The Dodgers and Padres are not a rivalry, despite ESPN painting it as the best rivalry in the league.
The series is exciting to watch, but the games are more of a big brother vs little brother matchup.
Dodgers are the big brother, winning a majority of games played against their west coast competition.
The Padres front office made some big moves to stack their lineup and pitching rotation during 2019-2020 season has the Padres begun putting up a fight with the big teams in their division.
Then the media and fans have overhyped these two teams to be a new rivalry only after certain events in some of their more recent matchups.
During their postseason matchup in 2020 relief pitcher, Brusdal Graterol, blew a kiss at third baseman Manny Machado after recording the final out which led to the two sides bickering at one another to end the inning.
After that wild altercation, the country seemed to deem the Padres and Dodgers to be the biggest rivalry in the sport.
You cannot just force a new rivalry to happen. Sites like ESPN have been headlining these two teams to be the next Yankees-Red Sox rivalry but is far from the truth.
It only hails in comparison to the original matchups like the Dodgers have against the Giants and the age-old rivalry back east with the Yankees and Red Sox.
The rivalry has nothing to do with world series championships, but it is the back and forth matchups set in the regular season, which draws attention to these two teams. The teams clawing and fighting head to head to take their division or knock them out of the postseason to head-on.
As it stands now, the San Francisco Giants are looking like more of a rivalry seeing as they are neck and neck with the Dodgers for the division title.
The Dodgers are 2.5 games behind the first place Giants as they attempt to defend their title as world series champions.
The Padres have yet to even put a dent in the Dodgers when facing them and as of the standing in this season, they are in third place and 15 games back between the Dodger and Giants.
In the beginning, before “Slam Diego”, (Padres new catchphrase after hitting grand slams in four games), Petco Park was known as Dodger Stadium of the south as instead of brown and gold shirts in the stands, it was all Dodger Blue.
This is evident as Dodger fans can be seen swarming the Padres stadium when they match up. Padres fans only started to pour out once their team began to win more.
Fans of the Padres are even taking to social media to say how they are here to take the west and push the Dodgers out of the way after putting together a season that ended in heartbreak last season.
The Astros and Dodgers are more of a rival than the Padres as those two teams have a history with each other and have not been forced through the power of social media.
The Padres are a great team, but the Dodgers are still the big brother team in the west along with the Giants.
It will not be a rivalry for many years to come and should stop being painted as such.
