LOS ANGELES — Xander Bogaerts stood in a quiet, emptying clubhouse as he attempted to give voice to a collective emotion. In the wake of a stunning conclusion, everyone had their own way of expressing regret. But just one teammate had ever reached the summit of this sport. No one else had ever won multiple World Series.
For so long, it felt like the 2024 Padres had the pieces to change all that. Then came a torturous Friday night. Suddenly, it was the end.
“Roster-wise, man, we had it all,” Bogaerts said. “I mean, similar to the 2018 Red Sox. We were just that good. I kind of had a lot of feeling of the similarities with this team and that team. But we didn’t get the job done.”
This one will hurt for a long time, much longer than the final 24 innings. Those flew by without a single Padres run. The final nine frames saw one of the game’s most resilient offenses come up with a two-out Bogaerts walk in the second, consecutive one-out singles in the third … and nothing else. The Los Angeles Dodgers, after a 2-0 shutout in a National League Division Series decider, will keep playing. The Padres will spend at least the next several months thinking about what could have been.
Especially because of who was both there and not there.
As Bogaerts stood amid relative silence, he reflected on the absences of Ha-Seong Kim and Joe Musgrove, two beloved teammates who were not there after undergoing surgery. Then, Bogaerts made reference to someone else. He was still wearing his team-issued jersey, the one with a “PS” patch over the heart.
“Obviously, even Peter (Seidler),” Bogaerts said of the late Padres owner. “He brought me here, and we have something special. And this was the time that it felt like everything that had happened and him being up there, you know, kind of looking down on us, guiding us — that it would be a special year. But it didn’t happen.
“In sports, one’s gotta win and one’s gotta lose. That’s the only bad thing I would say about it.”
For so long, the 2024 Padres embodied the most enjoyable parts of this sport. They were a .500 team the day after the All-Star break. They played near-.900 baseball over the next three weeks. They finished the regular season with 93 wins, the second-most in franchise history. They entered October as a popular pick to go all the way.
The stars felt aligned because of what they had on the field. And because of what they had away from it, too.
“I don’t think I’ve been a part of a team that’s been so tight,” Manny Machado said.
“This is maybe the most fun I’ve ever had on a baseball field, you know, playing with these guys,” Kyle Higashioka said.
“I think I found a deeper love for baseball,” said Jackson Merrill, the Padres’ youngest player. “I think I really didn’t know the extent of how electric it can be and how much of a family you can build through an entire summer of it.”
“Maybe the closest of any team that I’ve been involved with,” Yu Darvish, San Diego’s oldest player, said.
Nowhere did the Padres demonstrate that bond more frequently than on offense. They led the majors in hits and batting average. They avoided focusing on home runs but still ended up with a Petco Park record. They rallied back from deficit after deficit. Whenever they hit a double, they looked toward their dugout and formed a heart shape with their arms.
Tuesday, they basked in the love of their teammates and an adoring home crowd en route to a six-run inning that was capped by a majestic Fernando Tatis Jr. home run.
Three days later, Darvish took the mound at Dodger Stadium and touched the “PS” patch on his jersey. He proceeded to throw almost fine innings, limiting the damage to two solo homers. No one yet knew that those six runs from Tuesday would be the Padres’ final runs of 2024.
“It’s obviously very tough with how good we were as a team together,” Darvish said through interpreter Shingo Horie. “It really hurts.”
Disappointment manifests in any number of ways. Late Friday, multiple San Diego players credited a bevy of Dodgers arms for blanking one of the sport’s most resilient offenses over close to three consecutive games. The Padres’ 24-inning scoreless streak not only ended their season. It also was their longest such streak of the season.
“Man, they were executing,” Tatis said. “Their pitchers did the job. Obviously, we put tough at-bats out there, but at the end of the day, stuff didn’t go our way.”
There were the two flyouts Machado hit to the warning track. There was the top of the third when Higashioka and Luis Arraez hit consecutive singles off Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a starting pitcher the Padres had twice overwhelmed in the regular season. There was Tatis, so recently the hottest hitter on the planet, hitting into a subsequent double play.
There wasn’t much else.
“That was definitely a good opportunity,” Higashioka said. “But, I mean, Yamamoto’s a good pitcher. We’ve gotten to him in the past, and we were very confident against him, but he came out with his ‘A’ game today and shut us down. We couldn’t get that killer blow.”
Killer blows can come in other forms, as well. There was this, for example: The Dodgers came back from a 2-1 series deficit with almost no help from perhaps the most feared hitter on the planet. Shohei Ohtani finished the series 4-for-20 with 10 strikeouts. In Friday’s hitless showing, he went down swinging three times.
It could have been framed as a testament to a Padres team that had the pieces to win it all.
“(President of baseball operations) A.J. (Preller) and his guys, they put us in an extremely excellent position,” Bogaerts said. “What more could we have asked for, to be honest with you? We had the best bullpen and the best batting average in the game. And the bullpen kind of showed up this series, but the hitting maybe wasn’t the way we know it to be.
“Playoff baseball is a little different, too. But yeah, that was the only part that didn’t show up consistently.”
The timing could not have been worse.
“We did a lot of unusual things,” Jurickson Profar said. “We don’t want to give credit either, you know, to their pitching. We just didn’t come through.
“Just sad for this team. We had everything to go all the way. But, you know, it’s baseball. Baseball. They played better than us the last two games. And we’re going home.”
Not everyone was ready to disperse. After the final game of their season, a good chunk of the Padres lingered along the railing of the visitors dugout, staring in silence as the Dodgers celebrated on the field.
Merrill was the last to leave the railing. The star rookie said later he “1,000 percent” plans to be at Petco Park on Saturday. He did not yet know what he would do there
“Maybe just sit at my locker. I gotta clean my locker out. And get ready to start developing and get better,” Merrill said. “I’m 21. There’s so much room to grow and so much room to improve. I just want to come back and help these guys compete. You know, I felt like I didn’t do the best I could. I’m sure a lot of us feel that way.”
How many others will get the chance to help the 2025 Padres remains to be seen. Musgrove, the hometown hero, is expected to miss all of next season after having Tommy John surgery. Kim is expected to decline his end of a mutual option. Profar, Higashioka, David Peralta, Donovan Solano and Tanner Scott — all key members of the 2024 team — are expected to join him in free agency the day after the World Series concludes.
The day before that will supply more reminders of a brutal 24-inning stretch.
“I think ‘stunning’ is appropriate,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said.
“It hurts a lot,” Arraez said, “because we did a lot of good things.”
They did. After last offseason’s upheaval and payroll reduction, they will remember those, too.
“I’m proud of these guys, man,” Machado said. “All year since spring training, they’ve worked their butts off to get here, and a lot of guys counted us out.”
“We have a strong core over here, and man, the sky’s the limit,” Tatis said. “I have no doubt we’re going to be knocking on the door every single year.”
“We competed with what we have, and what we had is really good. What we have is really good. And we have a good foundation moving forward,” Shildt said. “I don’t expect this to be a one-off. I firmly expect this group to come back and be ready to go for the consecutive playoff run for two, three, four years. That will be historic in San Diego baseball history.”
Maybe that will happen. But, on Friday, someone had to lose. The visiting clubhouse opened to reporters almost 30 minutes after the game. By then, amid the hugs and the handshakes, some players still sat motionless at their lockers — as if they had never left that dugout railing.
After a season that for so long felt magical, the Padres cannot help but remember what didn’t happen.
“Right now, I can’t think of the good moments,” Profar said. “We’re just out of the playoffs. So, I have this memory in my mind right now, just that we couldn’t make it.”
(Top photo of Jackson Merrill: Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
