Padres News: Manny Machado Talks About Differences for Team Through Hot End of Season
The San Diego Padres made an impressive last-ditch effort to reach the postseason in the month of September, but it fell just short. They dug too big of a hole for themselves all year long, and it caught up to them down the stretch of the year.
One could argue that their winning ways were due to the quality of teams that they were playing over the last few weeks of the season. The only team above .500 that they saw after September 11th was the Los Angeles Dodgers, who had already clinched the NL West, and LA was just waiting for the postseason to start.
The other teams they played were the Oakland As, Colorado Rockies, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants and Chicago White Sox.
While the Friars can only play the teams on the schedule, it seems that they took advantage of the weaker opponents to put them into potential playoff positions. To their credit, they did what they needed to, and started winning games in different ways than previously done.
Nobody believed they would still be alive entering the final weekend of the regular season, but they proved they were resilient in the end. Star third baseman Manny Machado reflected on this fact.
“I think the biggest thing was we impacted the game in the middle of the game where we didn’t earlier in the year,” Manny Machado said, speaking of how the Padres have played in September the way they expected to play all season. “We didn’t get the extra runs off of those pitchers that were right on the ropes kind of struggling a little bit. We weren’t able to take advantage of those situations and tack on three or four runs and give our pitchers a little bit more wiggle room to play with. We should have done that a little bit more throughout the year, and we didn’t.”
The Friars struggled to find any sort of consistency this season, and it cost them. They didn’t play up to standard from the opening game of the season, and it now lands them as one of the biggest letdowns in baseball history.
“I think ultimately it boils down to we should have just played better baseball,” Machado said this week. “Not really one specific game or one specific series or even one stretch that we had that was tough. I think we should just … have played at this level all year and we just didn’t.”
The hope is that they can put the 2023 season in the rearview mirror, and focus now on 2024. They can take what they learned from this season, and make sure that this never happens again. San Diego has a very talented roster, but they are expected to have an interesting offseason that could see some real changes coming down the line.
