It didn't matter anymore.
Only it did.
"To kind of get that monkey off our back here and win a series and score some runs feels pretty good," manager Bob Melvin said after the Padres won their second consecutive game at Coors Field on Sunday.
The season series against the Rockies in their silly ballpark was over. The Padres don't have to go back a mile high until June.
But it wasn't so much about the Rockies.
The biggest thing the Padres did for themselves over the weekend was perhaps showing their words could become reality.
They said things were different, and they were.
At the most important point of the season, they are playing like they said they could. Past be damned.
Next demon to exorcise: The Dodgers.
The Padres have again been pummeled virtually all season by Dodgers, losing 12 of their 16 meetings against the team with the best record in the major leagues. Nine of the losses have been by at least five runs. The Padres have led at the end of just 25 of the 144 innings in those games.
There is little that can be said to make this series not seem grossly one-sided.
But much like the Padres' woes at Coors Field, where they lost seven of their first eight games this season, the past won't matter if the next three days can be a success.
The Padres actually have nine days to make sure their losing record (34-39) from June 23 through Sept. 15 doesn't matter. They need to win enough of their final nine games, all at home, to make the past 14 full seasons of futility no longer matter.
This is where they are.
"We're not 100-game winners right now," said left-hander Blake Snell, who starts Tuesday night's series opener. "The coolest thing about it is that we're still fighting to get in. Milwaukee and Philly are right there clawing. We've got to keep fighting to stay ahead. We just need to win more games than them and we're in."
They actually don't even need to do that.
Any combination of Padres wins and Brewers losses adding up to six means the Padres are in a legitimate postseason for the first time since 2006. (They made the 2020 playoffs at the end of a season shortened to 60 games during the beginning of the COVID pandemic.)
So the Padres could theoretically go 3-6 over the course of their three-game series against the Dodgers, White Sox and Giants, and they would still be in the postseason as long as the Brewers finish no better than 6-3 in their games against the Cardinals (two), Marlins (four) and Diamondbacks.
The Padres, who have won seven of their past nine games, also lead the Phillies in the race for the two available NL playoff spots. They need nine wins/Phillies losses to clinch the No. 5 seed.
There are a couple other chases happening over the final nine games as well.
First, Manny Machado has reinserted himself in the National League MVP race. His .988 OPS leads the National League since Aug. 3, and he has closed the gap in WAR and other metrics on summer front-runners Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado.
Machado acknowledged winning the MVP would be a "big accomplishment" but said the award "is a team thing."
Additionally, the Padres are well within range of setting a franchise attendance record. Should they average at least 38,135 over the final nine games, they will pass the mark of 3,016,752 set in 2004, the year Petco Park opened.
"I hope it will be electric," Machado said. "Hopefully, it's a playoff atmosphere and getting ready for that next step that we're going to take. We're excited to get back home. We've got one of the best fan bases in the league. For them to go out there and give us the energy that we need every single day is going to be huge."
It begins Tuesday.
There is no more theorizing or justifying or waiting. They just figure they must win. The most marathon of all sports is down to a mad dash to the finish.
"Every game counts from now on," Machado said. "We've been preaching it for the last two or three weeks. Every single game that we play, we gotta go out there and treat it like it's our last."
To that end, the Padres lined up their top three starting pitchers for this series. Unlike the first part of last season, when both teams manipulated their rotation a few times to start their best pitchers, that has not happened in 2022.
Snell has a 2.86 ERA in eight career starts against the Dodgers, including two in the 2020 World Series. Joe Musgrove allowed the Dodgers three runs in seven innings in June and four runs in 5 1/3 earlier this month but has not allowed one run in his past two starts (11 innings). Yu Darvish, who has not officially been named Thursday's starter but is expected to make that start on regular rest, has a 2.52 ERA against the Dodgers this season and is riding a 22-start streak of going at least six innings.
The Dodgers plan to start Tyler Anderson (15-4, 2.52) and Julio Urías (17-7, 2.25) in the first two games.
"We like the three guys we're sending out there," Musgrove said. "This is it. End of the year, it's all about getting some momentum and hitting that stride at the right time going into the postseason. So obviously we got to make the postseason first, but we like where we're at right now, and going into this series feel a lot better than we did earlier in the year. … It's gonna be a fun week and a half. This is a series that we've all been looking at for the last couple of weeks, knowing that those are going to be important games to win and we haven't played them the best this year. So feeling like the confidence we have now and where we're at feels a lot better lining up against them."
