Lights-out bullpen deployed to perfection in Padres' Wild Card Series clinch

SAN DIEGO -- The lights cut out, Korn’s “Blind” blared, the sellout Petco Park crowd rose to their feet roaring and Mason Miller seemingly spawned onto the mound for the start of the ninth inning. The game was over. The National League Wild Card Series was over.

But in reality, it had ended well before that.

This is exactly why Padres general manager A.J. Preller assembled the best and deepest bullpen in baseball, for nights like Wednesday.

“In the postseason, you’ve got to get a lot of great hitters out,” Preller said. “You’ve got to have a lot of answers in that bullpen.”

After starter Nick Pivetta departed in the fourth, Padres manager Craig Stammen fully unleashed his bullpen over the final 5 2/3 innings against the Cubs in Game 2. Bradgley Rodriguez, Jason Adam, Adrian Morejon and Miller proceeded to allow just three men to reach base and keep Chicago’s league-best offense scoreless to slam the door on a 4-1 victory and send the Padres to the NL Division Series for a best-of-five-series against the Brewers.

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Michael King going seven scoreless innings in Game 1 and saving the key arms in the back end set the Padres up perfectly to lean on that group the following night. If the Padres got an early lead, Stammen wasn’t going to mess around with keeping Pivetta in longer than he needed to secure the series.

That’s exactly how things played out.

San Diego scored a pair of runs in the second before Pivetta -- who did his job in limiting the Cubs over 3 1/3 innings -- got the hook in the fourth after giving up an RBI single to Nico Hoerner. A one-run lead ballooned to three after Gavin Sheets’ pinch-hit homer in the bottom half of the inning. The ‘pen took care of the rest.

“Michael’s effort last night was phenomenal and that allows us to go out firing in the early part of the game today and get our best guys out there,” Miller said. “It puts us in a really confident position. We get a lead and we feel really good about it.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Padres’ performance in this series was shutting down the Cubs’ elite lineup, and specifically their top two hitters in Pete Crow-Armstrong and Alex Bregman. The former is coming off the seventh 40-40 season in baseball history and the latter posted a 1.010 OPS in the second half.

They collectively went 0-for-15 in the series with eight strikeouts.

It was quite the statement, but it’s exactly what the Padres have been doing all season. By innings, San Diego had the fourth-most used bullpen in the Majors (683 2/3) and it possessed the fifth-best ERA (3.53).

“It’s an incredible group, top to bottom,” Adam said. “It doesn’t matter the situation, it doesn’t matter the inning, everybody out there is ready to go at all times. Fourth inning, ninth inning, I don’t care who we put out there, I feel really confident the guy is getting the job done.”

Rodriguez was the first into the fray, the rookie right-hander who immediately became one of the best relief arms in the sport and has been dominant in high-leverage situations throughout the year. He played fireman in the fourth, escaping a bases-loaded jam to preserve Pivetta’s line before pitching a clean fifth that he capped with a strikeout of Seiya Suzuki on a changeup below the zone.

“We’ve always known that about Bradgley -- that his maturity level is beyond his years,” Padres pitching coach Ruben Niebla said. “He doesn’t rattle. He doesn’t get nervous. He trusts himself and is a confident guy. We’re able to put him in those situations very confidently, and he’s responded well to that.”

Adam got through a 1-2-3 sixth, then Morejon cruised through the seventh and eighth, allowing just one hit, a Tyrone Taylor single. Then the ball was handed to Miller, the most imposing reliever in the game, who struck out an insane 47.4% of the batters he faced this season and finished with a career-best 1.67 ERA and 38 saves.

He gave up a double to Hoerner but struck out a pair and got Carson Kelly to ground out to end it, sending the Padres to Milwaukee and the Cubs back home.

“It’s not about any individual, it’s about a group,” Miller said. “It’s about passing the ball to the next guy and getting us in the clubhouse with a win. I think it’s a lot of selfless guys down there.”

Now, the Padres get the top-seeded Brewers in the NLDS, another team with plenty of firepower in the bullpen. To defeat them, and anyone else standing in the Padres’ way this October, Wednesday will be the template.

And if it continues to pan out the way it did, that should scare the rest of the postseason field.

“We knew we had six innings we could cover,” Niebla said. “It worked out to perfection.”