San Diego Padres at Arizona Diamondbacks

As early August regular-season baseball games go … they don’t get much bigger than this one. The Padres and Diamondbacks are vying for the final Wild Card spot in the National League. And, yes, there are other teams in the mix. But these two are currently at the center of that race. Come late September, there might only be room for one of them at the postseason table. They’ve played three series this season. And, after the Padres’ 5-1 victory Thursday night, they’ve split all three of them. It sure looks like this race might go down to the wire -- a season-ending three-game series between the two NL West rivals at Petco Park. “We've played these guys pretty even all year round,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said. “We'll see them again later in the year in a three-game series. Could be the decider of it all.” **A critical Padres victory** Why, exactly, was this particular game so important? Call it a three-game swing. The Padres gained a game. The D-backs lost a game. And the head-to-head series -- which is used as the first postseason tiebreaker -- is tied once again. “Obviously a leverage-y kind of game for us -- and one that we couldn’t lose,” starter Walker Buehler said. “I’m glad we played well.” The Padres and Diamondbacks split two games in April, four in July and four this week at Chase Field. Which means the winner of that late-September series is going to win the season-series tiebreaker. The way things are going, that tiebreaker might end up mattering an awful lot. “We're in this last stretch -- every detail, every game matters,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said. “So it's definitely way better being just one game behind.” There are, of course, 43 games before the Padres and Diamondbacks meet again. Both teams will use those 43 games to try and build a gap large enough to make that final weekend irrelevant. Or at least, to put themselves in the best position possible for that final weekend. “We better be six games or eight games ahead,” Tatis joked.