Late Night to Moonlight

BY KEVIN KERNAN

The best story heading into the playoffs is getting little attention because of East Coast bias and the always nasty time difference.

That under the radar story is the explosive march to the playoffs by the $3.9 billion Padres.

I spent 10 years in San Diego, much of that time covering the Tony Gwynn Padres and the plain fact is the games end much too late on the West Coast for East Coast fans to take notice.

Meanwhile, collapsing teams like the Mets get way too much attention and on Tuesday the Mets announced that Andy Green, a former Padres manager, was given a three-year contract to continue to manage the last place 71-85 Mets. The Mets are 37-38 under Green, who had been the interim manager. While with the Padres over four seasons from 2016-2019 Green compiled a 274-366 record.

These are much better days for the Late Night Padres.

It seems like just yesterday the Padres were in a tooth and nail fight with the mediocre Diamondbacks for the sixth and final playoff spot in the National League. The Padres were just trying to hang on. The Padres, though, have blown past the D-Backs and now have the opportunity to host the Wild Card series, and since the Padres have perhaps the best home crowd in baseball, that is a big deal.

The Dodgers get all the exposure in the East because of Shohei Ohtani, their massive payroll and the fact they are going for their third straight World Series championship, but it is the Padres who head into the final games of the regular season on fire. Going into Tuesday night’s game against the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium, the Padres were 87-69, leaving Arizona in the dust — tied with the Cubs for the best wild card record and a game ahead of the Phillies. After Tuesday’s action that saw the Padres lose 7-0 to the Dodgers, however, the Cubs, Phillies and Padres now sit in a three-way tie in the NL Wild Card race.

The Padres, though, lost the season series to the Cubs and Phillies so they will have to finish a game ahead of them in the standings to host the wild-card series.

What’s really interesting is the Padres have survived a multitude of pitching injuries and did not get much from the trade acquisitions of pitchers Robbie Ray and Casey Mize but still found ways to win games. Before those trades were made the Padres went 8-1 with Michael King and Walker Buehler serving as their only “traditional’’ starters. At this point it looks like, King, Buehler and Nick Pivetta, who has made three starts since coming off the injured list, will be the postseason starters. Ray has a 5.22 ERA with the Padres while Mize is even worse at 6.64.

The Padres went into the Dodgers series having won 13 of 14 and 37 of 53. Less than two months ago they were below .500 and were so desperate they went to a two-man rotation. Having Mason Miller (37 saves and a 1.21 ERA) to close games is a luxury though and there was no way A.J. Preller was going to trade him.

San Diego went into the series with Los Angeles with a magic number of two; this would be the first time ever the Padres have made three straight playoff appearances.

The Padres have to keep it going against their arch-rival the Dodgers; these are not games against the Rockies or the Marlins, who the Padres beat up on.

“We still have homework to do,’’ said Fernando Tatis Jr., who blasted his 25^th home run of the season on Sunday in the win over the Marlins. “We’re trying to get a (home) series.’’

The Padres’ first-year manager Craig Stammen, a former relief pitcher, has done a great job of mixing and matching with his pitching staff. Tatis Jr. has been the offensive difference, and this past week has been getting much needed help from Jake Cronenworth.

Cronenworth, who plays baseball with a hockey mentality, was named the NL Player of the Week, something that he hasn’t been able to do since 2021. Earlier this year he suffered a concussion that made it so difficult to hit. He said his eyes were not in sync. “My right eye was delayed from my left eye,’’ he explained.

You can’t hit like that, so Cronenworth had the most unique rehab assignment of his life where he had to focus on eye drills and that took time to get right.

“We’ve been missing that left-handed bat in our lineup,’’ Stammen told reporters. “He just does all the little things on the field that you kind of miss.’’

That’s an amazing comeback that would have gained much more attention in the East. Same with the Tatis Jr. power surge. He had zero home runs through May 29 and now has 25. He changed his mechanics and opened his stance to get more lift into his swing, looking more like the player who has a 14-year, $340 million contract. With the change, his hard contact was going up into the air instead of into the ground. He also raised his hands to work through the baseball and focused on hitting the fastball out front.

Part of it was psychological as well. Tatis was batting leadoff and was thinking like a leadoff hitter, he went back to thinking more like a slugger.

Just another interesting angle that was happening much too late on the West Coast for people to notice. The Padres have to keep it going against their arch-rival the Dodgers; these are not games against the Rockies or the Marlins, who the Padres beat up on.

This will mark the Padres’ fifth postseason appearance in seven years. In the 50 years prior, they made it to October baseball only five times. The Padres have never won a World Series. I was there in 1998 when they were swept away by the Yankees. It has been an uphill climb ever since and they deserve a little love for their accomplishments this season.

REAL FIELD OF DREAMS

The sports world lost a true Giant this week with the passing of former New York Football Giants GM Ernie Accorsi, 84, someone everyone loved. Believe me, Accorsi was a baseball man as much as a football man and he was a former sportswriter as well.

A mere 25 years ago, I sat down in his office in the Meadowlands on a cold January day to talk baseball with him. There was a true Field of Dreams connection. Turns out that as a young sportswriter in the early 1960s, Ernie interviewed an old-timer, a former player, a guy named Moonlight Doc Graham, yes that Archibald Graham. Accorsi was working in Charlotte at the time and went to cover a minor league game at Griffith Park, where the Charlotte Hornets were in the middle of a long losing streak.

They were celebrating the 1902 Hornets team that won the Class D North Carolina League Championship and that is why the old-timer was at the game, he was a member of that team that won 25 straight games in 1902, but Ernie only knew him as Archie Graham, not Moonlight Graham of W.P. Kinsella fame, the young player who played in only one MLB game in his career, for the New York Giants in 1905, not getting an official at-bat.

Accorsi reached into a drawer and pulled out a copy of his story from that day long ago and showed it to me.

“Why I picked him to interview that day, I don’t know, he was a very nice old man,” Accorsi told me. “But the story complies with the movie, that he went to bat only one time.”

Graham, who was born in Fayetteville, N.C., in 1876, won the batting title in the Eastern League the year before he was called up to the majors in 1905. “That’s when I got my shot at the New York Giants,” Graham told Accorsi. “But I didn’t get any breaks there.”

Accorsi followed that quote with this paragraph: “Dr. Graham did get one break, one that ended his baseball career at a very untimely point. He walked in his first trip to a major league plate: then immediately cracked his leg and was finished in baseball.”

Moonlight, of course, went on to become Doc Graham, practicing medicine in Chisholm, Minnesota. Graham became the chief physician for the Chisholm public schools, a position he held until his death in 1965.

Years later, Kinsella found Moonlight on Page 960 of the eighth edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia. There was the one game, followed by zeroes. He was not given credit for that one walk. In 1989 the world learned about Doc Graham when Field of Dreams was released, and Burt Lancaster brilliantly played the older Graham in the movie. It was his final performance.

It took four years from the movie’s release for Accorsi to connect all the baseball dots but in 1993 when he was going through some old clippings, searching for a story he wrote on President Kennedy’s assassination, Accorsi realized that his old-time ballplayer Arch Graham was Kinsella’s Moonlight Graham.

As Lancaster said in the movie: “Son, if I’d only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes … now that would have been a tragedy.’’