Three years later, the quote still resonates.
When it comes to the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, late Padres owner Peter Seidler framed the dynamic best.
“The Dodgers are the dragon up the freeway we’re trying to slay,” Seidler said in August 2022, during an in-game interview with ESPN as the two teams played a “Sunday Night Baseball” game at Chavez Ravine.
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“We have a lot of respect for them, obviously. But our goal, and San Diego knows this as well, is to win a championship.”
And from that pursuit, one of baseball’s most heated modern rivalries has sprouted.
Read more: Contentious Dodgers-Padres series ends with benches clearing and managers ejected
To the rest of the baseball world, the Padres have been a plucky feel-good story over the last half-decade. They’re a small-market team that has become an annual postseason contender. They have an aggressive front office, a roster full of big personalities, and an ever-pulsing current of emotion and intensity reverberating from the dugout through their frenzied home crowds.
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In Los Angeles, however, the perspective couldn’t be more different. The Dodgers have long been the ruling power in the National League West, champions of the division 11 times in the last 12 years. The Padres, on the other hand, are the rebels who won’t surrender, the barbarians at the door trying to steal their crown.
“I just think that it starts with them wanting to overtake us,” manager Dave Roberts said this week, ahead of the Padres’ latest visit to Dodger Stadium on Friday. “I think that we’ve clearly dominated the division in the last decade. … But I think that they’re trying to overtake us. I think that with that, that certainly brings out emotion.”
While the Dodgers have quelled similar challenges during their decade-long reign in the division, the Padres have proved to be a different kind of foil — coupling a contrast in style and culture with enough staying power to fuel increasingly contentious bouts.
“It’s just two contrasting styles,” third baseman Max Muncy said, “that have just grown into this beast.”
There was the Dodgers’ sweep of the Padres in the 2020 NL Division Series, then the Padres’ payback in a postseason upset two years later. Last fall, a tight division race came down to the last week of the season. When their paths again crossed in October, yet another NLDS went all the way to a decisive fifth game.
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This year, more tinder has been…