LOS ANGELES — After the trade deadline passed, A.J. Preller reiterated that the Padres’ best team employs Dylan Cease.
The Padres president of baseball operations was talking about good Dylan Cease.
That is not who climbed the mound in the first inning Saturday at Dodger Stadium.
The Jekyll-and-Hyde hurler walked the first three hitters he faced and pushed that total to six — one shy of a career worst — before yet another early exit as the Padres hardly put up a fight in giving the season series to their NL West rivals via a 6-0 loss at Dodger Stadium.
The Padres and Dodgers play four more times this year — Sunday and three games next weekend at Petco Park — but the Dodgers have already won seven of nine to clinch the season series.
That ultimately only matters if the two teams end the season in a tie atop the NL West, and the Padres took exactly two games to give away the rare one-game lead that they carried over the Dodgers into Chavez Ravine.
Well, the Padres at least had the tying run on base in the ninth on Friday.
A day later, they were thrown out three times on the bases through the first two innings and never managed to get their 2023 NL Cy Young winner off his game in his first outing against his old friends.
Blake Snell allowed three of his five hits inside the first two innings, including leadoff singles from Fernando Tatis Jr. in the first and Xander Bogaerts in the second inning.
Both were thrown out trying to steal during the ensuing at-bats by catcher Will Smith. The first might have cost the Padres a run as Luis Arraez followed with a ground rule double. Manny Machado followed with a walk, and he too was thrown out trying to take second on the back end of a double steal.
Snell practically cruised from there, finishing with six shutout innings in beating the team that employed him from 2021 through 2023.
Cease had been on a roll since sticking with the Padres at the trade deadline, striking out 16 over 11 innings (1.64 ERA) in winning two starts in dominant fashion.
On Saturday, he was off from the start, walking Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Will Smith to begin the game. The Dodgers plated a run on Teoscar Hernández’s one-out sacrifice fly and two more, after a walk to Andy Pages, on Michael Conforto’s single to right.
The pitch count reaching 37 was reason enough for David Morgan to begin warming in the first inning.
Cease ultimately escaped the first. But by the time that center fielder Jackson Merrill’s error on what should have been an inning-ending catch allowed two more runs to score — after another walk — the mission had seemingly switched to giving the Padres as much length as possible.
But that only got him into the fourth inning, with Ohtani’s single — just the Dodgers’ second hit of the game — finally chasing Cease after 88 pitches (44 strikes).
Cease struck out just two, and only three of the five runs he allowed in 3⅓ innings were earned.
But the traffic was all his doing, and it backed up on him in historic fashion.
In fact, only five other pitchers in franchise history had ever walked six or more batters while allowing just two hits, with Jarred Cosart last enduring that kind of day in August 2016.
Cease’s outing continued a curious year for a pitcher who threw a no-hitter last year, collected Cy Young votes for the second time in his career and can pile up strikeouts with the best of them.
When he’s good, he’s good, as evidenced by the 1.16 ERA in his five victories this year. But Cease entered the game with a 7.24 ERA in his 10 losses, and the command issues snowballed on him in a key matchup with the Padres’ chief rival.
One of those wins this year was against the Dodgers, a June 10 start in which he struck out 11 over seven shutout innings.
Of course, it’s hard not to think about Cease’s two postseason starts against the Dodgers last year. He allowed five runs in 3⅓ innings in giving up an early 3-0 lead in Game 1 of the NLDS at Dodger Stadium and allowed three runs in 1⅔ innings on short rest in a Game 4 loss at Petco Park.
The Padres were ultimately bounced in five games.
The consequence on Saturday was simply stress testing baseball’s best bullpen and dropping the Padres a game behind the Dodgers in the NL West.
In the long run, there’s plenty of time to make up that gap.
The bigger concern is the innings piling up on the bullpen in this series.
Excluding Randy Vásquez’s bulk work on Friday, relievers have covered nine of the 16 innings so far in this series, with Morgan (1⅔ IP, 1 ER), Yuki Matsui (1 IP) and Ron Marinaccio (2 IP) mopping up after Cease on Saturday.
Originally Published: August 16, 2025 at 8:40 PM PDT