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This is the Dodgers-Padres series we’ve been waiting for
The NL West title is on the line, starting tonight
Back in March, the Dodgers and Padres kicked off the 2024 Major League season against one another in South Korea, splitting a pair of games. Six months and 310 total games later, they’ll face off for three more in Los Angeles beginning Tuesday, with the NL West title up for grabs. Despite being three games behind the Dodgers, the Padres are fully in control of their own destiny, given that they took seven of the previous 10 meetings this season and will thus hold the tiebreaker no matter what happens.
It’s exactly the kind of late-season race between the two rivals we expected way back when they faced one another in Seoul. Isn’t it?
Actually, no. Those were the expectations back in 2021, when San Diego acquired Yu Darvish, Blake Snell and Ha-Seong Kim, and we wondered before the season if it would be one of the best divisional races of all time. It was – but not for the Padres, who finished 28 games out as the 107-win Giants and 106-win Dodgers battled until the final day.
But in 2024? This wasn’t exactly the outlook atop the NL West.
Obviously, the Dodgers had a huge winter, acquiring Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and others. Yet the San Diego outlook was far more muted, in part due to last season’s unmet expectations and in part due to the November 2023 passing of popular team owner Peter Seidler, who had welcomed the aggressive moves of previous years. Soto was traded to the Yankees in exchange for badly needed pitching, while Dylan Cease was added from the White Sox just before the Korea trip. The team had exactly one reliable outfielder in Tatis Jr., and never made any moves to support him on the grass.
FanGraphs projected San Diego to win 83 games and come in 10 games behind the Dodgers. At the All-Star break, that’s essentially what they were on track for, given their 50-49 record while sitting seven games out in the West.
It’s obviously gone better than that, for reasons both expected (the RISP/extra-innings silliness has gone away) and unpredictable (the trades for Luis Arraez and half the bullpen; the speed in which Jackson Merrill became a star; the entire existence of Jurickson Profar).
You can see the shape of the season via the playoff odds here. The Dodgers were always expected to make the playoffs, and they clinched a berth last Thursday. The Padres were just one of many teams in the Wild Card mix, and it took until late summer for that to finally change.
