LOS ANGELES \u2014 After the trade deadline passed, A.J. Preller reiterated that the Padres\u2019 best team employs Dylan Cease.<\/p>\n
The Padres president of baseball operations was talking about good Dylan Cease.<\/p>\n
That is not who climbed the mound in the first inning Saturday at Dodger Stadium.<\/p>\n
The Jekyll-and-Hyde hurler walked the first three hitters he faced and pushed that total to six \u2014 one shy of a career worst \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The Padres and Dodgers play four more times this year \u2014 Sunday and three games next weekend at Petco Park \u2014 but the Dodgers have already won seven of nine to clinch the season series.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Well, the Padres at least had the tying run on base in the ninth on Friday.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Snell practically cruised from there, finishing with six shutout innings in beating the team that employed him from 2021 through 2023.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s one-out sacrifice fly and two more, after a walk to Andy Pages, on Michael Conforto\u2019s single to right.<\/p>\n
The pitch count reaching 37 was reason enough for David Morgan to begin warming in the first inning.<\/p>\n
Cease ultimately escaped the first. But by the time that center fielder Jackson Merrill\u2019s error on what should have been an inning-ending catch allowed two more runs to score \u2014 after another walk \u2014 the mission had seemingly switched to giving the Padres as much length as possible.<\/p>\n
But that only got him into the fourth inning, with Ohtani\u2019s single \u2014 just the Dodgers\u2019 second hit of the game \u2014 finally chasing Cease after 88 pitches (44 strikes).<\/p>\n
Cease struck out just two, and only three of the five runs he allowed in 3\u2153 innings were earned.<\/p>\n
But the traffic was all his doing, and it backed up on him in historic fashion.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Cease\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
When he\u2019s good, he\u2019s 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\u2019 chief rival.<\/p>\n
One of those wins this year was against the Dodgers, a June 10 start in which he struck out 11 over seven shutout innings.<\/p>\n
Of course, it\u2019s hard not to think about Cease\u2019s two postseason starts against the Dodgers last year. He allowed five runs in 3\u2153 innings in giving up an early 3-0 lead in Game 1 of the NLDS at Dodger Stadium and allowed three runs in 1\u2154 innings on short rest in a Game 4 loss at Petco Park.<\/p>\n
The Padres were ultimately bounced in five games.<\/p>\n
The consequence on Saturday was simply stress testing baseball\u2019s best bullpen and dropping the Padres a game behind the Dodgers in the NL West.<\/p>\n
In the long run, there\u2019s plenty of time to make up that gap.<\/p>\n
The bigger concern is the innings piling up on the bullpen in this series.<\/p>\n
Excluding Randy V\u00e1squez\u2019s bulk work on Friday, relievers have covered nine of the 16 innings so far in this series, with Morgan (1\u2154 IP, 1 ER), Yuki Matsui (1 IP) and Ron Marinaccio (2 IP) mopping up after Cease on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Originally Published: August 16, 2025 at 8:40 PM PDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2014 After the trade deadline passed, A.J. Preller reiterated that the Padres\u2019 best team employs Dylan…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":152192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,1370,1266,3549,1306,7264,62,7289,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-152191","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-latest-headlines","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-san-diego","14":"tag-san-diego-padres","15":"tag-sandiego","16":"tag-sports","17":"tag-top-stories-sdut","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-united-states-of-america","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","22":"tag-us","23":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115042108294710737","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}