Pivetta is nails, but Padres missing a hammer in Game 1 vs. Cubs

CHICAGO -- Under the grandstand up the first-base line at Wrigley Field, the visitors’ clubhouse played Bob Marley. Softly. Subtly. But perhaps a bit defiantly, too.

The Padres had just dropped a tense Wild Card Series opener, 3-1, to the Cubs at Wrigley Field on Tuesday afternoon. Twenty-seven outs into their 2025 postseason run, their backs are against the wall.

But this is a team loaded with veterans, a team full of players whose backs have been against the wall before -- in 2020, ’22 and ’24. They know the feeling.

“Tomorrow’s it,” said Jake Cronenworth. “Forget about what happened today. … Almost everybody in this room has been in a must-win game.”

So the music still played, even after a gut-punch of a Game 1 loss. Based on recent Wild Card Series history, the odds are now clearly stacked against these Padres. No team to lose Game 1 on the road has ever even rallied to win a Game 2. In the history of best-of-three postseason series, only two teams out of 20 have rallied from an 0-1 deficit to win the series.

Of course, these Padres have never lost a Wild Card Series in three tries. They’re also one of those two teams that have rallied from an 0-1 deficit to win a best-of-three series, having done so against the Cardinals in 2020.

“Do it again,” said Fernando Tatis Jr., “like we did that year. We have a lot of confidence in the room. And we have a lot of experience.”

As was the case in that 2020 series, the Padres’ bats are going to need to come to life at some point. They notched only four hits on Tuesday -- none in 4 2/3 innings against the Chicago bullpen.

“It was a well-pitched game on both sides,” said Padres manager Mike Shildt. “They threw out a lot of good arms. [Cubs starter Matthew] Boyd dodged some bullets early. We let him off the hook, had a chance to add on.”

The Padres grabbed an early lead with consecutive doubles from Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts to begin the second inning. But they squandered multiple opportunities to build on that advantage.

Bogaerts advanced to third base on a throwing error, forcing the Cubs to bring their infield in with nobody out. Shortstop Dansby Swanson made a diving snare of Ryan O’Hearn’s sharp ground ball. Bogaerts wasn’t running on contact, so he stayed put -- and was later stranded at third.

In the fourth, Swanson made another remarkable defensive play on O’Hearn, backtracking and reaching over his shoulder in shallow center to catch a soft line drive.

“I hit the first one good; I thought it might sneak by him,” O’Hearn said. “He made a good play. Second one, I thought I got enough on it to drop it in over his head, put a run on the board. Neither one worked out, but the right approach was there. Another centimeter off the barrel, the job gets done.”

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Hard to fault O’Hearn, given how close he came to plating a run each time. Sometimes baseball is a game of inches. Sometimes it’s a game of centimeters. There’s only so much you can control.

Here’s one of the controllables: In the fourth inning, two batters before Swanson’s robbery of O’Hearn, a red-hot Merrill dropped down a sacrifice bunt from the cleanup spot. The bunt moved Manny Machado into scoring position. It also cost the Padres an out.

The decision, of course, fit squarely with the Padres’ ethos. They led the Majors in sacrifice bunts during the regular season by a mile. Afterward, Shildt revealed that he hadn’t called for the sacrifice but that he fully supported Merrill’s decision to do so.

Merrill cited the tricky matchup against Boyd. Yes, he doubled in the second inning. But it was a bloop double, and he wasn’t seeing the ball particularly well.

“It’s playoff baseball; we’ve got to score a run any way we can,” Merrill said afterward. “Bogey barrelled him up in the first at-bat. So I’ll give him an opportunity to get a knock and see what happens.”

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After Bogaerts’ infield single, Machado was stranded at third, as well. An inning later, Seiya Suzuki and Carson Kelly hit back-to-back homers off starter Nick Pivetta, who had been excellent up to that point and finished with nine strikeouts in five innings. The Cubs led, and the Padres didn’t put another runner on base.

It marked just the fifth time in postseason history that a group of relievers held an opponent entirely off the bases for at least four innings. And it’s now happened in the Padres’ last two playoff games. They were also held without a baserunner by the Dodgers’ bullpen on the night they were eliminated last October.

If their bats don’t come to life, the same fate awaits them on Wednesday.

“We know what we're looking at,” Shildt said. “We've got to take care of business tomorrow to set ourselves up to take care of business on Thursday. And we expect to do that. Our clubhouse right now is disappointed, but nobody is hanging their head. This is a good club that knows what they're capable of doing and is eager to show up and go and compete tomorrow.”