SAN DIEGO – Fernando Tatis Jr. – tired, frustrated, maybe even a little bored of all that time he was in the field – he couldn’t help but smile as he approached the third base of his house trot on Wednesday night he bled until Thursday morning.
The San Diego Padres had produced no success in ten innings and had not recorded any extra-base success in a game that by then had reached the end of the 15th.
But of of course Tatis, 0 for 6 on the night and with a 1-on-24 drop, hit a two-run homer that tied the game after the Los Angeles Dodgers finally broke with a pair of runs in the top half of the game. entrance.
De of course Tatis’s battered ball only came out after bouncing off the top of the right field fence.
And of of course this game happened in the 16th inning.
It finally ended then, when AJ Pollock, the hero of another tight game between these two budding rivals Tuesday night, hit a two-run homer to head to the top of the 16th, sending the Dodgers to a laborious, methodical, and bewildering 5. -3 Petco Park victory.
“I’m pretty beaten, but after winning you feel a lot better,” said Dave Roberts, Dodgers manager, who has won 15 of his last 17 games but keeps 2 1/2 games behind the San Francisco Giants in the National League West.
“I should count as two. Unfortunately it doesn’t.”
This game, the longest of three innings since Major League Baseball, incorporated an auto runner into second base in extras at the start of the 2020 season. It finally ended at 12:59 p.m. It lasted five hours and 49 minutes and consisted of 19 pitchers who threw 489 combined throws.
Three of these pitchers, all members of the Fathers, came to beat. Two others, Walker Buehler and Blake Snell, started the marathon by participating in an old-fashioned pitcher duel, combining to allow just two runs and record 43 starts, 18 in attacks. The Padres, who lost 10 of their previous 12 and suddenly struggled just to qualify for the postseason, held a 1-0 lead until Will Smith hit the local round against Snell in the eighth. entrance.
The score would stay there for six more frames.
The Dodgers, taking advantage of the pitcher’s position, ended up placing Manny Machado and Jake Cronenworth in the middle of the Padres ’lineup, issuing eight intentional walks, most since that statistic was tracked in 1955. At one point in the game, Kenley Jansen recorded his 1,000th professional elimination, joining Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman as the only lifeguards who recorded so many on one team. Later, after midnight, another Dodgers reliever, Brusdar Graterol, celebrated his 23rd birthday.
The two teams made a combined 7-on-51 with runners in scoring position and left 35 runners stranded at the bases, four of whom were thrown between third base and motherboard. Upon entering the 15th, the Padres had 0 for 18 in running opportunities.
“It was really weird,” said Snell, whose Fathers are still a game behind the Cincinnati Reds for second place in the National League wildcards. “Both teams have stacked lineups, they can really hit, and I mean, when we scored more than one run? The fifteenth inning? What’s that? It was weird.”