The San Diego Padres hit six homers and blew out the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday night, squaring their best-of-five National League Divisional Series at 1-1. The Padres and Dodgers have fashioned an exciting, and at times, emotional rivalry in recent years. That was evident in multiple respects on Sunday, with high tensions manifesting in the form of a pitcher-batter spat and Dodgers fans misbehaving toward Padres outfielders.
We’ll start with the more innocuous of the developments. Dodgers right-hander Jack Flaherty and Padres third baseman Manny Machado engaged in a prolonged bout of jawing that stemmed from Flaherty’s outing-ending strikeout of Machado in the sixth inning.
Flaherty appeared to give Machado a command (“sit the f— down”) after recording strike three, which Machado understandably took exception to at the time:
Machado and Flaherty continued to trade recipes well after Flaherty had retreated to the dugout:
The emotions run through the postseason and that’s what the beauty of this is,” Machado said after the win.
Whereas Flaherty and Machado’s bickering was largely harmless — it didn’t escalate into a brawl or a bean-ball war — the uglier side of Game 2’s emotions were felt by what happened between Dodgers fans and Padres outfielders Jurickson Profar and Fernando Tatis Jr.
Profar, for those who didn’t watch the game, robbed a Mookie Betts home run in the first inning. When he did, he didn’t make it immediately clear that he had caught the ball. Instead, Profar was too engaged with the left-field fans, resulting in Betts beginning his home-run trot and the Dodger Stadium PA playing the team’s celebratory music.
Profar later said that he didn’t say anything to the Dodgers fans at the time.
Whether you describe Profar’s acts as trolling, ribbing, or just having fun, there’s no excuse for what occurred to begin the bottom of the seventh inning. The game had to be delayed by more than 10 minutes after Dodgers fans threw at least two baseballs at Profar and chucked bottles at Tatis, who had playfully leaned into the crowd’s jeering throughout the night.
“We’re giving those people a show out there. Looks like they got a little upset because our team went up, but this is the playoffs. This is the environment that we are built for, and I enjoy every single second of it,” Tatis said after the game.
Fortunately, both Profar and Tatis appeared unharmed. Profar said afterward that he was not hit by either ball, but that it was “scary.” Cooler heads prevailed and prevented an even uglier scene from developing. After the half inning, the aforementioned Machado brought the Padres roster together in the dugout — ostensibly to discuss and/or put what had happened behind them.
“You gotta stay locked in and we have to play our baseball. Manny did a good job of keeping us in the zone,” Padres center fielder Jackson Merrill said afterward.
The Padres and Dodgers will have Monday off before resuming the series with Game 3 on Tuesday at Petco Park in San Diego. Here’s hoping that the two teams and the fans bring the energy, but that they leave the extracurricular nonsense at home.
Or, as Profar said when he was asked if it’s fair to say the two teams dislike each other: “Yes, but it’s still a baseball game.”
