LOS ANGELES — A guy in the twilight of his career hit a home run in a game 40 years and five days ago, and his jersey number is now forever affixed at various spots around Petco Park.
That guy played a little more than four seasons for the Padres. He is not in the Hall of Fame. He spent actually much of his career being booed in San Diego while playing for another team.
Yet no one will ever again wear No. 6 for the Padres because Steve Garvey hit a walk-off home run in Game 4 of the 1984 National League Championship Series.
That is the only reason.
Garvey’s blast off Lee Smith in the bottom of the ninth inning on Oct. 6, 1984, was a transformational moment for a franchise that 40 years later is still looking for another one.
That is the kind of moment that awaits the 2024 Padres on Friday.
The Padres had to win the next day after Garvey’s historic blast to take the series from the Cubs.
That is not the circumstance now.
More than eight months after they arrived in Arizona to prepare for the start of the season, the Padres and Dodgers will play Game 5 of the National League Division Series at Dodger Stadium.
That is the maximum number of games that can be played in a Division Series.
The result of this one game — after playing 162 of them in the regular season and a handful more so far in the playoffs — means everything for both teams.
No arguing about what this one means. It is literally a must-win.
“You don’t have tomorrow if you lose,” Xander Bogaerts said. “And the winner, they have tomorrow.”
A win means hosting the Mets in the first two games of the best-of-seven National League Championship Series, which begins Sunday.
Winning means another celebration and the possibility of two more. Winning means a parade is possible. Winning means the Padres’ oft-stated goal of “bringing a championship to San Diego” remains attainable.
A loss means the possibility that for this team no longer exists. Really, a loss means this particular team no longer exists.
It means the reality that Joe Musgrove faced when he learned last week he had to have Tommy John surgery will be felt by everyone else.
Musgrove fought back tears as he spoke of knowing his previous start was “the last time I’m going to compete with some of these guys as teammates in my career, and that’s hard to swallow.”
Friday will be just the fourth winner-take-all game in Padres history.
They are 3-0 in such games — having won Game 5 of the 1984 NLCS against the Cubs, Game 3 of the 2020 wild-card series against the Cardinals and Game 3 of the 2022 wild-card series against the Mets.
The Dodgers go back a little further than the Padres — having been founded in 1884 as Brooklyn and going to their first modern World Series in 1916 as the Brooklyn Robins. Still, just 15 of their 55 playoff series since then have gone to their limit.
Given the length of the season and the necessary laissez-faire pace of so much of the regular season, the drama of a winner-take-all game in Major League Baseball is arguably as heightened as any.
And they don’t occur all that often.
The Padres absolutely wanted to finish off the Dodgers on Wednesday at Petco Park.
But this is another shot at the same thing.
“I’m already excited for Friday,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said a few minutes after the Padres’ 8-0 loss to the Dodgers in Game 4 had been completed, necessitating a for-sure finale on Friday. “How fun is that going to be? Missed opportunity, chance to close it out. Didn’t. Move on. Play Game 5. Winner take it.”
So that is how big this is.
And how big the Padres believe they can make it — by not making it that big,m because they introduced Game 5 and Game 7 intensity in spring training.
“Here’s the part I’m excited about for this group: We’ve done that the whole season,” Shildt said. “We treated the whole season (as if every game was big) for this moment. We don’t need to feel like, ‘Oh my gosh.” Because in everything there is attention to detail. Everything is important. Everything matters. We normalize that. … We just go play, just go execute.”
Since the Padres have personified that cliché all season, perhaps that will work for them in this game, which does mean so much.
It is intense. But it is still the same game.
“The intensity is just the importance and attention to detail, focus on the little things that make us a great team and try to take advantage in the game,” Bogaerts said.
The Padres have lost consecutive games just three times since the All-Star Game. They have won when Manny Machado was hot and continued to do so when he cooled off. They won a lot with Fernando Tatis Jr. They won when Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove were out.They won after losing leads.
“You play a regular-season baseball game, specifically one that we play our baseball, and we play it tomorrow, and you can’t beat us,” Jackson Merrill said. “We play the right brand of baseball and the way we usually play. I haven’t seen the team that can beat us on that day. … Regardless of what day it is. It could be the birth of more baseball, it could be the end of the season, and at the end of the day we’ll reflect on what happens. That’s our identity. We treat every game like a postseason game, so we’re already used to it.”
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