San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
MELVIN IS OK WITH NO PLAY-IN GAME
The Padres won’t need an extra game. They will just work to make 162 enough.
The new postseason format, with six teams from each league making the playoffs, means there is no longer a 163rd game in the event teams finish with identical records.
Instead, there is a list of tiebreakers that determine which team would advance. The first one is head-to-head record in the regular season, and that favors the Padres in the event they finish tied with the Brewers for the final wild-card spot because the Padres won four of their seven games.
Padres manager Bob Melvin has enough on his plate with matchups and personalities and workload management and lineup composition and all the rest. He sometimes is not up to speed on what could be considered minutiae, such as how playoff berths are decided.
He was unaware before last week that there was no longer a play-in game.
“I’m happy about it now, based on the position we’re in,” Melvin said recently. “But we still have to keep going. At this point in time, all for it.”
The Phillies beat the Padres four out of seven this season and, thus, hold the tiebreaker over the Padres should they finish tied.
Back on track
So this is what Juan Soto can do.
As mesmerizing as his plate appearances were over his first couple weeks, as he walked once every five plate appearances and had a .438 on-base percentage, he didn’t provide the production the Padres expected when they pulled off one of the biggest deadline trades in history last month. And a career-worst 15-game stretch from Aug. 29 to Sept. 15, during which he hit .063 with a .286 on-base percentage, was certainly a shock.
But in the seven games leading up to Saturday, Soto was batting 10-for-26 (.385) with five walks, three doubles and two home runs.
“We’ve been working a lot since I got here,” Soto said after hitting a double and a homer on Friday. “I think we are finding little by little my feeling and how my swing is supposed to go.”
Soto, who singled out assistant coach Ryan Flaherty as helping him, is a career .287/.425/.528 hitter. He averaged a home run just less than every 16 at-bats with the Nationals in his career, including this season, and is averaging one every 29 at-bats with the Padres.
Even in his relative struggles since joining the Padres, he has been on base at least twice in 22 of his 42 games with the team.
“You expect him to swing the bat the way he has right now and for a period of time now,” Melvin said. “It’s just kind of who he is.”
Alfaro’s approach
Before Melvin “reconsidered” the lineup and replaced Austin Nola with Jorge Alfaro for Friday’s series opener, Alfaro had caught three of the Padres’ previous 24 games.
“You just accept,” Alfaro said Friday afternoon. “You have to be a good teammate. I just prepare myself.”
That is the challenge for a player who isn’t playing — wanting to be on the field as much as possible but also wanting to be part of a winning team in any way possible. And in his response to the mention of his having started 54 of the season’s first 126 games, Alfaro revealed how difficult it is to be sitting so often now.
“That was fun,” Alfaro said.
Alfaro is trying to treat his circumstance the same way he does those crucial atbats in the ninth inning.
“Be ready,” he said. “That’s all I have in mind right now. Be ready, and when that opportunity comes you just have to enjoy it.”
That’s how a man has a team-record four walk-off RBIS in a season and how he deals with hardly playing any more.
Alfaro went on the injured list Aug. 26 with right knee inflammation. He was activated Sept. 5 and on Sept. 6 started and hit a walk-off single. In the Padres’ 15 games since, he has started three times at catcher and served as designated hitter once. He has not caught in a game since working the ninth inning of a blowout loss on Sept. 15.
As the Padres work toward clinching a postseason berth, with every game already feeling like a playoff contest, it is Nola starting virtually every day because of the trust Melvin and the pitchers have in him. Nola started 11 of the 16 games leading up to Friday with Alfaro catching three and Luis Campusano starting two.
“I just work here,” Alfaro said when asked if he understands. “… I’m not really thinking that much. I don’t have any answer. I don’t have anything.”
The reality is Melvin, a former catcher who expects much of his catchers, values Nola’s game calling.
Nola caught for Darvish on Saturday, as he has all his starts. And by making the switch Melvin was prioritizing Nola catching for Mike Clevinger today, as he did not want Nola to catch three straight days with the third of those being a day game.
Notable
Hitting coach Michael Brdar had a cast on his left hand Saturday after suffering a fractured middle finger when he was hit in the dugout by a foul ball lined off the bat of Soto in the third inning Friday.
The Padres set a team record Friday by going a 43rd consecutive game without a triple. That surpassed the old mark of 42 games from Aug. 28, 1997, to April 15, 1998.
kevin.acee@sduniontribune.com