Cal Baseball: Bob Melvin Steers Padres Past Two Powerhouses; World Series in View

Having sent home the Mets and Dodgers, San Diego faces Philadelphia in NLCS.

Cal alum Bob Melvin spent 11 seasons managing the Oakland A’s to mostly over-achieving seasons. Then he took a job last offseason with a San Diego Padres team whose higher payroll gave the team a real chance.

“We believe that Bob is the right man to take our talented group and help them deliver a championship to the city of San Diego,” Padres general manager A.J. Preller said last Nov. 1 when Melvin was hired.

Fast forward almost a year and Melvin, who turns 61 later this month, has the Padres in the NL Championship Series against the Philadelphia Phillies. Game 1 is Tuesday at Petco Park in San Diego, with the Padres four wins away from a berth in the World Series.

Melvin piloted the Padres to an 89-win regular season, their best victory total since 2010. The team drew more 800,000 more fans than a year ago, its best attendance since 2004.

Bob Melvin / Photo by Orlando Ramirez, USA Today

Even so, San Diego was the No. 5 seed in the expanded NL playoffs, and matched in the best-of-three Wild Card series against the 101-win New York Mets. The Padres won two of three.

That set them up to face their southern California rival, if you can call it that. The Los Angeles Dodgers won the regular-season series against the Padres for the 12th straight season this summer, taking 14 of 19 meetings after winning the final nine matchups in 2021.

The Dodgers won a franchise-record 111 games and the Caesars Sportsbook installed the Padres as a +190 underdog, the second-biggest betting underdog in a playoff series over the past decade.

But Melvin, who played on Cal’s 1980 College World Series team before a 10-year MLB career as a catcher, steered the Padres to an improbable 3-1 series win over L.A. in the best-of-five set.

How big an upset was this?

Reflecting on win differential in the regular season, the 22-game disparity was the second-largest in postseason history. Only the 93-win White Sox upset of the 116-win Cubs in the 1906 World Series was bigger.

“These guys handed it to us, took every series from us this year,” Melvin told the San Diego Union Tribune. “So to be able to get one more chance at it in a little different scenario. We’d been playing better leading up to it.

“We felt confident going in even though we had not taken a series from all year, and once we won that game over there (Wednesday in Game 2), to bring it back home. We felt really confident that we wouldn’t go back to L.A.”

The Padres trailed 3-0 in Game 4 at home on Saturday night when they scored five runs in an epic 34-minute seventh inning on the way to a 5-3 closeout triumph.

Pitching was the key for San Diego. They held the powerful Dodgers to a .227 batting average with no home runs over four games, striking out 44 batters in 35 innings. The Padres’ bullpen didn’t allow a run in the first three games.

Melvin, who won two of his three manager of the year awards during his tenure with the A’s, was a popular figure in Oakland. He is no doubt earning some love from Giants fans right now after his club sent home the Dodgers.

He directed the A’s to six postseason appearances in 11 years, but never had the firepower to get to win it all. The Padres had reached the playoffs just once in 15 previous season before Melvin’s arrival.

Now they’re in position to dream about the franchise advancing to the World Series for the first time since 1984, and possibly winning the Fall Classic for the first time ever.

Cover photo of Padres manager Bob Melvin by Kirby Lee, USA Today

Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo