WHEN FOOLS THROW BASEBALLS AT DODGER STADIUM, PADRES ARE IN CONTROL
Mocking the la-la crowd with laughter and wagged tongues, the visitors angered fans into firing hard objects, water bottles and trash — which could mean victory in the National League Division Series
We know it as a celebrated park in a sublime ravine, but Dodger Stadium also can be a hellhole. Sunday night, fans contributed to the vulgar chapters by throwing baseballs at Jurickson Profar. He plays for the Padres, from San Diego, a much cooler place than creepy Los Angeles when kooks are allowed to heave hard objects, water bottles and trash during a postseason freeway conflict.
How devastating when management loves to throw megadollars at Shohei Ohtani yet can’t control fan behavior. The bosses still haven’t learned 13 years after Bryan Stow, a Giants fan, was attacked in the parking lot and suffered brain damage for life. This is the same building where security people cornered a man whose wife gathered Ohtani’s first home run this season, shaking him down when they should have offered serious prize money.
Now the question becomes whether the fans, who delayed Game 2 of the National League Division Series for 12 minutes, will entomb the Dodgers after a 10-2 loss. Who couldn’t help but notice the Padres pausing, taking charge during the break with team meetings, then turning loose again amid a display of six home runs? The brokers who run Guggenheim Baseball are supposed to be the ownership gods of baseball, capable of signing Ohtani for $700 million and making it seem breezy when six Japanese groups arrive daily to make major deals. But Mark Walter and his partners, including Magic Johnson, might have ruined a season by allowing anyone to hurl a ball at Profar, who made the first-inning mistake of robbing Mookie Betts of a home run in left field and laughing with fans after his catch.
“That was hilarious,” teammate Jackson Merrill said. “He’s having fun. He was playing like a little kid and I love that.”
They didn’t like his smile. By the seventh inning, they grew angry and fired wicked bombs toward him, forcing a teary-eyed Profar to join teammates in shallow left field. Would manager Mike Shildt remove his team from the field? Manny Machado, often accused of not being a team leader, gathered everyone for a long chat. Where was security? Why didn’t police eject the offenders? Since when did southern California become an East Coast or Midwestern sports mob?
“I feel like when it went over the line, when they started throwing stuff onto the field,” said Fernando Tatis Jr., who homered twice “I felt like that should not be happening in a big-league game.”
“We were looking for a higher security presence out in the left-field corner to ensure that that behavior didn’t continue,” crew chief Dan Bellino told a pool reporter. “And to make sure that if anybody did throw anything out on the field, they would be identified immediately and removed from the stadium.”
Unlike Game 1, when Ohtani hit a three-run homer and led the Dodgers to a victory, no one could overcome the fury of 54,119 fans. They sense another premature playoff defeat, for the third straight autumn. The Padres have a deeper pitching staff, which is more than enough to beat the Dodgers, who have chronic issues that force pitchers to the injured list and surgeries. When they also come at you with Tatis, Machado, Merrill and Xander Bogaerts, manager Dave Roberts will need prayers to win the series and, perhaps, keep his job.
“The series started with a comment about a fight and punching and we're going to beat them to the punch and all that,” said Shildt, referring to a Roberts comment. “But we've been punching on the field all year. What I got out of it was a bunch of dudes that showed up in front of a big, hostile crowd with stuff being thrown at them and said, ‘We're going to talk with our play. We're not going to back down. We're going to elevate our game. We're going to be together. And we're going to take care of business.’ ’’
In another indictment of Roberts, the Padres kept their poise when Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty hit Tatis in the knee in the sixth inning. Machado was irate. “When you try to hit our best hitter … you can't get him out, don't hit him,” he said. “They got the best player in the game right? Ohtani? We don't go out there and try to hit Ohtani. We try to get him out. Don't go out there and try to hit my guy.”
Facing Machado, Flaherty fired back. “Sit the (expletive) down, (expletive),” he said before Machado yelled back. The fans were about to boil. Why didn’t police and security react when objects flew onto the field? Maybe they were afraid of the crowd.
“I've seen over a thousand games here, well over a thousand games in this ballpark, and I've never seen anything like that,” Roberts said. “So obviously there's a lot of emotions and things like that. But that's something that should never happen.”
The fans let the Padres taunt them and, obviously, overreacted. Tatis wiggled his extended tongue and mocked them — never mind his 80-game suspension for steroids in 2022. “Dodger fans, they were just not happy. They're losing the game, obviously, and just a lot of back and forth,” he said. “What can I say? I wish they could control it a little bit more, their emotions.”
“The bear’s been poked for a while. It’s been poked previous years, decades,” Merrill said. “We just finally got the firepower, we finally got the team to take it to them.”
Only Profar was calm. “Every game we win, I enjoy. But this one a little more,” he said. “Going back home.”
Yu Darvish returned to the site of his worst pitching performance — 2017 World Series — and kept calm after the delay. “I've never experienced anything like that,” he said through an interpreter. “What I was thinking was it was important not to give up any runs in that inning. If you do that, the tendency is that sort of the game flow changes. So my mindset was just shut them down here.”
Game 3 is Tuesday at Petco Park. Game 4 is Wednesday. Is this all for Ohtani and the Dodgers, who could make major leadership changes? Are the Padres finally ready to win their first World Series? “I know we're about to go back to San Diego with a very, very loud, raucous, aggressive, hungry crowd that's going to be super excited and going to be getting after it,” Shildt said. “But I know also we'll stay classy, San Diego.”
And the impromptu team meeting? “Just stay focused,” Machado said. “Stay focused on the task at hand. We’ve got (six) outs left. Go out there and try to finish up the game and stay focused in what we need to do and accomplish.”
“Just regroup, resettle,” Tatis said. “The game was on our side. We know what we're capable of. And, man, it was just a reminder who we really are as a group and just how crazy we can turn a place to go nuts.”
Nuts was factual.
“It was ugly,” Roberts said. “It was ugly.”
Will San Diego stay classy, Ron Burgundy? It could be even uglier.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.