NEW YORK — Hours before first pitch at Citi Field on Friday night, Padres manager Bob Melvin sat in front of a throng of media and answered questions about his starting lineup. Why Josh Bell at cleanup? Why Trent Grisham at all? They had struggled. This was the postseason. Too much was at stake for Melvin to be wrong.
Melvin, calm as ever, responded to those questions by pointing out that, indeed, it’s the postseason — and time for a reset. The struggles of two hitters in August and September would likely mean very little in October.
A few hours later, Bell and Grisham answered those questions better than Melvin ever could — by homering off Mets ace Max Scherzer, igniting a stunning four-homer Padres romp in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series at Citi Field.
And just like that, with their 7-1 victory over the Mets, the Padres are one win away from a trip to Los Angeles for the National League Division Series against the Dodgers.
Having struggled with the long ball for much of the season, the Padres couldn’t have picked a better time for a breakout. Bell, Grisham, Jurickson Profar and Manny Machado all went deep in the first five innings, chasing Scherzer.
In the meantime, Yu Darvish worked around some early trouble for seven innings of one-run ball. Darvish only struck out four Mets, but he worked efficiently and allowed just six hits, becoming the first Padres starter to complete seven innings in a postseason game since Kevin Brown did so in Game 4 of the 1998 World Series.