Why Dodgers-Padres has become baseball’s most heated modern rivalry

Three years later, the quote still resonates.

When it comes to the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, late Padres owner Peter Seidler framed the dynamic best.

“The Dodgers are the dragon up the freeway we’re trying to slay,” Seidler said back in August 2022, during an in-game interview with ESPN as the two teams played a Sunday Night Baseball game at Chavez Ravine.

“We have a lot of respect for them, obviously. But our goal, and San Diego knows this as well, is to win a championship.”

And from that pursuit, one of baseball’s most heated modern rivalries has sprouted.

To the rest of the baseball world, the Padres have been a plucky feel-good story over the last half-decade. They’re a small-market team that has become an annual postseason contender. They have an aggressive front office, a roster full of big personalities, and an ever-pulsing current of emotion and intensity reverberating from the dugout through their frenzied home crowds.

In Los Angeles, however, the perspective couldn’t be more different. The Dodgers have long been the ruling power in the National League West, champions of the division 11 times in the last 12 years. The Padres, on the other hand, are the rebels who won’t surrender, the barbarians at the door trying to steal away their crown.

“I just think that it starts with them wanting to overtake us,” manager Dave Roberts said this week, ahead of the Padres’ latest visit to Dodger Stadium on Friday. “I think that we’ve clearly dominated the division in the last decade … But I think that they’re trying to overtake us. I think that with that, that certainly brings out emotion.”

While the Dodgers have quelled similar challenges during their decade-long reign in the division, the Padres have proved to be a different kind of foil — coupling a contrast in style and culture with enough staying power to fuel increasingly contentious bouts.

“It’s just two contrasting styles,” third baseman Max Muncy said, “that have just grown into this beast.”

There was the Dodgers’ sweep of the Padres in the 2020 NL Division Series, then the Padres’ payback in a postseason upset two years later. Last fall, a tight division race came down to the last week of the season. When their paths again crossed in October, yet another NLDS went all the way to a decisive fifth game.

This year, more tinder has been added to the fire, thanks to a flurry of hit batters and a benches-clearing melee during a series at Dodger Stadium in June.

And this week, ahead of a 10-day stretch in which the clubs will play their final two regular-season series, the Padres provided another plot twist, erasing what once felt like an insurmountable nine-game deficit in the standings to arrive in Los Angeles with a stunning NL West lead.

The dragon, of course, hasn’t been slayed yet. The Dodgers are still the defending World Series champions, even if their recent middling form has complicated their title defense.

Still, the conquest that Seidler — who died after the 2023 season at age 63 — long envisioned has never seemed so attainable.

The threat posed by the Padres has never felt so real.

“I feel like we’ve just been facing each other in [a lot of] big spots,” infielder Miguel Rojas said. “Ever since that [playoff] series in ‘22, this team took it a little bit personal over the next couple years. Obviously last year, going through them to go all the way to the World Series was a big part [of our run]. But it feels every time we face each other, even in the regular season, it’s a big spot.”

While the Dodgers and Padres have shared a division ever since the latter’s founding in 1969, much of their co-existence featured very little shared history.

For most of the Padres’ first half-century, the club was mired in perpetual mediocrity. Before 2020, they’d made the playoffs only five times. Where the Dodgers boast eight World Series titles, the Padres own the distinction of the league’s oldest team to have never won it once.

There was one close division race between the clubs in 1996, when the Padres swept the Dodgers in the final series of the season to claim the NL West by one game. In 2006, they tied atop the standings but both flamed out in the playoffs.

After that, the Dodgers ascended to annual contender status. The Padres, meanwhile, searched for an identity amid a 13-year playoff drought.

At the start of 2019, one finally arrived.

While Manny Machado was productive during his brief Dodgers tenure at the end of 2018, helping the club win a second straight NL pennant, his style of play was an awkward fit with the team. He wouldn’t always hustle, and wouldn’t always apologize for it. He burnished his reputation as an occasionally dirty player, and never seemed too interested in trying to change it.

The Dodgers never really planned to bring him back as a free agent. But they also didn’t expect him to wind up in San Diego, where he signed a $300-million deal with the Padres ahead of the 2019 season.

“It’s about bringing a championship to San Diego,” Padres general manager AJ Preller said the day Machado was introduced. “A lot of people over the last few years have been very patient as we’ve tried to build something that’s going to stand up long term. Obviously, it’s an exclamation point here today with the signing of Manny.”

And in the six years since, the Padres have been crafted in his fiery image; built around similarly unabashed stars like Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill, Jurickson Profar and Joe Musgrove.

The Padres’ Manny Machado follows through on a two-run home run in Game 1 of the 2024 NLDS against the Dodgers.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

That ascent began in 2020. The Padres embraced their “Slam Diego” moniker, adopting a noticeable, fiery edge. They weren’t afraid to flip bats or talk smack or taunt fans. Their brand of baseball, at least in the eyes of that dragon up the freeway, was rooted in their persona as much as anything; a sharp juxtaposition to the Dodgers’ more subdued, even-keeled approach.

“When you look at what the Padres have become, it’s a team that plays with very high energy, very high emotion. And they’ve created an atmosphere down there that drives off that,” Muncy said. “We are almost the opposite. We play on very little emotion. And I just think those two styles contrast very differently. You started seeing that in the games.”

The Dodgers’ perpetual perch atop the standings stoked San Diego, too, making the Padres’ performance in the long-dormant rivalry a manifestation of their championship ambitions.

“When I was there, we always wanted to beat the Dodgers,” said Blake Snell, who played for San Diego from 2021 to 2023 and will face them for the first time since joining the Dodgers on Saturday in Los Angeles. “Because that’s the team you gotta go through to get to the World Series.”

That dynamic was evident in the 2022 playoffs, when the underdog Padres conjured an intensity the Dodgers couldn’t match.

It was at the forefront of last year’s October rematch, too, when the Padres ran away with a Game 2 victory punctuated by Machado throwing a ball toward Roberts in the Dodgers’ dugout, and the Chavez Ravine crowd showering trash near Padres players on the field.

“What I got out of it was a bunch of dudes that showed up in front of a big, hostile crowd with stuff being thrown at them and said, ‘We’re going to talk with our play; we’re not going to back down,’” Padres manager Mike Shildt said that night.

“That is kind of part of their game,” Muncy countered ahead of Game 3. “Trying to get under your skin and trying to have the emotion come out and get you to do something that you’re not normally doing.”

This time, the Dodgers responded, prevailing in a five-game series that Roberts compared to a “street fight.” On the verge of a potential slaying, his team instead breathed fire back.

“I just felt last year, where they were going, how they were kind of feeling, and our mindset and psyche, we needed to kind of match their intensity,” Roberts said.

The fight is no longer confined to press conference taunts. This year, the rivalry boiled over into physical clashes. And at the center were the two respective managers.

Over the years, there’s been plenty of pettiness imbued into Dodgers-Padres games, from a scoreboard graphic of a crying Clayton Kershaw at Petco Park, to Will Smith’s description of the since-departed Profar as “kind of irrelevant” last year.

But this June, the antagonism was ratcheted up, after the teams combined for 11 hit batters — and not-so-veiled accusations of intentionality — over seven games played in a 11-day stretch.

The Padres took exception to three different plunkings of Tatis. The Dodgers were dubious of two balls that pelted Shohei Ohtani. By the time Tatis was hit in the hand in the final game of the latter series, Shildt had seen enough, shouting in Roberts’ direction as he walked onto the field to check on his star player.

Roberts responded in kind, racing out to meet Shildt with a slight, but nonetheless surprising, shove. Suddenly, the benches had cleared. Roberts and Shildt continued jawing through it all.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts yells at San Diego Padres manager Mike Shildt after benches clear in the ninth inning of a June 19 game at Dodger Stadium.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

“After a while, enough’s enough,” Shildt said afterward. “Intentional, unintentional, the fact of the matter is we took exception with it. I responded.”

“I felt that he was trying to make it personal with me,” Roberts countered in his postgame press conference. “Which then, I take it personal.”

Machado delivered the most memorable quote of the night, cautioning the Dodgers to “set a little candle up for Tati” and “pray” he hadn’t suffered a serious injury (X-rays on Tatis’ hand came back negative).

But in the aftermath, all the attention centered on Roberts and Shildt, who were each suspended by the league for one game.

“It’s ultimately about the defense of our team,” Shildt said the next day when asked about Roberts. “And anybody that is going to take the steps that I feel are inappropriate against our team, then I will take action. I’m not a personal guy. I’m not a grudge guy. But I am a foxhole guy.”

Roberts snapped back when asked about Shildt (whom he said he has spoken with since the incident) this week.

“It definitely added to the intensity of the series, when you’ve got two managers going at it,” Roberts said. “And I never want to make it about me, I really don’t. I just took offense to his response towards me. I thought it was directed at me. But for me, I just want to go out and play good baseball. That’s kind of where my head’s at.”

Given the Dodgers’ struggles of late, simply stacking wins has never been a bigger priority. Over the next week and a half, they could reclaim a division lead they have so clumsily squandered, or enter the final month of the season with substantial ground to make up.

“We can’t make it more than what it is,” Mookie Betts said. “It’s another series in August. Obviously, we all know it’s big and X, Y and Z, but we can’t make it that way. We have to just look at it as the same game as today and play our game and not try to get too high or too low.”

“I’m not a grudge guy. But I am a foxhole guy,” said San Diego Padres manager Mike Shildt, walking with Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernandez and utilityman Kike Hernandez after a bench clearing in the ninth inning of a June 19 game.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Still, the Dodgers won’t feign passivity this time. Not as long as the Padres continue to lean into their trademark intensity.

“They told me right away, obviously, we don’t like those guys a whole lot,” newly-acquired Padres reliever Mason Miller said on Foul Territory last week, of the message he received from his new teammates upon being traded to San Diego at the deadline. “I haven’t really [experienced] a rivalry to that extent.”

Roberts wasn’t surprised to hear it.

“We think about whoever we’re playing,” he said. “I do think it’s one of those things where, they’re very hyper-focused on us. But I guess it’s a compliment. Still, we’ve got to match their intensity. Because they want to beat us more than anything.”