The End Comes Quietly for Dodgers

After a season of silence on offense, it was only fitting the Dodgers faded away quietly Thursday night in a 6-1 loss to San Diego at Qualcomm Stadium.

The Padres officially pulled the cord on the Dodgers’ National League wild-card hopes before 17,988, scoring five runs in the eighth to break open a 1-0 game and eliminate their rivals from playoff contention.

“When you’re on this team and don’t make the playoffs, everyone is going to call you an underachiever,” second baseman Alex Cora said. “That’s OK. We’ll take it.

“In this game, you’ve got to find a way. We didn’t find a way.”

The loss, combined with Florida’s victory over Philadelphia, mathematically eliminated the Dodgers from achieving the only goal that stood between them and another winter of discontent at Chavez Ravine.

Dodger Stadium will be empty in October for the seventh consecutive season, and the Dodgers acknowledged there’s much work ahead to avert eight in a row.

They said the league’s most offensive offense was too much to overcome, and they’re already wondering about what could have been.

“I really feel that we were trying to do a miraculous thing, and we damn near pulled it off,” said Manager Jim Tracy, whose team dropped to 84-74 with four games remaining against NL West champion San Francisco.

“It doesn’t go back to last week or two weeks ago. We tried to pull it off, but the run shortage has just been something that, in some cases, has been overwhelming for us.

“To try to win 1-0 and 2-1 every night is virtually impossible to do.”

The Dodgers twice won, 2-1, in the four-game series against the Padres (63-96). With the clock ticking loudly for weeks, however, the Dodgers couldn’t afford to lose against the NL West’s last-place team.

Although the Dodgers had braced for elimination, failure landed on them hard.

“No doubt about it,” center fielder Dave Roberts said. “Obviously, if you look at our stats offensively, we’re at the bottom, and it wouldn’t have taken much.

“A couple of runs here or there, we could have been looking forward to the playoffs. Yeah, it’s frustrating.”

The Dodgers have scored two runs or fewer in a debilitating 60 games -- and No. 60 brought down the curtain.

“It’s frustrating, but we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves,” catcher Paul Lo Duca said. “We had the team in the clubhouse, we just couldn’t get it done.”

Hideo Nomo (16-13) again delivered a performance worthy of the major league’s top pitching staff. The right-hander held firm after giving up a solo home run to Xavier Nady in the second, holding the Padres to a 1-0 lead going into the eighth.

“The job that this man has done for the last two years here, you can’t say enough about it,” Tracy said of Nomo.

Meanwhile, the Dodgers were squandering opportunities against Padre starter Brian Lawrence (10-15), who escaped multiple jams in seven scoreless innings.

The Dodgers stranded two runners in scoring position in the fifth, and left the bases loaded in the sixth in a familiar scene. They had nine hits but grounded into three double plays.

The Padres finally delivered the knockout blow in the eighth while batting around against Nomo.

Khalil Greene had a two-run single and another run scored on left fielder Jeromy Burnitz’s throwing error on the play. Burnitz hit his 31st homer in the ninth against Trevor Hoffman, but the Dodgers knew they were finished.

“It’s difficult whenever you get eliminated. It’s a bad feeling,” right fielder Shawn Green said. “But we still have four games left and we’ve got to try to finish up on a good note.

“There’s obviously room for improvement here, or we wouldn’t have finished where we did. But I don’t think we need to make a lot of changes.”