In a playoff game where every inning felt like a test of leverage, Adrian Morejón showed why the Padres trust him so much. The left-hander entered in the top of the seventh with a 4-1 lead over the Cubs and did not just hold the line; he made the middle innings look easy, then handed the game off to Mason Miller for the ninth.
That matters because Morejón was not asked to survive chaos. He was asked to compress it. Over two scoreless innings in Game 2 of the NL wild-card series, he retired Carson Kelly, Dansby Swanson and Pete Crow-Armstrong in the seventh inning on 14 pitches, then worked through the eighth with the kind of efficiency that playoff bullpens are built on.
Efficiency that plays in October
The details tell the story. Morejón needed 14 pitches in the seventh and got 11 of them at 99 mph or higher, a level of power that gave the Cubs little room to breathe. He kept his outing short, sharp and aggressive, which is exactly what a contending bullpen wants from a reliever in a high-leverage spot.
The eighth inning was more of the same. He induced a flyout from Alex Bregman, allowed a single to Tyrone Taylor and then got Seiya Suzuki to ground into a 1-6-3 double play. That sequence did not just end the inning. It also showed the two sides of his value: enough velocity to overpower hitters, and enough control to avoid letting a single become a rally.
Why the Padres lean on him
The Padres have Mason Miller, and Miller is widely considered the best closer in baseball. But Miller’s own view of Morejón says a lot about how the bullpen is built. He called Morejón the most valuable reliever on the team and said the separator is the ability to get swing-and-miss, limit damage and stay efficient.
That description fits what Morejón just did against the Cubs. At 5'11" and 224 pounds, the lefty does not win with profile alone. He wins by making each inning smaller than it should be, which is a major asset when a bullpen needs one reliever to bridge the game and another to finish it. Morejón did that work in the seventh and eighth, and Miller handled the ninth.
That is the bigger takeaway from Game 2. Morejón was not merely effective in a single outing. He showed why the Padres can deploy him in multiple innings, why they value him so highly, and why a bullpen with both him and Miller can be so hard to beat in October.
