Who else? Hader key in Padres-Brewers race

This story was excerpted from AJ Cassavell’s Padres Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

One team has Josh Hader. One team traded Josh Hader.

And — wouldn’t you know it? — those two teams seem poised to battle for the National League’s final playoff spot over the season’s final three weeks.

The Padres headed to Seattle this week, leading Milwaukee by two games in the race for the third and final NL Wild Card spot. They do so with a suddenly resurgent Hader at the back end of their bullpen.

Think of it this way: Hader, of all people, might be asked to close out a playoff clincher that would also eliminate the Brewers. At the very least, Hader’s performance over the next three weeks should go a long way toward determining the Padres’ playoff fate. (And, thus, the Brewers’ fate as well.)

“Not at all,” Hader said. “It’s a business. It was a team I played for, and I gave my all. But that’s the way the business goes. … At the end of the day, I’m full Padre. This is where my feet are and where my head’s at.

“We want to win a World Series here. When you start worrying about things that are irrelevant to where you are now, that’s when you start getting a clouded mind.”

Lately, Hader is starting to look a lot more like the dominant relief weapon the Padres thought they’d traded for at the Deadline. He’s starting to look like the guy who tied an MLB record earlier this season with his 40th straight scoreless appearance. He’s starting to look like, well, Josh Hader.

The transition was bumpy. In his first seven outings, Hader allowed 12 runs — including two poor showings against the Nationals that saw him temporarily demoted from the closer role.

But Hader has allowed just a walk, a bloop single and a run across his last four appearances (and that run came largely because the D-backs ran wild on the Padres last week). He credits a small mechanical fix.

“I’m getting in the right direction on my delivery,” Hader said. “That was the biggest thing — going through and trying to make progress on what I needed to fix. Obviously, the results are showing. But I think it’s just baby steps.”

Baby steps, indeed. Four strong outings is not a large enough sample to indicate that Hader is definitively back. But it was hard not to feel that way after his 1-2-3 ninth inning against the Dodgers on Friday — in which he struck out a pair.

“This might’ve been the best stuff that we’ve seen him have this year,” said Padres manager Bob Melvin, who later acknowledged that the ninth inning, again, belongs to Hader.

It might’ve been the best stuff the Padres have seen. But Hader says it’s not quite his best. That’s still to come.

“It’s going in the right direction,” he said. “I don’t think we’re fully there yet. But I think we’re in a spot to where we can move in a good direction.”