NL DIVISION SERIES: PADRES VS DODGERS

October 11, 2024

Mike Shildt

Dodger Stadium

San Diego Padres

Pregame 5 Press Conference

Q. Obviously you've got Yu going today, but in a winner-take-all game you've got your high leverage guys fully rested. How do you feel about that?

MIKE SHILDT: Good on both accounts. We've got Yu going. Trust him completely. We have our back-end guys ready to go. They're ready. Even though they pitched yesterday or the day before they're ready. They're definitely rested. We're excited to have them get after it and bring it home.

Q. You put faith in David Peralta against left-handers lately. What went into that decision, and what he's kind of shown you, I guess, his whole time here, but especially lately?

MIKE SHILDT: The faith is in David. The situations, they evolve, right? It's not like -- we have Donovan Solano over there, given the opportunity in a bigger moment. But he's led off against some lefties and gotten some hits and done a really good job.

Q. Being around Yu these past few years, can you kind of understand what this means to him as far as facing Yamamoto with all of Japan watching tonight's game?

MIKE SHILDT: It's a big deal. I mentioned it several days ago back home when asked about this series being able to stand on its own, what I love about this series, beyond the fact we're going into a really cool Game 5, is the fact that Major League Baseball has done a fantastic job of making this an international game.

I grew up, it was America's game and hot dogs and apple pie and I guess I could put a plug-in for Chevrolet. But now it's just international game. Tomorrow the whole country of Japan is going to be watching and rightfully so. I think it's fantastic that our game has those tentacles now.

Q. In your experience, in a game of this magnitude, what is the best kind of mindset for what a clubhouse should look like heading into something like this?

MIKE SHILDT: It should look like April, May, June, July, August, September, October. I mean, the way I was raised, the way I feel strongly about, the way I feel convicted about is if you're taking the game every day to the preparation that needs to be taken to, and you're going to go play and compete regardless of circumstance, it doesn't matter if it's Game 1 or Game 5 in the NLDS. It just doesn't matter. It's about going and playing.

If there was something that we would have done earlier that says, now we go play and now let's go get them, we would have done it in June. But the good news is we've done it since Spring Training. We've normalized going to compete regardless of circumstance. So it's really about showing up and playing good, solid, clean baseball.

Q. At this time, when we spoke to you yesterday, Dodgers hadn't announced Yamamoto as the starter. Obviously he's starting tonight. What do you view as the keys against him? Because obviously in prior starts your team has had some early success against him.

MIKE SHILDT: I think it's similar to most every pitcher. We're going to know what he's going to look to do. And the competition is about taking it away. It's as simple as that. We're going to do that against him and anybody else we see tonight.

Q. I guess it was 15 days ago you guys clinched a playoff spot here in a pretty dramatic way. Going into a winner-take-all game like this, does that give you guys any extra confidence or comfort playing here?

MIKE SHILDT: I think we're comfortable here. I think that's been pretty clear. The game, you mentioned that we clinched here. The game we play here, games we've played here most recently, we played here quite a bit. A lot of our guys on the roster played here quite a bit.

We're familiar with the clubhouse. We're familiar with the environment. We're very familiar with the opponent, the crowd, everything that comes with it.

I think that has served us well. And we're not going to be overly surprised. We're just going to go play baseball tonight.