Padres Editorial: San Diego Padres Biggest Rivals

Jun 27, 2014; San Diego, CA, USA; San Diego Padres mascot The Swingin

Who is Thy Enemy?

If there is one thing baseball fans love, it is good old fashioned rivalries. With all due respect to the Steelers-Ravens or even the Lakers-Celtics, baseball clearly has the best rivalries in sports. Red Sox and Yankees stands alone, with the Dodgers-Giants right behind it. It is a combination of teams that have been around for a long time, can cross geographical lines and games that just always seems to be close. Remember when HOF-elect Pedro Martinez slammed 90-year-old Don Zimmer into the ground? Tim McCarver was ready to storm the field himself to stop the melee. Yet for every great rivalry that now can get played out every year thanks to inter-league play, some teams get the short end of the stick.

After all, every team does have rivalries. Those rivalries are often caused by individual players but amazingly sometimes the rivalries can remain long after the players involved move on. It is amazing that as long as baseball has been played certain tendencies can remain and be challenged. Recently the Red Sox have actually won more World Championships than the Yankees, but for 86 years before that things weren’t so good on the Red Sox side of the court. Bucky “F-ing” Dent. Grady Little leaving Pedro in and Aaron Boone in 2003 come to mind for suffering Sox fans.

The Padres play a fierce AL Rivalry series against the Seattle Mariners every year that really gets the fans going…not so much. Dubbed the Eddie Vedder cup, we’ll dub that the Padres 4th biggest rivalry. Who are the top three though and what moments (recent and historical) cause them to reach that level? After all, the Padres do have rivals but sometimes rivalries are a little more one sided than others. In other words, many teams feel like they have a rivalry against the Dodgers – but the Dodgers may not even know about it.

Will Leitch of SportsonEarth wrote up three rivals for each team, and I’ll take his feedback into account when coming up with the Padres top four rivalries.