October baseball always collapses a whole season into a handful of pitches. Every borderline call feels like a referendum, every near-miss a fork in the road your franchise might never see again. For the Padres, Game 3 in Chicago turned on one of those razor-edge moments — a low fastball that lived outside the zone and still got wrung up. That snap of the wrist didn’t just record an out; it redirected the entire inning, and with it, the Padres’ season.
Zoom in on the sequence and you can feel the air shift. Jackson Merrill had just ambushed Brad Keller for a solo home run, injecting oxygen into a dugout that believed.