Padres back with vengeance, ready to compete for NL West crown??

There have been other bad endings in October, even though there are rarely good ones for losing teams. The worst, of course, of all time, came for the Yankees in October of 2004, when they saw the Red Sox come from 0-3 down to beat New York in the most famous League Championship Series.

But perhaps the worst ending since then came for the Padres last October, when they were once again trying to get past the Dodgers, their biggest rival, the way the Sox finally got past the Yankees in ’04.

The Padres, after a rousing 93-win season, led the Dodgers two games to one in a Division Series and were about to play Game 4 at home in Petco Park. They knew the Dodgers were looking at a bullpen game to keep their season alive. It was, San Diego was sure, their time. Then they never scored another run. They got shut out in that bullpen game and shut out by Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Game 5, and their season finally came crashing down with Dodger pitchers retiring the last 20 hitters of the Padres season.

“It ended pretty fast,” Jackson Merrill said when it was over.

• Analyzing Merrill's massive contract extension: 'My goal is to win'

And you know how the Padres have responded to a nightmare ending like that and responded to the way the Dodgers have come out of the gate? The Padres have started as hot and fast as the Dodgers have. They have gotten back up and gotten right after them. By the time Shohei Ohtani hit that walk-off homer to get the Dodgers to 8-0 on Wednesday, the Padres were already with them at 7-0. And as big a story this April as the Dodgers are.

“I have no doubt we’re going to be knocking on the door every single year,” Fernando Tatis, Jr. said after Game 5 last season.

It sounded like brave, empty words in the immediate aftermath of what had just happened in Games 4 and 5, when the Dodgers were right there for them, and looked ready to be knocked off and knocked out of a World Series run because the Padres were going to make one. But now -- and as small a sampling as this is -- Tatis and his teammates have made it look as if they plan to back those words up.

“We’re playing the game hard,” Tatis said after the Padres swept the Guardians to get to that 7-0 record.

You never know whether a team will get back up after a heartbreaking finish like the one the Padres endured. But so far and so good. San Diego has looked like the team that rolled through the second half of the ’24 season and rolled the Braves in their Wild Card Series before jumping the Dodgers the way they did.

They still come at you with Manny Machado and Merrill and Tatis, Luis Arraez and Jake Cronenworth, and this season, they have added the red-hot Gavin Sheets to the mix. They have even added a veteran like Jose Iglesias, after all the terrific “OMG” things he did with the Mets last season.

And the Padres can still pitch, with Dylan Cease and Michael King at the top of a rotation that doesn’t have Yu Darvish right now because of elbow inflammation but has added Nick Pivetta, who gave up just one hit in seven innings in his Padres debut. Their closer, Robert Suarez, has come in as hot as so many other Padres have, with three saves already in his team’s first seven games.

It is not just the Dodgers and the Padres in the NL West, for sure. In so many ways, it is as interesting a division as there is in the sport right now, because the D-backs never seem to go away, and the Giants might finally be on their way back.

But it is the Dodgers against whom the Padres have always measured themselves for a long time. Certainly, the Yankees and Red Sox have been in their storied rivalry longer. Everybody knows how the Yankees dominated that rivalry once Babe Ruth was sold from the Red Sox to the Yankees and what became known as the “Curse of the Bambino” began, until so much changed across four long baseball nights in October of ’04. But the Padres, across their history, have played in the immense shadow of the Dodgers, and their stars, and their history, even in seasons like 1984 and 1998 when they were the ones to make the World Series.

By the way? The Padres have had their innings against the Dodgers. In 2022, after the Dodgers had won 111 regular season games, the Padres upset them in another Division Series before losing to the Phillies in the NLCS. Then, last season, it looked as if the Padres were about to do it to the Dodgers again until they didn’t.

Now they get another chance. The Mets are in another division from the Dodgers. The Yankees are in another league. But it’s different with the Padres. The Dodgers are just a couple of hours up the road from them. But only one win better right now in the NL West.