October baseball is cruel in how quickly the narrative can flip from hope to heartbreak. Every pitch carries the weight of a season, and when that pitch feels wrong, it lingers. For San Diego, the frustration of Game 3 boiled over in the kind of controversy that keeps fans awake and replaying the moment on loop. The Padres had battled all series, inching within striking distance, and then — on the swing pitch of the night everything tilted.
That swing pitch was the low fastball Xander Bogaerts saw from Brad Keller. You didn’t need a partisan lens to see why it frustrated the Padres dugout; the call was tough to swallow in real time and even harder after the freeze-frames hit social media.