If you think Mason Miller's paternity-list move is some sneaky front-office trick, you have to believe the San Diego Padres would rather win a win-or-go-home game with Wandy Peralta than with their All-Star closer. That theory falls apart the second you say it out loud.
About 45 minutes before Game 3 of the NLDS against Milwaukee, Miller went on the Postseason Paternity List. His wife, Jordan, had gone into labor Tuesday afternoon with their first child. Stammen got the call around 2 p.m. PT that she might be going into labor. For the next three hours, Miller and the team waited to see if the baby would arrive in time for him to make it to the ballpark. It didn't. At 5:47 p.m. PT he went on the list, and Peralta, who wasn't even on San Diego's original NLDS roster, became the active replacement.
A manipulative roster move is supposed to help the team making it. This one hurt them. If San Diego wanted to game the postseason, they picked the worst possible way to do it: pulling their best reliever off an elimination-game roster for a lefty specialist who hadn't even made the series cut to begin with.
The rules explain where the suspicion comes from. An injury swap is brutal: replace a guy mid-series and he has to miss that series, plus the next one if the team advances. The paternity list works differently. Miller can miss a minimum of one day and a maximum of three, and when he comes back he can bump Peralta without sitting out anything else. It's the league's own family-leave policy working exactly as written, built so a player never has to choose between his kid being born and his roster spot.
And the Padres took the hit anyway. Down 0-2 in the best-of-five, facing elimination, they ran out there without the arm you most want in the ninth. Michael King came out of the bullpen and shut down Milwaukee in the eighth and ninth, and San Diego won 4-3 to force Game 4. They survived despite the downgrade.
I get where the mood comes from. Miller's last outing was ugly: 40 pitches Sunday, a blown save, the bases walked loaded, then a two-out walk-off single to Jackson Chourio in only his third six-out attempt of the year. There's chatter on social media about whether he was tipping pitches. None of that has anything to do with his wife going into labor two days later. Babies don't check pitch counts. Fans already souring on Miller this week are reaching for a reason to doubt him on something that has nothing to do with baseball.
Nobody should be litigating whether a man's reason for being at his child's birth is real. Teams don't schedule labor. Questioning it is unfair and unprovable. Here's what the team said: "We're thinking about him. I know it's a hard thing to balance, but he's doing the right thing."
Game 4 is set for Wednesday night in San Diego. Miller hasn't been confirmed back yet, but the Padres expect him. Whenever he returns, he'll have earned none of the suspicion aimed at him. He chose his family and cost his team its best weapon to do it. That's a guy getting it right.
