SAN DIEGO — Fernando Tatis Jr. — tired, frustrated, maybe even a little bored from all that time standing in the outfield — couldn’t help but crack a smile as he approached third base on his home run trot. The San Diego Padres hadn’t produced a hit in 10 innings and hadn’t registered a single extra-base hit in a game that by that point had reached the bottom of the 15th.
But of course, Tatis, who had been 0-for-6 on the night and riding a 1 for 24 slump, hit a game-tying homer after the Los Angeles Dodgers finally scored a run in the top half of the inning.
Of course, Tatis’ batted ball only went out after bouncing off the top of the right-field fence.
And of course, this game moved into the 16th inning.
It finally ended then, when AJ Pollock, the hero in another tight game between these two budding rivals on Tuesday night, smacked a two-run shot to lead off the top of the 16th, sending the Dodgers to a laborious, methodical, perplexing 5-3 victory from Petco Park as Wednesday night turned into Thursday morning.
The game — the longest by three innings since Major League Baseball incorporated an automatic runner on second base in extra innings at the start of the 2020 season — finally ended at 12:59 a.m. PT. It lasted 5 hours, 49 minutes and was composed of 19 pitchers who threw a combined 489 pitches.
Three of those pitchers, all members of the Padres, came to bat. Two others, Walker Buehler and Blake Snell, began the marathon by engaging in an old-fashioned pitchers’ duel, combining to allow only two runs and record 43 outs, 18 on strikeouts. The Padres, losers of 10 of their previous 12 games and suddenly fighting to grab the final playoff spot in the National League, held a 1-0 lead until Will Smith hit a game-tying solo home run off Snell in the eighth inning.
The score would remain there for another six frames.
The Dodgers, capitalizing on the pitcher’s spot eventually being settled after Manny Machado and Jake Cronenworth in the middle of the Padres’ lineup, issued eight intentional walks, the most since that statistic was tracked in 1955.
At one point in the contest, Kenley Jansen recorded his 1,000th career strikeout. Later, after midnight, another Dodgers reliever, Brusdar Graterol, celebrated his birthday.