On their way to the postseason, a destination that is practically inevitable now, the Padres have a chance to show once again one of the primary ways they altered the course of their 2024 season.

Before next week’s showdowns in Los Angeles and Phoenix and the postseason beyond, the Padres host the White Sox for three games beginning Friday.

And that is one really bad team.

Bad on a historical scale.

The White Sox are not like the Marlins, Rockies or Angels, the teams with the next three worst records in MLB this season. They aren’t even the 1969 Padres, who lost 110 games in the franchise’s first year of existence.

This year’s White Sox blew past that threshold on Sept. 7 and are now three losses from matching the 1962 Mets’ MLB record of 120 losses in a season.

The White Sox do arrive in San Diego possibly playing some of their best baseball, having won three in a row before losing their past two. When they won Saturday and Sunday in Oakland, it was the first time since June that they won consecutive games.

This might have been bad news for the Padres in May or June. Recent results, however, suggest it should mean the Padres get at least three steps closer to popping champagne.

Foremost, the Padres have so much to play for.

With nine games remaining, they can clinch a playoff berth with any combination of victories and Braves losses that add up to five. They also maintain a two-game lead over the Mets and Diamondbacks in the race to secure the National League’s top wild-card spot and a home series to start the postseason.

Clinching a playoff spot in their final home game of the regular season does not seem all that likely, given that the Braves are playing the team with the National League’s worst record. How it could happen by Sunday’s home finale is with a sweep of the White Sox and the Braves losing two of three to the Marlins or Padres victories two of the next three days and Braves losses all three days.

On its own, the postseason push should be enough impetus for the Padres to manhandle the worst MLB team seen in the lifetime of some 85 percent of people on earth, a team that has averaged a little more than one win a week and was officially eliminated from contention a little more than a month ago.

But admit it, you’re nervous.

The scars are deep. They are fairly fresh too.

The Padres did not make the playoffs last year because they could not consistently beat terrible teams until it was too late. They started this season 12-17 against teams that currently have losing records.

But among the many things the Padres have been so much better at the bulk of this season is taking care of the task at hand. At least once they settled into that being the focus.

“It takes time,” Jurickson Profar said this week. “We build it. You build stuff like that. This is the big leagues. Even if you have a team full of superstars, you still need to build it. It’s not a robot game.”

Since being swept by the Angels in early June, the Pades are 30-9 against teams that presently have a losing record.

“I think it was like a switch for us,” Profar said.

Manager Mike Shildt, the coaching staff and some players had been preaching it, but that sweep was a low point that drove home the need to play every game against every opponent a certain way.

“We’re going to prepare for everybody just like it’s Game 7 of the World Series,” Shildt said this week. “That takes care of everything.”

The Padres have won 13 of their past 18 series, splitting three others and losing two. They have won against division leaders and cellar dwellers. They did lose a series in Colorado to the Rockies in mid-August. But Coors Field allows for some grace.

The bulk of the evidence the past three months indicates this is a team that won’t be set off course by playing a bad team.

Or by beating a good one.

Because this series comes on the heels of the Padres taking two of three from the Astros, leaders of the American League West and the most successful team in the major leagues over the past decade. That series win had the Padres feeling it Wednesday night.

“We’re going to see them again,” Manny Machado predicted.

Machado reiterated that he expects the Padres to meet the Astros again in 2024 in the only series they possibly could — the World Series.

And he did so as if it were the most obvious thing he possibly could say.

“We always understood what the goal is all year,” he said. “And this hasn’t changed, and we’re gonna continue to think that way.”

The Padres have worked to get to a point where they make everything just what it is.

Occasionally, they allow that mentality to be reflected in discussion of their big goals, such as winning the World Series. But it mostly involves steadfastly refusing to talk about and doing their best to not think about anything but the game at hand as if it were the only thing that exists.

It is exemplified in some variation of Shildt saying, as he did Wednesday, “We normalize how we play. … We’re going to play our game. Opponent, environment, day, night, hot, cold, we’re going to play our game. We’re going to play efficiently and we’re going to play to win.”

And it was on display when Machado said matter-of-factly on Wednesday that: “We’ve got another tough ballclub coming in on Friday, so we’ve got to get ready for that.”