178. All this from a man who finished April with a 75 wRC+ but who put up a 143 the rest of the way, giving him a strong chance to finish in the top five of MVP voting. His 2026 statistics will show yet another season with at least 25 homers and 25 steals — the fourth time he’s done that — with the lowest strikeout rate of his still-ascendant career to boot. But the numbers won’t tell the full narrative arc. His first home run of the regular season famously did not come until late May, and his team’s playoff odds sagged to a season-low 7.4% in July. The Padres were under .500 as late as July 25, and their deadline acquisitions of Casey Mize and Robbie Ray didn’t do much to help. But thanks to a bullpen unit that tied for second all-time in collective WAR, Jackson Merrill’s second-half revitalization, the surprise production of Harris, Ty France, and Samad Taylor, plus Tatis finding some sort of flow state (which may or may not have something to do with planetary alignment), the Padres are poised to advance into October.
The lesson here? Chase wild, thrill-seeking endeavors over playing it safe. This style of play might just be what San Diego needs in a hypothetical Division Series against the Milwaukee Brewers and their tight, fundamentally sound, 103-win operation. Run free, Fernando Tatis Jr., and deal with the consequences later. At the very least, you gave everyone something to marvel at and helped your team to a convincing win. Which is kind of the whole point of playing postseason baseball.
“He’s not coming out of this game” was the comment from NBC play-by-play announcer Dave Flemming while the broadcast lingered on a shot of Padres Game 1 starter Michael King as he sat in the dugout looking through a notebook during the bottom of the sixth inning. “He’s not reading War and Peace either,” added color commentator Mark Grant. “He’s studying hitters.”
But that’s not to say King and the Padres wouldn’t find certain aspects of War and Peace relatable. Speaking in reference to his own work, Leo Tolstoy acknowledged that War and Peace defies conventional attempts at classification, saying it is “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.” Comparatively, analysts have struggled all season to properly define the 2026 Padres. If Tolstoy had scripted the Friars, he might have said they are “not a playoff team, much less a contender, and still less a club in the midst of a rebuild.”
Instead, the Padres were a team that went 30-20 in its first 50 games, 19-31 over the next 50 games, and then finished out the season by going 42-20. On July 22, their odds of making the playoffs bottomed out at 7.4%. Then they went on a run, and just one month later, their odds had surged to 68.9%. But rather than continue that upward trajectory en route to clinching a playoff spot, they first endured a backslide that shrank their odds to 39.2% as recently as September 2. It would have been logical for San Diego to sell at the trade deadline, but Padres POBO A.J. Preller was born without the specific bit of genetic code that allows humans to understand selling as a strategic concept. Instead, they added starting pitchers Robbie Ray and Casey Mize and finished the year as the top-seeded Wild Card team in the National League. Read the rest of this entry »
Albert Cesare/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images and Eric Hartline-Imagn Images
Credit the Phillies for trying. When I highlighted the worst defenses among contending teams in early July, they were the poster boys, scoring worse than any team besides the decidedly non-contending Rockies in the multi-metric methodology I’ve used for the past four seasons. But when the August 3 trade deadline arrived, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski took a step to improve that shoddy defense, acquiring second baseman Luis Arraez from the Giants and setting off a game of musical chairs that sent incumbent second baseman Bryson Stott to third base, third baseman Alec Bohm to first, and first baseman Bryce Harper to right field. The defense at those spots mostly improved, but last Thursday, with the Phillies in the midst of what would become a 2-6 skid that nearly cost them a Wild Card berth, Arraez sprained his left ankle while trying to avoid a tag at first base. On Monday, interim manager Don Mattinglyannounced that the 29-year-old infielder will be left off the roster for the team’s Wild Card Series against the Braves.
How Mattingly will proceed with his lineup is unclear. In the three games Arraez missed — including Sunday’s playoff berth-clinching win over the Rays — Edmundo Sosa started at third base twice while Stott returned to second, while in the other game, Bohm and Harper moved back to their original positions as well; they lost that one 12-1.
Below I’ll take a closer look at the metrics underlying the Phillies’ defensive configurations, but long story short, they rate as the playoff team with the worst defense, as they did last year and in 2023. Read the rest of this entry »
