Most-heated rivalry in baseball, Dodgers-Padres showdown is ‘Good for Southern California’

SAN DIEGO –– The Padres, it has felt in recent years, always just seem to be there.

Lurking in the standings. Looming the playoffs. Lingering on the heels of a Dodgers dynasty that –– in at least some subtle ways –– has been aided by their rival’s ever-present push.

There is no mistaking the success of the two Southern California franchises, of course.

And there has certainly been no love lost in what has become baseball’s most heated rivalry of late.

But having the Padres as a foil, as an annoying antithesis and competitive intradivision counterpart, has nonetheless been a good thing for the Dodgers during their historic ascent over the last half-decade.

“When you have a team like that … trying to take us down, it’s not pressure, because we’re not gonna feel pressure just because of that, but we do have to feel like we gotta keep our foot on the gas pedal,” veteran infielder Miguel Rojas said. “It’s definitely a good thing that we have a team in the same division, that is not letting us get our guard down.”

Early on this season, that familiar dynamic is playing out again.

Ahead of their first meeting of the year at Petco Park on Monday night, the Padres trailed the Dodgers by just a half-game in the National League West.

Granted, no one is paying much attention to the standings at this point. And before this week’s series opener, the Dodgers downplayed the significance of what remains little more than a mid-May divisional matchup.

“It’s always an eventful series coming down here and playing these guys,” manager Dave Roberts said. “But I certainly wouldn’t consider it a measuring stick.”

Then again, it’s impossible to ignore what is shaping up to be another intriguing NL West battle between the teams.

“I think we would expect a good race throughout the season,” Roberts said.

As has been the case so often in recent years, the Padres are right there once again.

“I think that we bring out the best in them, and they bring out the best in us,” he noted on the eve of this week’s series. “So I think it’s good for us. I think it’s good for baseball. I think it’s good for Southern California.”

Prior to this decade, the Dodgers and Padres rarely occupied the same plane.

In their first 51 years together in the NL West, there were only two seasons (1996 and 2006) in which they finished as the top two teams in the division.

Since 2020, however, that has been the case five times, including each of the past three campaigns. And in October, they have collided in three memorable NL Division Series meetings.

Chief among them was the Padres’ 2022 NLDS upset, which served as a look-in-the-mirror moment for a Dodgers squad that felt it failed to match the Padres’ intensity in that stunning four-game elimination.

Then came the Dodgers’ come-from-behind triumph over San Diego in the 2024 NLDS, an emotional launching point in the team’s path to back-to-back World Series titles.

“Coming back against San Diego in that series –– it was only five games, but it felt like a 162-game season,” Kiké Hernández said during last year’s playoff run, pointing to that as the moment the Dodgers (who were once defined by their October failures) learned how to better navigate postseason baseball. “You get this feeling of like, ‘Nothing can go wrong. We’re not losing’ … That’s sort of similar to the mentality we have as a group.”

There was no postseason rematch last fall, when the Padres were knocked out in the wild-card round while the Dodgers once again returned to the mountaintop.

But in the regular season, the Padres came as close as ever to unseating the Dodgers atop the division, holding first place as late as Aug. 23 as the Dodgers toiled through a second-half slump.

That’s the kind of thing, Rojas said, that has quietly benefited the Dodgers during the rise of their dynasty.

“What the last three years have taught me is, you gotta feel that sensation that you play with in the playoffs, within the (regular) season at some point,” he explained. “And (games against) the Padres are the same way. We go to the Padres, and we feel like, ‘OK, we need to win this series.’ Those are the kinds of things that prepare you for what is coming next.”

Hostilities between the sides have only added fuel to such fire.

From Manny Machado throwing a ball in Roberts’ direction during the 2024 NLDS. To a flurry of hit batsmen during a series at Dodger Stadium last June that led to a benches-clearing melee at which Roberts and then-Padres manager Mike Schildt were in the center. To even a string of back-and-forth jabs players from both teams have lobbed at each other through the media; so much so, one Dodgers player on Monday declined answering a question about the Padres, quipping they didn’t want to get themselves in trouble.

“This series,” Roberts said, “gets emotional, gets heightened.”

For the Dodgers, that has been a good thing in recent years, giving the team labeled as baseball’s biggest villain an antagonist of their own with whom they can sharpen iron.

“It’s just another three games in the regular season. You have to see it that way, so you don’t overreact,” Rojas said. “But it’s definitely a different series, for sure.”