LOS ANGELES — Manny Machado settled back into Dodger Stadium’s first-base dugout after Sunday’s seventh inning, gathered as many San Diego Padres teammates as he could and implored them to refocus. It was a necessary reminder. The prior two innings had seen superstar Fernando Tatis Jr. get plunked, in Machado’s mind, on purpose. They had seen Machado verbally spar with Los Angeles Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty, at one point seemingly challenging each other to a postgame fight. And they had seen fans throw baseballs and beer cans in the direction of Jurickson Profar and Tatis, respectively, triggering a nine-minute delay and further escalating the tension of an already-heated National League Division Series.
“It was just a reminder of who we really are as a group,” Tatis said of the meeting, “and just how crazy we can turn a place to go nuts.”
The Padres followed by homering four additional times, turning a nailbiter into a laughter to take Game 2 of the NLDS by a 10-2 score and even this best-of-five series at a game apiece.
“A hostile environment,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said. “What I got out of it was a bunch of dudes that showed up in front of a big, hostile crowd with stuff being thrown at them and said, ‘We’re going to talk with our play. We’re not going to back down — we’re going to elevate our game, we’re going to be together and we’re going to take care of business.'”
The discord between Profar and Dodger Stadium’s left-field fans began playfully. Mookie Betts lifted a deep fly ball in the bottom of the first that seemed headed for a game-tying home run, except Profar reached into the crowd and took it away. Profar delighted in a catch he considered the greatest of his career, egging nearby fans for so long that Betts was halfway toward third base before everybody else realized he didn’t homer. Profar made no apologies.
“That was one of my wishes — I wanted to rob a homer,” he said. “And I did it in a playoff game.”
Six innings later, as Yu Darvish was getting ready to begin the bottom of the seventh while holding a 4-1 lead, a fan hurled a baseball in Profar’s direction. As he approached an umpire about the incident, another baseball rolled near him, further animating Profar as he gathered with the umpiring crew in shallow left field. Shildt joined him, screaming in the direction of the fans in left field. Soon, all of the Padres’ starting position players gathered together.
“We have to stay together in a moment like that as a team,” Tatis said. “And the group we are, we obviously are staying together. And we saw our boy Profar getting balls thrown at him. He has a right to be mad, but at the end of the day, we understand we’re on a mission.”
Nearly two-dozen security guards lined the foul lines of Dodger Stadium as players began to reposition themselves on defense. Then three beer cans landed on the right-field warning track near Tatis, who had spent most of the night bantering with fans who screamed obscenities in his direction — especially after he made a leaping catch of a Freddie Freeman line drive in the fourth. Another flask of beer landed in the Padres’ bullpen nearby.
“I’ve seen over a thousand games here — well over a thousand games in this ballpark,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “And I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Profar claimed fans also wanted to throw objects onto the field in Game 1, before the Dodgers took the lead and wound up winning.
Tatis, who was shown wagging his tongue at fans from the dugout and mocking them with fake tears from right field, seemed to be the least bothered among his teammates.
“Man,” he said, “it’s definitely wild out there. But at the same time, it’s a good environment for baseball, although people get carried away a little bit with their emotions. But it’s a good back and forth. At the end of the day, it’s a show, and we should enjoy every moment.”
Tatis homered twice, in the first and ninth innings, and is now 9-for-14 in his first four postseason games. In between his homers, when he led off the sixth inning, Flaherty ran an 0-1 sinker in and plunked him on the left side. Flaherty quickly apologized, but Tatis never looked in his direction, keeping his gaze forward as he walked to first base. Tatis later intimated that he did not believe Flaherty threw at him on purpose, citing how close the game still was. Machado disagreed.
“If you can’t get him out, don’t hit him, right?” Machado said. “They’ve got the best player in the game, right? [Shohei] Ohtani? We don’t try to hit Ohtani. We try to get him out. Don’t go out there and try to hit Tati.”
Flaherty said the concept of hitting Tatis in that situation — with the Dodgers trailing by only three runs, nobody out and him having retired seven consecutive batters — “doesn’t make sense.”
“I understand what it looks like,” Flaherty said. “It’s the way the game is. You think I’m going to do that down 3-1 with 3-4-5 coming up? I get it, emotions run high. Dude, I get how it looks. … But that’s not the situation to hit someone. I’m just not going to make the same mistake I made in the first inning and throw it down the middle.”
After Tatis reached first base, Profar exchanged words with Dodgers catcher Will Smith, who earlier this season called him an “irrelevant” member of the Padres’ lineup. The next batter, Machado, struck out swinging, and Flaherty yelled in his direction, telling him to “sit the f— down.” Machado didn’t seem to hear Flaherty until he neared his dugout and saw teammates screaming toward the field. Flaherty said he was “really fired up.”
“Competition, right?” Machado said with a smile. “Things that happen in between the lines. People just going back and forth. He’s competing for his ballclub, and I’m trying to get a big hit for my team.”
But Flaherty and Machado continued to go at it the next half-inning, with Flaherty yelling from the dugout railing and Machado snapping back from the left side of the infield. Flaherty said Machado threw a baseball into the Dodgers’ dugout. Machado said he always tosses baseballs into dugouts for ballboys to pick up before the start of half-innings, be it to his own dugout or the opposing team’s.
Said Flaherty: “I wouldn’t have reacted if it was just a toss.”
“Nobody saw that but that was the reason the umpires were with him,” Flaherty added. “Everybody saw the end of it, which was me and him, but I wasn’t there to talk with him. I was there to sit in the dugout with my teammates. I happened to be the one who got caught talking with him.”
In the end, all that mattered was that the Padres won a game they needed — and that they’ll get back-to-back games at home, in front of what promises to be a raucous crowd in San Diego’s Petco Park.
The tension will only increase.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Machado said, “to be playing postseason baseball.”
