Three years later, the quote nonetheless resonates.
In terms of the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, late Padres proprietor Peter Seidler framed the dynamic finest.
“The Dodgers are the dragon up the freeway we’re trying to slay,” Seidler mentioned again in August 2022, throughout an in-game interview with ESPN as the 2 groups performed a Sunday Night time Baseball sport at Chavez Ravine.
“We have a lot of respect for them, obviously. But our goal, and San Diego knows this as well, is to win a championship.”
And from that pursuit, certainly one of baseball’s most heated trendy rivalries has sprouted.
To the remainder of the baseball world, the Padres have been a plucky feel-good story during the last half-decade. They’re a small-market staff that has turn into an annual postseason contender. They’ve an aggressive entrance workplace, a roster full of huge personalities, and an ever-pulsing present of emotion and depth reverberating from the dugout by their frenzied residence crowds.
In Los Angeles, nevertheless, the angle couldn’t be extra completely different. The Dodgers have lengthy been the ruling energy within the Nationwide League West, champions of the division 11 occasions within the final 12 years. The Padres, then again, are the rebels who gained’t give up, the barbarians on the door attempting to steal away their crown.
“I just think that it starts with them wanting to overtake us,” supervisor Dave Roberts mentioned this week, forward of the Padres’ newest go to to Dodger Stadium on Friday. “I think that we’ve clearly dominated the division in the last decade … But I think that they’re trying to overtake us. I think that with that, that certainly brings out emotion.”
Whereas the Dodgers have quelled related challenges throughout their decade-long reign within the division, the Padres have proved to be a distinct type of foil — coupling a distinction in model and tradition with sufficient endurance to gasoline more and more contentious bouts.
“It’s just two contrasting styles,” third baseman Max Muncy mentioned, “that have just grown into this beast.”
There was the Dodgers’ sweep of the Padres within the 2020 NL Division Collection, then the Padres’ payback in a postseason upset two years later. Final fall, a good division race got here all the way down to the final week of the season. When their paths once more crossed in October, one more NLDS went all the way in which to a decisive fifth sport.
This yr, extra tinder has been added to the fireplace, due to a flurry of hit batters and a benches-clearing melee throughout a collection at Dodger Stadium in June.
And this week, forward of a 10-day stretch through which the golf equipment will play their last two regular-season collection, the Padres offered one other plot twist, erasing what as soon as felt like an insurmountable nine-game deficit within the standings to reach in Los Angeles with a surprising NL West lead.
The dragon, after all, hasn’t been slayed but. The Dodgers are nonetheless the defending World Collection champions, even when their latest middling kind has sophisticated their title protection.
Nonetheless, the conquest that Seidler — who died after the 2023 season at age 63 — lengthy envisioned has by no means appeared so attainable.
The risk posed by the Padres has by no means felt so actual.
“I feel like we’ve just been facing each other in [a lot of] big spots,” infielder Miguel Rojas mentioned. “Ever since that [playoff] series in ‘22, this team took it a little bit personal over the next couple years. Obviously last year, going through them to go all the way to the World Series was a big part [of our run]. But it feels every time we face each other, even in the regular season, it’s a big spot.”
Whereas the Dodgers and Padres have shared a division ever for the reason that latter’s founding in 1969, a lot of their co-existence featured little or no shared historical past.
For many of the Padres’ first half-century, the membership was mired in perpetual mediocrity. Earlier than 2020, they’d made the playoffs solely 5 occasions. The place the Dodgers boast eight World Collection titles, the Padres personal the excellence of the league’s oldest staff to have by no means gained it as soon as.
There was one shut division race between the golf equipment in 1996, when the Padres swept the Dodgers within the last collection of the season to say the NL West by one sport. In 2006, they tied atop the standings however each flamed out within the playoffs.
After that, the Dodgers ascended to annual contender standing. The Padres, in the meantime, looked for an identification amid a 13-year playoff drought.
Firstly of 2019, one lastly arrived.
Whereas Manny Machado was productive throughout his temporary Dodgers tenure on the finish of 2018, serving to the membership win a second straight NL pennant, his model of play was an ungainly match with the staff. He wouldn’t at all times hustle, and wouldn’t at all times apologize for it. He burnished his status as an often soiled participant, and by no means appeared too excited by attempting to alter it.
The Dodgers by no means actually deliberate to carry him again as a free agent. However additionally they didn’t anticipate him to wind up in San Diego, the place he signed a $300-million cope with the Padres forward of the 2019 season.
“It’s about bringing a championship to San Diego,” Padres basic supervisor AJ Preller mentioned the day Machado was launched. “A lot of people over the last few years have been very patient as we’ve tried to build something that’s going to stand up long term. Obviously, it’s an exclamation point here today with the signing of Manny.”
And within the six years since, the Padres have been crafted in his fiery picture; constructed round equally unabashed stars like Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill, Jurickson Profar and Joe Musgrove.
The Padres’ Manny Machado follows by on a two-run residence run in Sport 1 of the 2024 NLDS in opposition to the Dodgers.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Occasions)
That ascent started in 2020. The Padres embraced their “Slam Diego” moniker, adopting a noticeable, fiery edge. They weren’t afraid to flip bats or speak smack or taunt followers. Their model of baseball, at the very least within the eyes of that dragon up the freeway, was rooted of their persona as a lot as something; a pointy juxtaposition to the Dodgers’ extra subdued, even-keeled strategy.
“When you look at what the Padres have become, it’s a team that plays with very high energy, very high emotion. And they’ve created an atmosphere down there that drives off that,” Muncy mentioned. “We are almost the opposite. We play on very little emotion. And I just think those two styles contrast very differently. You started seeing that in the games.”
The Dodgers’ perpetual perch atop the standings stoked San Diego, too, making the Padres’ efficiency within the long-dormant rivalry a manifestation of their championship ambitions.
“When I was there, we always wanted to beat the Dodgers,” mentioned Blake Snell, who performed for San Diego from 2021 to 2023 and can face them for the primary time since becoming a member of the Dodgers on Saturday in Los Angeles. “Because that’s the team you gotta go through to get to the World Series.”
That dynamic was evident within the 2022 playoffs, when the underdog Padres conjured an depth the Dodgers couldn’t match.
It was on the forefront of final yr’s October rematch, too, when the Padres ran away with a Sport 2 victory punctuated by Machado throwing a ball towards Roberts within the Dodgers’ dugout, and the Chavez Ravine crowd showering trash close to Padres gamers on the sector.
“What I got out of it was a bunch of dudes that showed up in front of a big, hostile crowd with stuff being thrown at them and said, ‘We’re going to talk with our play; we’re not going to back down,’” Padres supervisor Mike Shildt mentioned that night time.
“That is kind of part of their game,” Muncy countered forward of Sport 3. “Trying to get under your skin and trying to have the emotion come out and get you to do something that you’re not normally doing.”
This time, the Dodgers responded, prevailing in a five-game collection that Roberts in comparison with a “street fight.” On the verge of a possible slaying, his staff as a substitute breathed hearth again.
“I just felt last year, where they were going, how they were kind of feeling, and our mindset and psyche, we needed to kind of match their intensity,” Roberts mentioned.
The struggle is not confined to press convention taunts. This yr, the rivalry boiled over into bodily clashes. And on the heart have been the 2 respective managers.
Over time, there’s been loads of pettiness imbued into Dodgers-Padres video games, from a scoreboard graphic of a crying Clayton Kershaw at Petco Park, to Will Smith’s description of the since-departed Profar as “kind of irrelevant” final yr.
However this June, the antagonism was ratcheted up, after the groups mixed for 11 hit batters — and not-so-veiled accusations of intentionality — over seven video games performed in a 11-day stretch.
The Padres took exception to 3 completely different plunkings of Tatis. The Dodgers have been doubtful of two balls that pelted Shohei Ohtani. By the point Tatis was hit within the hand within the last sport of the latter collection, Shildt had seen sufficient, shouting in Roberts’ path as he walked onto the sector to test on his star participant.
Roberts responded in form, racing out to fulfill Shildt with a slight, however nonetheless shocking, shove. Abruptly, the benches had cleared. Roberts and Shildt continued jawing by all of it.
Dodgers supervisor Dave Roberts yells at San Diego Padres supervisor Mike Shildt after benches clear within the ninth inning of a June 19 sport at Dodger Stadium.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Occasions)
“After a while, enough’s enough,” Shildt mentioned afterward. “Intentional, unintentional, the fact of the matter is we took exception with it. I responded.”
“I felt that he was trying to make it personal with me,” Roberts countered in his postgame press convention. “Which then, I take it personal.”
Machado delivered essentially the most memorable quote of the night time, cautioning the Dodgers to “set a little candle up for Tati” and “pray” he hadn’t suffered a critical damage (X-rays on Tatis’ hand got here again unfavorable).
However within the aftermath, all the eye centered on Roberts and Shildt, who have been every suspended by the league for one sport.
“It’s ultimately about the defense of our team,” Shildt mentioned the following day when requested about Roberts. “And anybody that is going to take the steps that I feel are inappropriate against our team, then I will take action. I’m not a personal guy. I’m not a grudge guy. But I am a foxhole guy.”
Roberts snapped again when requested about Shildt (whom he mentioned he has spoken with for the reason that incident) this week.
“It definitely added to the intensity of the series, when you’ve got two managers going at it,” Roberts mentioned. “And I never want to make it about me, I really don’t. I just took offense to his response towards me. I thought it was directed at me. But for me, I just want to go out and play good baseball. That’s kind of where my head’s at.”
Given the Dodgers’ struggles of late, merely stacking wins has by no means been a much bigger precedence. Over the following week and a half, they might reclaim a division lead they’ve so clumsily squandered, or enter the ultimate month of the season with substantial floor to make up.
“We can’t make it more than what it is,” Mookie Betts mentioned. “It’s another series in August. Obviously, we all know it’s big and X, Y and Z, but we can’t make it that way. We have to just look at it as the same game as today and play our game and not try to get too high or too low.”
“I’m not a grudge guy. But I am a foxhole guy,” mentioned San Diego Padres supervisor Mike Shildt, strolling with Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernandez and utilityman Kike Hernandez after a bench clearing within the ninth inning of a June 19 sport.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Occasions)
Nonetheless, the Dodgers gained’t feign passivity this time. Not so long as the Padres proceed to lean into their trademark depth.
“They told me right away, obviously, we don’t like those guys a whole lot,” newly-acquired Padres reliever Mason Miller mentioned on Foul Territory final week, of the message he acquired from his new teammates upon being traded to San Diego on the deadline. “I haven’t really [experienced] a rivalry to that extent.”
Roberts wasn’t stunned to listen to it.
“We think about whoever we’re playing,” he mentioned. “I do think it’s one of those things where, they’re very hyper-focused on us. But I guess it’s a compliment. Still, we’ve got to match their intensity. Because they want to beat us more than anything.”
