The Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres went into the regular season with expectations of playing to a heated National League West race and among the 2023 World Series favorites.
But with October baseball two months away, the Padres have continued to fade in the division standings while the Dodgers continue to surge despite a rash of injuries and inconsistent performances from their starting rotation and bullpen.
Their wraparound series at Petco Park represented an opportunity for the Padres to continue making some headway as they had won five of six games. But the Dodgers continued to impose their dominance by taking three of four games from the Padres.
The results had manager Dave Roberts pleased with his team’s performance, via Bill Plunkett of the Southern California News Group:
“It was a great series. We had one bad inning,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But it’s still a really positive series for us. I don’t know what they’re feeling, what they’re going through. But we did what we needed to do.”
As Roberts noted, if not for Yency Almonte and Caleb Ferguson both struggling in the eighth inning on Saturday, the Dodgers likely would have swept the four-game series.
Further to Roberts’ point, the Dodgers fell into a 5-0 deficit on Monday before immediately responding en route to a 13-7 win.
Even with settling for three wins, the Dodgers maintained a four-game lead over the San Francisco Giants for first place in the NL West. The Padres remain in fourth place, 11 games back of the Dodgers. San Diego is also four games out of the third and final Wild Card spot in the NL postseason bracket.
Dodgers dominating since Padres trolled Kershaw
After the Padres defeated the Dodgers at Petco Park on May 5, they trolled Clayton Kershaw putting an imposed image of him crying on their scoreboard.
Since that point the Dodgers have won eight of nine games against the Padres, who have fallen 10 games in the standings during that span.
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