Padres feel season's urgency prepared them for playoffs – San Diego Union-Tribune

The Major League Baseball season consists of 162 games played over a six-month period.

For the regular season, more or less, each team wins a third of its games, each team loses a third of its games, and the winners and losers are separated by what happens in the other third.

And it all takes place over a six-month period that sometimes seems like it will never end.

The regular season is a period piece set in the Great Plains. It can drag on and you have to wait a long time for the big moments. Then suddenly the script changes for the teams that make it to the postseason. Playoff teams find themselves in an action movie full of high-speed chases on the streets of downtown.

It ranges from “many games left” to “every game is important.” Every decision is important. Every pitch counts. Every swing counts. Every mistake counts. At least it could be that way.

And there is a chance that everything will end within a few days. For all but one team, a painful collision with a wall is imminent.

A dozen teams sprayed champagne at the end of the regular season. Four will do so this week and four next week. Then two. And then one.

Only the winner of the World Series gets to the finish line on his own terms. Every second playoff team leaves a gloomy clubhouse one last time.

So yes, it's the same game. It's just a lot different.

“The biggest thing is the crowd and everything is magnified,” said Padres shortstop Xander Bogaerts, who has appeared in the postseason five times and won two World Series with the Red Sox. “The crazy thing is that the game is still the same. The scale just gets a little bigger and the hype and everything just gets a little outsized.”

As the Padres prepare to begin the 2024 postseason with Game 1 of a best-of-three wild-card series on Tuesday night against the Braves, Bogaerts is among those who believe this team is particularly well-suited heading into October survive.

The Padres have a quartet of starters who have posted a 2.75 ERA in their last 27 combined starts. The back end of the bullpen has weathered some bumps of late but remains just as stressed as anyone else, giving manager Mike Shildt plenty of opportunities to handle close games. The offense led the majors in batting average and finished in the top 10 in virtually every other category.

That's a lot of checked boxes.

But …

“We can’t let up,” third baseman Manny Machado said Monday afternoon. “We have to go out there and take care of our business and keep playing the way we played baseball. You can't take anything for granted in postseason baseball. You have to go out there and compete, compete and play and be prepared for anything.”

Here's where the Padres think what they've done over the past two and a half months has prepared them for what will hopefully be another month of games.

They point out that there was little calm before this storm.

“We played a number of playoff teams and played them very well,” said Michael King, who will start Game 1 for the Padres. “…And because we never felt completely comfortable in our wild card spot – and we were obviously aiming for the division at the time – we knew that every defeat was almost devastating. So when we went out, we had to win every series and play it like it was win or go home.”

The Padres were 50-50 as of July 20th. They won 42 of their next 60 games and had to win virtually as many. (It was 13-6 against playoff teams during that span.)

“We played postseason baseball all year,” Machado said. “It's been like this for a while. We had a good time playing against some really good teams. Our mentality as a group has been the same all year. I don’t think we’ll change.”

It's important to note that the stress the Padres felt was overcome or pushed aside is not exactly the same as what lies ahead. Players say that a September game against a top opponent in a packed stadium can feel a lot like the postseason, but that it doesn't bring all the butterflies of the postseason.

“Those lights are coming on,” Bogaerts said. “It speeds you up. You have to take a deep breath.”

However, there is no question that the Padres have played with determined zeal since the All-Star break. They only secured a playoff spot in the 157th game. And in 23 of their 33 games leading up to that crucial point, they had been within three runs at some point in the final three innings.

Shildt managed his bullpen most nights like he was chasing a prize.

In fact, the importance of every game from the start of spring training has been one of Shildt's biggest focuses for a team that started too slow in 2023 and played this way for too long. It took a while for the philosophy to manifest itself, but from the low point of getting beaten by the Angels in early June, there was clearly a determination to treat every game as one big game.

“That’s the difference between good players, great players and great teams,” Sheldt said. “Physical skills are physical skills. It depends on how consistently you use your skills and how you can concentrate on a daily basis.”

Everything he has preached for eight months about consistency and “normalizing” every situation and refusing to even consider that there is more going on outside of the moment has led to the next three days and the next four series, which the Padres hope.

“It's just exciting because everyone understands the size of the games and there are more people and more press,” Shildt said. “It’s significantly reinforced. But if you normalize just playing the game, then we've always played the game the right way. That doesn't change because it's October. …It’s clearly important. But individuals and teams find a way to do their best every day, no matter the circumstances, and that's exactly what this team did. So every day is about just being there, competing, playing and not making things bigger than they are.”

Originally published: October 1, 2024 at 6:00 am