The San Diego Padres’ season ended on Thursday, and they appear to have a complaint or two on the way out.
After eight innings of getting shut down by the Chicago Cubs, the Padres got on the board in the ninth inning with a solo homer from Jackson Merrill. The next batter, Xander Bogaerts, worked the count full against reliever Brad Keller, whose payoff pitch was tracked as a ball.
Bogaerts certainly seemed to think it was ball, as he started walking across home plate before umpire D.J. Reyburn punched him out. Bogaerts had words for Reyburn and was briefly joined by Padres manager Mike Shildt before walking to the dugout.
That call wound up being pretty significant. Keller hit his next two batters to put two runners on base with one out and a two-run lead. Had Bogaerts reached base, that would have been bases loaded and no outs.
Andrew Kittredge entered the game for Keller and got the next two batters out, ending the Padres’ season with a 3-1 Cubs win. There’s no telling how the inning would have worked out had Bogaerts drawn the walk, but the incident was a perfect example for why players are looking forward to the automatic ball-strike challenge system coming to MLB in 2026.
Bogaerts is one of those players, judging from what he told the San Diego Union-Tribune after the game:
That ball-strike call obviously wasn’t the only reason the Padres lost the game. There were the eight innings they failed to score against Cubs starter Jameson Taillon and the Chicago bullpen, and Yu Darvish’s one-inning start that put even more pressure on a gassed bullpen. Still, it’s tempting to think about the day when this stuff can be nullified with a hand signal from the batter.
Now, a difficult offseason for the Padres is set to begin after a frustrating season in which they made big moves at the MLB trade deadline but fell short of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NL West.