NL Division Series Preview: Los Angeles Dodgers vs. San Diego Padres

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that no matter what happens, the 2022 Padres ultimately had a fine season. Despite losing their best player for the entire season (and a chunk of the next one), they won 89 games and made the playoffs, and also acquired one of the best young players ever available via trade. They excised the worst of 2021’s demons in avoiding a repeat of the sudden, stunning collapse that transformed them from a top-tier contender to a sub-.500 squad. And most recently, they went to New York and ended the season of the 101-win Mets. But the season would still not feel like a triumph if they now fell to their biggest rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers (sorry, Giants fans, you have to share your bête noire). That’s easier said than done.

The rivalry between the Dodgers and Padres over the last few years has largely been a mismatch. San Diego went a miserable 5–14 against the Dodgers in 2022, didn’t even take a single series against them this season, and haven’t had a winning record in this matchup since 2010. To add injury to insult, the only time the Padres have made the playoffs during the A.J. Preller era, the weird 2020 season, it was the Dodgers that sent them packing in a 3–0 sweep in the NLDS.

Let’s start things out with the ZiPS game-by-game projection.

The Dodgers are keeping it close, as of press time, whether Clayton Kershaw or Julio Urías will be the Game 1 starter (though reportedly, they already know). While Kershaw has seniority in the rotation, the team has regularly not started him in the first game of a series when he’s available, with both Urías and Walker Buehler among the pitchers getting the nod in recent years among others. ZiPS would slightly favor Kershaw as the Game 1/Game 5 starter, bumping the projected probability of the Dodgers advancing from 60.2% to 61.6%. While Urías won his first ERA crown in 2022, his peripherals are down slightly from ’21.

I expect a more orderly use of the rotation than in most years, fueled by the missing rest day between Games 4 and Game 5 (if those are necessary). In the past, bringing a Game 1 starter back for Game 4 still allowed the Game 2 starter to pitch in Game 5 on a normal four days’ rest. Now, to pull off that particular gambit, you either have to commit to pitching both players on three days’ rest or go to another option in Game 5. Andrew Heaney has had a wonderful bounce-back season, but I’m fairly confident that the Dodgers would prefer to avoid having him be the starter in a possible high-stakes elimination game.

However it shakes out, the Padres will inevitably face a healthy dose of southpaws after matching up with three right-handed starters in New York. While they didn’t have much of a platoon split during the season, when ZiPS projects the splits, the computer spits out a deficit against lefties that amounts to roughly 20 points of OPS. The lack of Fernando Tatis Jr. looms large here; with him in the lineup, the Padres improve to only 54%–46% underdogs, as notable a shift in the probabilities as I can recall since I’ve been doing this.

There’s another significant delta in the projections, and not one that favors the Padres. ZiPS fully expects Juan Soto to hit like Juan Soto should, but he’s inarguably had a disappointing season overall, at least relative to the lofty standards he’s set for himself. His wRC+ of 145 on the year, while a fine number, is a distinct downgrade from his 163 in 2021 and 202 in ’20. His .236/.388/.390 line in San Diego since the trade, while undoubtedly helpful to the team, isn’t superstar-level for a hitter without much defensive value to add. If I tell ZiPS that Soto plays like his Padres self so far rather than the current projection, the Padres drop even further into underdog territory, 64%–36%.

If the Dodgers have a platoon advantage against the Padres in terms of the latter’s hitters, it’s also true on the other side of the ball. While there’s no type of pitcher whom the Dodgers fear, it’s a reasonably lefty-heavy lineup, and ZiPS projects a similar split for them. But the Padres don’t have the personnel to take advantage of that. They do have Blake Snell, and as such, the Padres are projected to be the strongest in any games he starts. But Sean Manaea’s struggles this year have basically relegated him to mopup/long relief duty this postseason. The Mets forcing a Game 3 also had an impact on San Diego’s rotation, eliminating the ability to get Joe Musgrove two starts in the NLDS.

So far, a lot of this piece has been rather doom and gloom for the Padres, but despite that, there are still a lot of reasons for their fans to be hopeful. A 60/40 projection is not 70/30 or 80/20 or 90/10. If you had a magically weighted coin that came up heads 60% of the time, it would take quite a while for your friends to realize your relatively unambitious chicanery. The Dodgers only pass the 70% threshold against the Padres playing a best-of-25 series and only blow past the 90% mark at a highly improbable NLDS matchup that could go 151 games.

For a team that won 111 games, it certainly feels like there’s a lot of risk on the Dodgers. Tyler Anderson and Heaney were solid this year, but are you being honest if you say you’re as comfortable with them as, say, Max Scherzer and Buehler? Tony Gonsolin is back, but he also missed time recently with forearm pain, and Dustin May is no guarantee to be healthy for the series either. Blake Treinen‘s status is also up in the air, and Daniel Hudson’s season ended in June with a torn ACL. I’m not even sure which version of Craig Kimbrel, recently demoted from closer, they have right now. The team just isn’t quite as deep at this moment as they were in recent postseasons.

If the Padres can get to either Kershaw or Urías and split the first two games, the remaining three are projected as nearly a coin flip (52%–48% Dodgers). A team with Soto, Manny Machado, Josh Bell, and Jake Cronenworth in the lineup certainly has at least the chance to do that.

The nice thing about being the underdog is that you only need to vanquish the other guy once. Daniel LaRusso didn’t have to come out ahead against Johnny Lawrence every time. Rick Vaughn didn’t always have to strike out Clu Haywood. If the Padres best the Dodgers here, nobody will care about the 14 regular-season losses. I don’t believe in hoary old clichés about teams “wanting” something more, but I think the Padres are aware they have a lot more to prove than the Dodgers do and are unlikely to leave anything on the table.