Profar, Grisham rewrite their stories

San Diego's Padres continue their redemption tour in Los Angeles Tuesday

See the ball, hit the ball. Jurickson Profar (pictured) wanted to make sure he touched Max Scherzer’s first pitch Friday night before catcher Tomas Nido did.

He dumped it into leftfield, providing San Diego with a leadoff baserunner and New York with an omen. Josh Bell, the fourth batter, got Profar home with a 2-run homer. 

That was the theme of the only Wild Card series, of four, to reach Game 3. The Padres acted as if there was no time to waste, and their 6-0 victory Sunday sent them into the Division Series against the Dodgers, and turned the Mets’ 101-win season into an empty vessel for the trophy case.

Profar had been waiting long enough. He is 29. At one point he was thought to be the best player in the minor leagues, the Texas Rangers’ one-man nucleus in the making. It didn’t work out, thanks to injury, thanks to a dozen things that afflict young players, and he passed through Oakland on the way to San Diego in 2020.

Now Profar is a defensive weapon in leftfield, a contentious leadoff man, and a veteran. He was a .333 hitter with four RBI in the Wild Card series.

Profar represents the best kind of postseason story. All of the lonely, sweaty work on the back fields of spring training, all the morning rehab sessions during the wintertime, all of the furious underwater paddling that baseball players do to resemble gliding ducks on the pond…for most players, it comes and goes without validation. 

Playoffs are a way to get around that. Playoffs are where you introduce yourself to those who weren’t watching, to those who haven’t already formed their opinions through your fantasy league numbers,

Trent Grisham has been waiting three years to overcome his first October. 

He was with Milwaukee in 2019, and the Brewers were in Washington for the best one-of-one Wild Card game. They led 3-1 going into the bottom of the eighth, and even though the Nationals had loaded the bases, they still had Josh Hader, poison to lefthand hitters, facing Juan Soto with two out. 

But Soto guided a single to right-field, and as rightfielder Grisham positioned himself to hit the cutoff man and keep the game tied, he left behind a detail: the baseball itself. Anthony Rendon scored, the Nationals won 4-3, and then followed that up with three more series wins and the world championship.

Grisham, once the 15th pick  in the entire MLB draft, was shipped to San Diego in exchange for Eric Lauer. For two years he showed promise, but in 2022 he might have been the least effective offensive player in baseball. He struck out 150 times and hit .184, 12 points worse than the next-to-last batting average (Max Muncy, .196)

As they say, all the numbers return to zero in the playoffs. Grisham’s numbers didn’t have very far to fall. So he ambushed the Mets with two home runs and a .500 average in three games. Then he caught everything – bloops near the infield, bullets at the wall – that the Mets sent his way.

The fluctuations are rampant in a 3-game series, with so little time to revert to the mean, but Grisham obviously saw this as a shot at redemption. Most players never get one.

“Trent Grisham was absolutely fantastic in this series,” said Bob Melvin, the Padres’ manager. “You have to give him a lot of credit for going through a difficult season, getting benched for a while, coming to the series and showing up looking like an All-Star. It takes some mettle to fight through something like that.”

There was heavy mettle everywhere. Yu Darvish, known to Dodger fans as the pitcher who couldn’t get out of the second inning of World Series Game 7 in 2017, was the Pitcher of the Month in September and was pretty good in October, too, stifling the Mets in Game 1. Robert Suarez was the closer for the Hanshin Tigers in Japan last year and came to San Diego as a 31-year-old rookie. Ha-Seong Kim played seven years in the Korean Baseball Organization before he came to the Padres in 2021 and hit .201. Tasked with filling the canyon left by the injury and then the suspension of shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr., Kim hit .251 this year, drove in 59 runs, and kept things in control defensively.

Few had a right to feel better Sunday night than Profar. Coming out of Curacao, he had scouts debating whether he would make the majors as a pitcher or a shortstop. In 2013, scout Keith Law termed Profar “the best prospect in the minors today thanks to an incredible combination of tools, skills and baseball instincts rarely found in players in the middle of the field.” 

The Rangers traded him to Oakland after a 20-homer season in 2018. A shoulder injury had rendered him irrelevant in 2016 and 2017, and Profar wanted no part of the super-utility role that the Rangers foresaw. He also hit 20 home runs for the A’s but was packed off to San Diego after that. A.J. Preller, the Padres’ general manager, had been with him in Texas and signed him to a three-year, $21 million deal.

This year Profar became the leadoff man in late May and made it stick. According to Baseball Reference.com, Profar ranked fourth in defensive range among National League left-fielders. He also elevated his status in the clubhouse by his quick return from a concussion, suffered July 7 when he collided with shortstop J.J. Abrams. Profar couldn’t stand up without assistance and was taken out on a stretcher, but he was in the clubhouse the next day and was playing a week later.

Profar has shown no PTSD since. Now the Padres have to stash their memories as they come into Dodger Stadium Tuesday. They won’t have to check for stadium idiosyncrasies or even update their scouting reporters, but they will have to fight the residue of a 5-14 record against L.A. this year. They’re 35-72 against the Dodgers since 2017.

Historians note that the 1988 Dodgers were 1-11 against the almighty Mets before they won the NLCS. They, too, were a crew merely waiting for their moment to arrive.

Historians also note that the 1988 Dodgers were 1-11 against the almighty Mets in 1988 and still managed to win the NLCS in seven games. They, too, were a crew just waiting for a moment to arrive.