NL DIVISION SERIES: PADRES VS DODGERS

October 11, 2024

Mike Shildt

Dodger Stadium

San Diego Padres

Postgame 5 Press Conference

Dodgers - 2, Padres - 0

Q. How do you sum up this year from your seat? We'll get into the game in a minute, but just this year for you.

MIKE SHILDT: It's tough to sum up. But there's a lot of emotion taking place. Mixture, obviously a ton of disappointment in the end result.

But nothing but absolute respect and admiration for our entire club. It's a club that from day one poured everything they had into this, every single guy.

And they did something that was really special. They did it for each other and they did it for San Diego. And went into this season with a lot of, lot of question marks. And I was really pleased how the organization was able to get together so quickly.

It starts at the top. And I appreciate the commitment from ownership and A.J. I'm very grateful for A.J. and our relationship. But I'm ultimately grateful for the guys in our clubhouse that brought it every single day, man, and didn't back down from anything.

And also really grateful for the way they did it. They did it with effort and enthusiasm and love for each other, love for our community and respected the game. Had fun with it too. And that's a part of it that I enjoyed quite a bit is our players had fun and played free, played with enthusiasm.

You do it for our faithful and put every bit of what we had into it. The thing about putting your effort into faith is you never know how it's going to turn out. But that's the beautiful thing about faith. And we had it.

And we're just grateful for our community but disappointed that we weren't able to get to an ultimate goal that we all share.

Q. You guys led the league in hitting, scored in bunches. What is your view of 24 innings without a run? How stunning is that for that to be the way this ends for this team?

MIKE SHILDT: I think "stunning" is appropriate. Yeah.

I've got to tip your hat, and while we're doing it, congratulations to the Dodgers. Hard fought, a lot of things going on in the season. Had them down. They were able to come back. So congratulations to them.

Q. I imagine you'd take that start from Yu Darvish every time?

MIKE SHILDT: Darned right, every time. I thought Yu was magnificent again. Had them off balance. Couple of swings got him. Other than that, he was really good.

Q. I'm not going to go into the complete chapter and verse of this, but we have the three top teams in baseball are still in the playoffs. Spending teams in baseball are in the playoffs. You went up against a franchise here with a$700 million player and a couple of other $300 million players. Really in the end, when you look at the difference, the Padres cut money this year. They cut about 90 million. Do you think that that tips the scales? All the things that you just said and elucidated about, how hard you worked all season just to stay toe to toe with a team like that.

MIKE SHILDT: That's a lot to unpack. That's a good question. Back to Jeff's question about summing up the season, being able to regroup as quickly as this organization did, and like you said, cut, whatever it was, 90 million. And we also lost a lot of big-named free agents that went elsewhere. But, again, I give A.J. and our group credit.

We competed with what we have and what we had is really good. What we have is really good. And we have a good foundation moving forward.

I don't expect this to be a one-off. I firmly expect this group to come back and be ready to go for the consecutive playoff run for two, three, four years. That will be historic in San Diego baseball history.

As far as the payroll goes, ultimately it comes down to playing good baseball, and we did that all season.

Q. But do you think the scales are kind of tipped by the fact that the Dodgers are going to just keep spending? That's not going to change.

MIKE SHILDT: No, it's probably not going to change. But I give zero energy or thought towards that. Blessed to work with the club we've got. And we'll get the most out of what we have. And what we have is plenty. And I'm confident in our ownership and A.J. will only complement what we're doing now.

Q. When you kind of consider how you guys were able to approach Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Game 1 versus today, what's the difference in your mind?

MIKE SHILDT: Well, it's the best we've seen him. We were able to get him in the second game in Korea, which feels like 100 years ago, and get five in the first. And we had some good at-bats with him earlier in this season. Had good at-bats early in the game earlier in the series.

And I give him a lot of credit. Fastball looked like it had a lot of life.

Had to be pretty exciting for Japan tonight -- or in their case today.

He was good. I liked his fastball in and out. Threw the secondary when he needed to, and we just couldn't string anything together. I thought he rose to the occasion.

Q. Identity was something you talked about from Spring Training through regular season, the postseason, I know the result isn't necessarily something that you look on. But when you look on the foundation that you guys were able to build here in year one with you at the helm, is that something you look to and say this is something we can hang our hat on for years to come?

MIKE SHILDT: It's important, if you don't have an identity you don't stand for anything, just like I mentioned your faith, whatever your faith might be; if you don't have it anything, you're rudderless, right?

But when you have an identity, you have a clarity in how you're going to compete -- and the staff; this is a good opportunity for me to thank the staff right now.

Our staff did an A plus job this year with our players. The players get the credit for the success we had. I'll take the ultimate whatever there might be for not getting where we wanted to.

But the staff did a great job of creating the identity. The identity is only as strong as its challenges, and we were challenged a lot this year, and our identity only got stronger.

It's now part of who we are. And that's why I mentioned earlier, to Barry's question a little bit, that's why I can feel good about moving forward, that we stand for something that we believe in, how we play and compete, how we do it together, that will only get stronger and allow us to continue to have these moments in postseason and beyond.