After crossing home plate on his second home run, Tatis imitated a strut popularized by UFC celebrity Conor McGregor — that the sole Bauer often deploys after dominant half-innings.
“I enjoy it,” Bauer explained. “I think that pitchers who have that done to them and react by throwing people, or becoming upset and hitting people or whatever — I think that it’s pretty soft. If you give up a homer, the man should celebrate it. It is hard to strike at the big leagues.
“So, I’m all for this. And I think that it’s essential that the game moves in that direction, and we cease throwing at people because they observed with some success on the field.”
Tatis’ two homers — on a chest-high cutter to lead off the match and on a different cutter that tailed away from the strike zone at the sixth — came one night when he homered twice on the 22-year anniversary of his dad belting two grand slams in precisely the same inning out of Dodger Stadium.
His celebrations were a response to Bauer noticeably pitching with one eye closed when he confronted the Padres during spring training, but also the manner Bauer emphatically pounded his chest when he struck Tatis to punctuate his outing in his early regular-season start against the Padres last weekend.
“Payback time,” explained Tatis, the primary player with back-to-back, two-homer matches from Cy Young Award winners, according to Elias Sports Bureau research.
“It’s just fun,” Tatis added. “When you realize you are facing a man like that — he’s doing his stuff, he’s having fun on the mound, and if you get him get him, and you observe, too. He’s a hard man to take care of.”
Bauer said he did not watch Tatis cup his right hand over his right eye as he rounded the bases in the first inning, but he noticed players at the Padres’ dugout performing it when Tatis homered off him again later.
In the fourth, Bauer struck out Eric Hosmer using a curveball and displayed his signature celebration of sheathing an imaginary sword — a”sword” is a favorite term for the awkward half-swing hitters create when duped seriously on pitches. When Hosmer lined a ball back up the middle that almost struck Bauer two innings later, he reached first base and did the sword bash back .
“That is what it’s to be a competitor,” Bauer explained. “I’m gonna go . I’m gonna get you occasionally, and you are gonna get me sometimes. We could have fun, we could observe it while we’re still competing at the highest level. I simply thought that was important to notice tonight.”
Machado has destroyed Bauer’s fastball in recent years, so Bauer instead attacked him exclusively with his slider. Bauer threw 13 consecutive sliders in 3 at-bats against Machado, producing a groundout and 2 strikeouts.
On the previous one, Machado smiled and nodded his head toward the mound because he walked to the dugout. Asked if the plan was to throw sliders until Machado demonstrated he could hit them, Bauer said:”Yeah, essentially.”
The Padres and Dodgers will perform with their seventh match against one another in a stretch of 10 times on Sunday night. The two teams have split the first six meetings, together with nine ties and four lead changes during.
They have been divided by 2 runs or less in 53 of the 57 innings.
“It has been fantastic baseball all the way around,” Tatis said. “I feel like we’ve been playing great games, and we’re just taking the most out of each other.”
