“You’re either winning or going home,” Padres right fielder Fernando Tatis Jr. said Tuesday morning. “I ain’t trying to go on vacation yet.”
By Tuesday evening, Tatis and his teammates were a loss away from that vacation.
The Cubs’ 3-1 win in Game 1 of the wild-card series saw the Padres come up empty in big moments, stymied by a North Side defense that has dazzled all season.
“To win any baseball game, you’ve got to make outs, outs,” shortstop Dansby Swanson said. “They came my way today.”
Swanson did his Gold Glove thing, making a pair of highlight-reel plays that led to a pair of runners stuck on third base, the difference in a close — and crucial — postseason battle.
“You come up in two big situations with a chance to put a run on the board,” said designated hitter Ryan O’Hearn, the victim of both of Swanson’s web gems, “it’s frustrating to not get the job done there.”
“Swanson made, probably, the two biggest plays in the game,” fellow shortstop Xander Bogaerts said. “If either of those balls fall, we’ve got three runs, momentum. Everything’s different.”
For all the noise in Wrigleyville about the Cubs’ return to October, the Padres planned to be here from the start, ready to avenge last year’s ousting at the hands of the division-rival Dodgers.
They’ve played in four of the last six postseasons. And they’re going to need that experience to avoid a quick exit this time around.
“There’s a belief in the room that we expected to be here. We want to be here, now we’re here, and let’s go to work,” left fielder Gavin Sheets told the Sun-Times on Monday. “[In spring training], everybody has the expectation of going to the postseason. But for us, we truly believed it.
“There’s a hunger that this group has and we’ve been working toward it all year.”
The Padres have been here before, in this very situation. In 2020, they won a best-of-three series after losing Game 1. They won an elimination game in a best-of-three series in 2022.
Maybe this group has the right combination of experience and mindset to survive a raucous Wrigley Field.
“When we go through bad stretches or streaks where we’re not playing as well as we should, there’s never really a panic,” Game 2 starting pitcher Dylan Cease said Tuesday. “You see a lot of teams that don’t have that culture or that confidence, maybe, so something like that can spiral. But with this team, it feels like we get them back on track pretty quickly.”
Said Sheets: “You look around, and the calmness in the room [stands out]. It’s like, ‘Hey, we expected to be here. This isn’t a surprise to us. This is where we expected to be, expected to be in the postseason. Now let’s go to work.’ … Nobody’s wide-eyed. It’s very calm and focused.”
Whether the product of experience, focus, confidence or just an allergy to depressing silence, the Padres’ weren’t in the typical funereal clubhouse setting after their Game 1 defeat. Instead, there was music, usually only for winners. There was Bob Marley.
The perfect soundtrack for a vacation, if they can’t pull off another postseason comeback.
“We have the confidence,” Tatis said after the game. “It’s about going out there and performing to that level.”
The Cubs and Brewers faced off in Game 4 of the NLDS on Thursday.
Boyd became the fifth Cubs starter to have a scoreless start when facing elimination.
