Xander Bogaerts saved the Padres' season with his glove on Tuesday night, and the only reason he had to is that the pitching kept handing Milwaukee the keys. Both of those things are true, and if you only want to talk about the first one, you're letting the people who nearly lost this game off the hook.
Start with what happened. San Diego won Game 3 at Petco Park, 4-3, Jake Cronenworth's tiebreaking homer the difference, and avoided elimination with the Brewers up 2-1 in a best-of-five. Michael King, the Game 2 starter, came out of the bullpen and threw the final two innings on one day of rest. That's how little faith this staff had in anyone else with the game on the line. Mason Miller, the man who's supposed to pitch the ninth, was on the paternity list. So the plan was a worn-out starter, and the plan nearly blew up.
In the ninth, King walked William Contreras and Brice Turang, both with one out, putting the tying and winning runs on base. Those were two free passes in the highest-leverage inning of the year. Then Christian Yelich hit a line drive at 107.1 mph straight up the middle, and Bogaerts went to his knees, fielded it on a short hop, touched second and threw out Yelich at first. Game over: a 6-3 double play, and the season stayed alive.
The Bogaerts-did-it-all-himself crowd runs into a problem here. A ball crushed that hard is as likely to split the gap and score two as it is to end the game. Bogaerts was in the right spot and made a genuinely great play, no argument. But a one-run lead that survives on a 107 mph liner finding leather is a lead that was mismanaged into a coin flip. Praise the shortstop all you want. Don't pretend the pitching earned the ending.
Milwaukee had chances all night and didn't cash them, and a team that leaves the bases loaded in the ninth owns that too. "The other guys helped" doesn't excuse San Diego's own ninth, though. You still have to get the last out, and the Padres couldn't do it until a line drive happened to be aimed at the one man who could.
This is the third straight one-run game to open the series, the first playoff series since the 2021 NLCS to begin that way. It's thrilling, and it's also a warning. San Diego keeps winning by the width of a glove. That works until it doesn't. Bogaerts bought them Game 4 tonight at Petco. If the Padres want a Game 5, the pitching needs to stop making him do it alone.
