The San Diego Padres must have felt a punch straight to their collective solar plexus when Jackson Chourio hit a walk-off two-run single to give the Milwaukee Brewers a 4-3 win in Game 2 of the NLDS. With that soul-crushing defeat, the Padres are now down 2-0 to the Brewers and are staring at elimination on Tuesday for Game 3 of that series.

While a playoff series is never over until it's truly over, retired slugger David Ortiz, who knows what it's like to win a World Series having done so thrice during his career with the Boston Red Sox, flat-out said that the Padres' season is “over”. Ortiz mentioned that it's hard to come back from a loss of that sort, and that the Brewers are simply too good to overcome.

However, this Padres team has fed off of adversity all season long. They sputtered towards the middle of 2026, only to catch fire in September and earn the top Wild Card seed. They even knocked off the Chicago Cubs in the Wild Card round. Suffice to say, Manny Machado still has plenty of reason to be confident in the team moving forward.

“Those aren't the first comments that we've heard about us this year. It's been all year from everyone. Here we are once again with our backs against the wall. We overcame it once, and we're going to do it again,” Machado said, via Foul Territory on X.

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Perhaps Ortiz is playing mind games with the Padres, giving them bulletin board material to light a fire underneath them. After all, the Padres won 51 of their 91 regular-season victories at Petco Park, which will host Game 3 and Game 4 (if necessary).

Sure, the Brewers will have Jacob Misiorowski for a potential Game 5. But the Padres should cross that bridge when they get there. Getting there is the only goal they should have right now, and there's no better way to shut up critics like Ortiz than to prove it on the field.