When the Cubs’ Dansby Swanson was 8, his dad brought a portable pitching machine home, dragged it into the backyard and rigged it to fire baseballs high and deep into the Kennesaw, Georgia, sky. What better way, Cooter thought, to get the boy to stop demanding pop-ups be thrown to him at all hours of the day?
Swanson, already dreaming of playing shortstop in the big leagues, learned to position and feed the machine himself and became so good at tracking balls for over-the-shoulder catches, his confidence skyrocketed.
Great defensive plays have backstories. This one goes with the most important defensive play — Swanson’s run-saving robbery in the fourth inning — of the Cubs’ 3-1 win against the Padres in the opener of a best-of-three wild-card series at Wrigley Field.
“I’ve had many a rep at it, let’s put it that way,” Swanson said.
Dansby Swanson saves a run! #Postseason pic.twitter.com/YsGOZtXyYM
— MLB (@MLB) September 30, 2025
And the Cubs had many a hero step forward in a game they had to have, because we’ve all seen how quickly a postseason opportunity can slip away. The last Cubs team to make the playoffs, in 2020, was swept out of the wild-card round at Wrigley without even making the Marlins sweat. The 2018 Cubs laid an egg at Wrigley in what then was a winner-take-all wild-card game against the Rockies. Eight years in between postseason sightings of a dancing “W” flag in the outfield grass, well, that’s an awfully long time.
But now these Cubs have a chance to really do something.
That’s because right fielder Seiya Suzuki, who went through the mother of all second-half slumps and lived to tell about it, annihilated a solo homer off Nick Pivetta in the fifth inning to tie the game 1-1 and lift an anvil off the team’s back.
“I’m very happy,” Suzuki said.
And because journeyman catcher Carson Kelly, 31 and in a playoff lineup for the first time, followed Suzuki to the plate and put one over the wall in left-center, too.
“You dream about these moments as a little kid, getting to the postseason and hitting the game-winning home run,” said Kelly, who called it the biggest hit of his life.
But would it even have mattered if not for Daniel Palencia, who ran to the mound in the fifth inning in relief of starter Matthew Boyd? At the start of the season, Palencia was in the minors. Three weeks ago, he hurt his shoulder and went on the injured list. Now he has a dazzling stretch of five playoff outs under his belt.
“It’s been crazy, but I’ve been prepared for this,” Palencia said. “I’ve been preparing my body and my mind since the offseason. This is the moment I want to be there.”
And then who closed the door in the ninth inning but Brad Keller, who just last year didn’t even make it through May before being designated for assignment by — wait for it — the 121-loss White Sox. From that to this? How in the world?
“It’s pretty sick,” Keller said, beaming. “That was amazing. It’s really hard to describe what that felt like.”
And guess who pulled all the right levers at all the right times? That would be manager Craig Counsell, whose record in playoff games improved to 2-8 since 2018. But do we really care a bit around here about those eight losses given they came when he was managing the Brewers? The man is 1-0 with the Cubs, all that matters.
“It was perfect today,” Counsell said, “that’s what it was.”
Before the game, more than one Cub remarked in passing that the warm weather and sunshine didn’t really feel like postseason baseball. But then a ghost of 2016, Jake Arrieta, threw out the first pitch. And John Vincent belted out the national anthem. By the time Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder led the seventh-inning stretch wearing a jersey with “Ryno” across the back, OK, even a cynic had to admit the whole place reeked of October.
Eddie Vedder conducted the 7th inning stretch rocking a Ryno jersey! 🙌 pic.twitter.com/COoMzCdJtO
— MLB (@MLB) September 30, 2025
And the good guys actually won.
“The energy, the fans, just the intensity of the game was unbelievable,” Swanson said. “This is real fun. Real, real, real, real fun.”
Long ago, in 1932, the Yankees’ Babe Ruth stood at this very scene, at home plate, and pointed toward center field to call his shot. Whether or not he did exactly that is a matter of storytelling, but it was Game 3 of the World Series and a home-run blast of nearly 500 feet — Ruth’s second of the game — is a matter of record.
Before that game, in batting practice, Ruth is quoted as having said, “I’d play for half my salary if I could hit in this dump all my life.”
There’s no better dump, is there?
Not when a day comes together like this.
