NEW YORK — There was more champagne. There will be more baseball.
Joe Musgrove, the lifelong Padres fan and now one of the team’s starting pitchers and voices and leaders, became the first pitcher in major league history to pitch seven innings while allowing fewer than two hits in a win-or-go-home game. Along the way, he endured the indignity of having his ears rubbed in front of some 40,000 people and a national television audience.
Trent Grisham kept hitting and making plays in the field.
The Padres will keep playing.
They beat the Mets 6-0 in the deciding third game of their wild-card series Sunday night at Citi Field and are headed to play their nemesis in the next round. (Box score.)
Their next game is against the Dodgers at 6:37 p.m. Tuesday in Game 1 of the National League Division Series at Dodger Stadium. (Game 2 will be an hour earlier Wednesday, with both games televised on FS1.)
The Padres haven’t played much postseason baseball. This was just the seventh season to be followed by them being in the playoffs and just their 11th series. But significant on this day is that they are 3-0 in win-or-go-home games, having won Game 5 of the NL Championship Series in 1984 and Game 3 in the 2020 wild-card series against the Cardinals.
They won 7-1 in the first game here Friday before losing 7-3 on Saturday.
On Sunday, they were facing Mets right-hander Chris Bassitt, who they beat twice in the regular season. However, Bassitt allowed them just four hits on July 23 at Citi Field, and two of them were by players no longer with the Padres.
Bassitt struggled with command Sunday and was gone after four innings with the Padres ahead 3-0.
They added a run against reliever David Peterson in the fourth and two more off Mychal Givens and Edwin Diaz in the eighth.
There were just two moments midgame in which Musgrove was at all close to being taken off course.
After Pete Alonso led off the fifth inning with a single, with the Padres up 4-0, Mark Canha sent a one-out fly ball 396 feet to the gap in right-center field that seemed it would score Alonso and bring the Citi Field crowd and Mets to life. But Grisham ran 95 feet and snagged the ball as he ran into the wall. Musgrove finished the inning with a strikeout.
Then, as Musgrove was about to deliver the first pitch of the sixth inning, having already thrown 59 of them, Mets manager Buck Showalter walked toward crew chief Alfonso Marquez at first base and requested that Musgrove be checked for foreign substance.
The umpires assembled near the mound and then Marquez checked Musgrove’s hand, glove and hat before also inspecting his ears.
The crowd booed almost the entire time and eventually began chanting, “Cheater, cheater.”
Musgrove, who always perspires quite a bit on the mound and whose pitches Sunday were generally spinning slightly more than usual, something that could be attributable to adrenaline, was allowed to continue pitching.
During the interruption, Musgrove had mostly smirked. He didn’t look happy, but neither did he appear unsettled.
He didn’t pitch like it either, retiring the Mets in order. He appeared to swipe under his nose as he glared at the Mets dugout following a strikeout of Tomas Nido for the second out. And after the third out, he looked over his shoulder toward Showalter as he walked to the dugout and then cupped his ear as more vociferous boos serenaded him off the field.
“I’ve seen him doing it before, check the pitcher,” Musgrove said of Showalter on ESPN. “I get it dude, they’re on their last leg, they’re desperate, they’re doing everything they can to get me out of the game at that point. They motivated me a little bit. They fired me up. ... Opportunity to stick it to them a little bit, stick it to the crowd, I took it, then had to get back to work.”
Musgrove walked Francisco Lindor to start the seventh before first baseman Wil Myers made his third fine defensive play for the first out of the inning, Alonso lined out to right field and Jeff McNeil grounded out.
Robert Suarez replaced Musgrove, who had thrown 86 pitches, in the bottom of the eighth and faced just three Mets. Josh Hader finished it with a 1-2-3 ninth.
Grisham, who hit .184 in the regular season and became a part-time player in September, completed a magnificent series by reaching base all four times he batted Sunday. After hitting solo home runs in each of the first two games, he was 2-for-2 with a walk and was hit by a pitch Sunday. He reached base eight of the 12 times he went to the plate in the series.
The first time he reached Sunday was in the second inning, as the Padres took a 2-0 lead.
Josh Bell led off with a grounder through the right side, went to second on Jake Cronenworth’s grounder to first baseman Alonso and was stuck at second when Wil Myers grounded out to shortstop.
Ha-Seong Kim turned a 1-2 deficit into a walk, and Bassitt seemed to want no part of Grisham as he walked him on five pitches to load the bases and bring up Austin Nola.
Nola, who was 1-for-10 with the bases loaded this season, went down 0-2 by taking a sinker in the middle of the zone and swinging at one low and inside. He then fouled off three pitches before grounding a single through the left side past a diving Lindor as Bell and Kim ran home.
Kim walked again in the fourth, stole second on the first pitch to Grisham and scored on Grisham’s line drive to center field.
Jurickson Profar greeted Peterson with a single, went to second on Juan Soto’s groundout and scored on a single by Manny Machado that made it 4-0.
A third Kim walk and a single by Grisham began the eighth. Nola’s sacrifice bunt moved both runners up and Profar struck out before Soto grounded a single down the left field line that made it 6-0.
