Padres Daily: The real point Profar helped make; walk this way; Ohtani balls; Joe stays

Good morning from DFW,

There was a good story and a developing story, the fun story and the real story.

Jurickson Profar, as he is making a habit of early this season, made sure the Padres did not lose last night.

He did so a night after he mistakenly thought he had been intentionally thrown at, which caused a little ruckus in the middle of Saturday’s game and prompted Dodgers catcher Will Smith to comment afterward that Profar was “irrelevant.”

So it was felicitous that Profar got the decisive hit last night, a bases-loaded double in the seventh inning. You can read about the Padres’ 6-3 victory and some of the Padres’ thoughts on Profar’s relevance in my game story (here).

We will revisit Profar later in the newsletter.

Now, let’s focus on the important takeaway from the Padres’ series win at Dodger Stadium.

They don’t win series there very often. They entered this season having gone 30-67 at Dodger Stadium since the start of 2013, the year the Dodgers began their run of consecutive playoff appearances. This was the Padres’ sixth series win among the 33 they have played at Dodger Stadium in 12 seasons. (It’s not like the Padres have been all that much better against them at Petco Park in that span, going 35-62.)

Profar said the victories here this weekend were “a message.” But the message wasn’t necessarily to the Dodgers or about the Dodgers.

“Honestly, it’s winning a series,” Manny Machado said. “... I think we put too much emphasis on who we’re playing. Let’s play our best baseball. We know they’re a good team. There’s no question about that. But let’s just play good baseball, and I think we’ve been doing that and we’re going to continue doing that.”

That’s the point.

The Padres played well enough to win two games against a good opponent.

It isn’t necessarily about beating the Dodgers. But beating the Dodgers is what follows if the Padres are playing like they expect to.

“It’s always good to win a series,” Mike Shildt said. “A hard-fought series. Back and forth. But ultimately it’s about how we compete.”

The Padres did what good teams do more often than not, which sometimes includes overcoming their own mistakes and missed opportunities and taking advantage to expose the other team’s shortcomings.

It seems the Dodgers do not have a very good bullpen at present.

The Dodgers have beaten the Padres before without having a very good bullpen.

“We just stayed with it,” Shildt said after the Padres’ fourth comeback victory of the season and their second of the series. “That’s the different kind of resilience.”

Finishing

Last night was the Padres’ third victory over the Dodgers this season. And any longtime observer recognized throughout all of them the kind of game the Padres usually lose to their nemesis.

Dodgers pitchers walked more batters yesterday than any group of Dodgers pitchers had in a game since 1962, four years after Peter Seidler’s grandfather moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. The first six of those walked batters were stranded, as the Padres failed to score after loading the bases with one out in the third inning and failed to add on to Machado’s leadoff homer in the fourth despite getting two more baserunners. They grounded into four double plays, more than they had in their previous 407 games.

“We left too many runners on,” Machado said. “We’re going to continue to get better at that. That’s what this group is about. Every day we learn something new. And tomorrow we’ll figure out a way to get some of those runs in. With a team like that, you can’t mess up on those opportunities. Today we got away with one, but we’re going to have to cash in on some of those to not even give them a chance.”

That’s probably a healthy way to process the failures.

There was also the upside of the game’s ebb and flow, which is that the Padres eventually did capitalize.

“When you have a really good team, opportunities are going to show up throughout the game,” Profar said. “Sometimes we don’t cash them in, but we are that good that we’re gonna create them again.”

Pro’s a Pro

As members of the media gathered around the game’s hero, Fernando Tatis Jr. announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Jurickson (expletive) Profar.”

That pretty much sums up how Profar’s teammates feel.

Profar was brought back because the Padres brass felt like he could adequately play left field and help them win and because he plays the game a certain kind of way and is close with Tatis and holds sway with Tatis and other key players.

In other words, he is highly relevant to the Padres.

It was almost like Smith thought Profar was still hitting .236 for the Rockies.

Profar is different when playing for the Padres. And he is playing at the highest level of his career through the first 18 games of the season.

He is tied for the MLB lead with four game-winning RBIs and leads the Padres with four go-ahead RBIs.

The Padres made an effort to show Smith respect while contending what he said was off-base.

“He’s got his own opinions about relevancy,” Shildt said. “He can judge that all he wants. That’s for him to do. I can tell you this … Profar is very relevant to us. He’s a glue guy for us. This guy has 10 years in the big leagues. There’s some relevancy there. Did a nice job tonight with the three-run double. Beyond that, Pro’s a pro and he’s a very big part of the San Diego Padres. He’s very relevant to me. I believe in him completely. He’s very relevant to his teammates. We respect and appreciate him highly.”

Fewer than 10 percent of MLB players accrue 10 years of service time, a mark Profar passed earlier this season. For that, Machado was offended for his teammate.

“Everyone has their opinion, but at the end of the day how I see it is this baseball game is unity,” Machado said. “Whenever you got a guy that’s got 10 years in the league, I think he’s a little bit more relevant than being irrelevant, as (Smith) said. You have to put some respect on people’s names. I think that’s what this game is losing. They are losing respect for some of these guys who have been doing this for a very long time.”

Profar declined to respond to Smith’s assertion beyond how he responded in the seventh inning.

“I’m not going to comment on that,” he said. “I’m just gonna play like I did. … I heard about it. But I’m not a media guy. I show up out there, you know?”

Things get said all the time in high-level competition. But Smith’s blustery comment blowing up on him was amusing in that it had been in response to Profar having been caught up in the heat of the moment a day earlier. Profar acknowledged after Saturday’s game that he was mistaken to believe Gavin Stone was throwing at him while having not yet allowed a baserunner in a one-run game.

“They don’t know each other as a human being,” Tatis said. “It’s part of the game, it’s part of the emotions. I know that was just a comment based on what happened in the game. But then after that, next day, you’re gonna flip the page and that’s just gonna give us more motivation.”

Special balls

Wandy Peralta was ready to pitch in the eighth inning when home plate umpire Brian Knight came out and told him he had to use a new ball.

Peralta didn’t look happy, and Shildt came out to find out what was happening.

It turned out, there are specially marked baseballs for use when Ohtani bats in anticipation of his next homer breaking Hideki Matsui’s record for MLB home runs by a Japanese-born player.

“I had a ball that I had that I felt comfortable with that I was getting ready to pitch with,” Peralta said through interpreter Danny Sanchez. “When they approached me and said they needed to swap the balls out, the ball that I had I felt comfortable with, but I understand that rules are rules. That’s when I tossed the original ball out and went with the one they gave me.”

After a brief conference, Peralta delivered a pitch to Ohtani that the Dodgers designated hitter lined to center field for a single.

Peralta then threw the ball he received away and asked the umpires if he needed to swap again. They converged on him, which brought Shildt out again for a heated conversation with first base umpire Gabe Morales.

“I understand that completely,” Shildt said of the desire to have validation for a possibly historic home run. “I’m not sure Wandy is really aware of that, but I know he liked the ball he had and there’s something to be said for that too on our side. … And then, look, it was a really good crew that we had, and they do a great job. But when you have two or three guys ascending on our guy, I have to take exception with that. I understand they want to do what they have to do for the game, but our guy is looking out there to compete and he’s got a ball he likes. He throws it out. That’s fine. We don’t need two or three umpires converging on the guy, lecturing him about throwing out a baseball. So I took exception with that.”

Said Peralta: “I didn’t like that situation too much. I didn’t necessarily understand what was going on in the moment. I’m trying to win a game.”

(There was a really interesting story by Steve Henson in the L.A. Times last week about what happened after a fan caught Ohtani’s first Dodgers home run. You can read that here. And there was a really interesting time in my life in the spring of 1996 traveling around the country with Steve Henson covering a Cal State Northridge baseball team that team had Adam Kennedy and Robert Fick.)

Not this time

Mookie Betts, who had a long run as a Gold Glove right fielder and has been a decent second baseman, is turning out to be an excellent shortstop for the Dodgers.

And Jackson Merrill had had about enough of it when he hit a hard grounder up the middle that Betts fielded with a diving play, got up and threw to first base.

“I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Merrill recalled. “Because he’s been doing it all series. That was like the third one. ... I just kinda saw him running towards it, and I was like I gotta get my ass down the line, just in case (Betts’ throw) was somewhere off target.”

It was, and Merrill had a single, which scored Profar from third to tie the game 3-3.

It was the second of Merrill’s three singles on the day, as he took over the team lead with a .333 batting average (18-for-54).

Walk this way

The Padres have been among the most aggressive teams in the league, as I wrote the other day (here). It has worked for them.

Yesterday, being patient worked.

They swung at just 12 of the 87 pitches they saw outside the strike zone, a season-low rate of 13.8 percent.

“We have been aggressive in our pitches and our strike zone,” Tatis said. “And being able to lay off (bad) pitches has been the key to success with what we have built.”

Yesterday was a dramatic manifestation of what hitting coach Victor Martinez was talking about this week.

There was this quote I included in my story:

“All the work that we do is about hitting. It’s not about taking pitches.”

And at another point of our conversation, in a quote that didn’t make the story, he said this:

“I think a walk is the result of a good approach. It is not the purpose. But if they want to walk us, we take the walk. We have to take the walk.”

Tough times

For the second straight game, Yu Darvish was roughed up in one inning. Yesterday, he found a way to complete five innings, two more than he did last Monday.

“Grinding through and you’re almost like praying to God (that) things turn out your way,” Darvish said through interpreter Shingo Horie.

It might not be as dire as that sounds. But the second-oldest pitcher in the major leagues is struggling a bit.

The 37-year-old right-hander’s fastball velocity is regularly down a tick or two. He is being hit harder more often. He is not missing as many bats with his breaking pitches.

A 36-pitch inning in which he allowed three runs, three hits and a walk yesterday was similar to the 42-pitch inning in which he allowed four runs, three hits, walked two and hit a batter on Monday.

Darvish has had tough stretches before and found a way out of them. He attributed some of his issues yesterday to the mucky mound. But he also said this about his current struggles:

“It’s not usually this bad. Usually, this doesn’t happen that often.”

Joe sticks with ‘the guys’

Joe Musgrove starts tonight against the Brewers.

Some pitchers who are scheduled to start the next day two time zones away fly ahead of their teammates.

But despite the late game meaning the Padres were not due in Milwaukee until after 3 o’clock this morning, Musgrove stuck around Dodger Stadium to watch Sunday’s game and took the charter flight with his teammates.

“I wanted to be here,” he said. “I feel better being with the guys. I don’t think I’m gonna be suffering too much. I’ll sleep on the plane. I’ll sleep in. If it (had been) a 7 o’clock start, I probably would have flown ahead just because that’s getting us in early morning. But this won’t bother me too much. Everyone’s got to play. I’m not the only one.”

Again, in the zone

This is not a repeat from yesterday.

This was yet another diving play made possible because Jake Cronenworth is a former middle infielder and because he lines up further toward second base than any other first baseman in the league.

Cronenworth is tied with Bryce Harper for the MLB lead with three outs above average and two runs prevented.

Tidbits

• Yesterday was just the 162nd time since 1900 that a team walked 14 times or more times in a game. It was the second time a Padres team did so, the other being in a 19-inning game against the Pirates on Aug. 25, 1979. The Padres lost that game, 4-3, making them one of 32 teams to lose when walking 14 or more times.
  
• Yuki Matsui extended his scoreless streak to 5⅔ innings (five appearances) by retiring all four batters he faced yesterday.
  
• Machado sent the third pitch of the fourth inning, a James Paxton fastball down the middle, a projected 418 feet to center field. Machado is batting .367 (11-for-30) on pitches in the strike zone this year. He batted just .295 on those pitches last year after batting .415 on pitches in the zone in 2022, when he finished as the runner-up in NL MVP voting.
  
• Eguy Rosario hit his third double of the season. He has two homers, zero singles, one walk and nine strikeouts.
  
• After starting the season 12-for-30, Luis Campusano has three hits in his past 27 at-bats. (As an aside, his 369-foot drive that was caught just shy of the left field wall in the fourth inning would have been a home run at Wrigley Field.)
  
• Ha-Seong Kim walked a career-high four times yesterday, including the intentional walk he was issued in the seventh inning. Tommy Pham and Juan Soto are the only other Padres to have walked four times in a game since 2020.
  
• Tatis’ 113.5 mph single was the 30th-hardest ball put in play in 2024. Tatis, who also has the hardest hit ( 116.7 mph) and the ninth-hardest (114.9 mph) is the only player besides Ohtani with three balls among the 30 hardest hits in MLB this season.
  
• Robert Suarez’s first pitch yesterday was a sinker, ending his streak at 45 straight four-seam fastballs. He threw two sinkers and 10 four-seamers yesterday.
  
• My notebook (here) posted before the game talked about the Padres’ penchant so far for giving away free runners and runs.
  
• Two of the three youngest players in the major leagues will be on the same field in Milwaukee the next three days — Merrill, who turns 21 on Friday, and Brewers right fielder Jackson Chourio, the youngest MLB player. Chourio shared a field in Baltimore the past three days with the second-youngest player in the majors — Orioles second baseman Jackson Holliday.

All right, that’s it for me. My layover is just about finished.

Talk to you tomorrow.