Into Thin Air

The Next Ascent

The end of the Padres 2024 season was defined by two seemingly contradictory ideas:

• The Padres playoff run ended with losses in winnable games.

• The Padres were good enough to have gone all the way.

And if the Padres NLDS rivals had lost in the NLCS, tension between these two ideas may have lingered. But the final out of the 2024 World Series extinguished whatever tension may have remained between these two ideas. They are both true.

This is not some silver lining to the season. The season ended with perhaps the greatest missed opportunity in the team’s history. It’s not unreasonable to think that 2024 was the best chance the team has had to win a World Series. Yes, in 1998 the Padres made the World Series. But they were up against King Kong. In 1984 they faced Sparky Anderson’s Tigers, one of the most complete teams ever assembled, with likely the best bullpen to ever walk the face of the earth¹. It’s no surprise the 2024 World Series winner came from the National League, there was a gulf in class between those entrants and the entire AL field. This year’s Yankees team punched its ticket by beating two teams from the AL Central who got fat during the regular season feeding like buzzards off of the corpse of the Chicago White Sox. The 5th inning of the 5th game of the 2024 World Series will live in infamy alongside the 2004 ALCS in the Yankees hall of shame. A vintage Yankees team this was not.

How we will think about 2024 involves reconciling two more seemingly contradictory ideas:

• The 2024 season was an incredible leap forward.

• The 2024 season was a failure.

The 2024 season was an incredible leap forward because after 2023, in all likelihood the cultural nadir of the Padres, the 2024 team embraced situational baseball, shed the worst of the special rules for star players, developed a home grown superstar, and played a relentless never-out-of-it style of baseball giving fans a reason to keep the faith until the final out. This was never more exemplified than in the final painful home playoff game when, down by eight runs in the bottom of the 9th, the stadium remained full of fans, hoping to see a miracle. Because they’d seen them before. There is reason to think that durable change occurred in 2024. The team showed that from their past failures there were lessons learned, applied, and carried forward. And that’s a source of hope.

The 2024 season was a failure through one lens only, that of playoff essentialism. Through that lens it’s undeniable that every Padres season thus far has ended in failure. But 2024 felt different than recent playoff failures. If we’re honest with ourselves, victory in the 2022 NLDS still brings forth a feeling of contentedness, even though that season ended without a World Series appearance. 2022 feels like it was a success. And in a way it was. Because it was a time of smaller goals. Goals that were met. It was victory at the Whispering Wood. That season exceeded our expectations. But a focus on beating a particular team cannot be allowed to act as a vice on the team’s expectations. 2024 was proof that the team needs to think bigger.

It can both be true that 2024 was a season of unprecedented growth, and a season which failed the test of playoff essentialism. The World Series is the top of the mountain. And the 2024 Padres were within view of the summit when their hopes vanished into thin air. It’s going to hurt when teams like that fail. That goes with the territory of no longer being content to have simply participated in the climb. That attempt is over. All that matters now is learning from the missteps, and beginning to climb again. There is no guarantee of success. There never will be. That’s the nature of climbing the tallest mountains. Today is day one of the next ascent.

1. Perhaps there is a new contender