Dodger Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres, are just over 120 miles apart, but they’re closer than it seems when considering the Catholic history of the cities they represent.

As the National League West-champion Dodgers and Wild Card Padres battle it out in the National League Divisional Series of Major League Baseball, let us look at their shared Catholic history, one much deeper than the fact that the cities’ names are unquestionably Catholic — one for heavenly creatures and the other a saint.

Nearly two centuries before the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles before the 1958 season, the Spaniards were making their own inroads near Chavez Ravine.

On Aug. 2, 1769, the expedition of Juan Gaspar de Portolá and Father Juan Crespi discovered the La Brea Tar Pits (roughly seven miles from Dodger Stadium) and named the area Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de la Porciúncula (Our Lady of the Angels of the Porciuncula).

On Aug. 18, 1781, colonists arrived at Mission San Gabriel (founded Sept. 8, 1771) from Loreto to set up the Pueblo de los Ángeles. A few weeks later the formal foundation documents were drawn up for the Pueblo de los Ángeles.

When fans drive on “the 5” between the ballparks, they may want to reflect on the Catholic padres who took pretty much the same route — on foot.

On April 6, 1774, Franciscan Fathers Junípero Serra and Francisco Garcés began walking together from Mission San Gabriel to Mission San Diego. In 1776, Father Garcés (martyred in present-day Arizona in 1781) became the first European to explore California’s Central Valley.

The Padres were founded as an expansion franchise in 1969, but the city’s history that they represent goes back even farther than the storied franchise to their north.

On Nov. 12, 1602, the first Catholic Mass was celebrated in California, upon the arrival of the explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno, who named the port San Diego in honor of the feast of San Diego de Alcalá. Onboard with Vizcaíno were three Carmelite Friars — Fray Andrés de la Asumpción, Fray Antonio de la Ascensión and Fray Tomás de Aquino.

On May 17, 1769, soldiers, sailors, Indians and Franciscan missionaries from New Spain occupied the land known today as Presidio Hill as a military outpost.

On July 16, 1769, St. Junípero Serra founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá, the first of eventual 21 California missions.

On Jan. 17, 1832, in the vicinity of where Petco Park is today, Father Peyrí and Pablo Tac, a California Mission Indian and scholar, departed San Diego via ship for the College of San Fernando in Mexico City. Tac would eventually go to Rome and study for the priesthood. His writings are the earliest from an Indigenous person in California.

It is Tac who gives us the most insight into the relationship between California mission history and the baseball games going on now.

While a student in Rome, around 1835, he wrote about a particular ball game at Mission San Juan Capistrano between two native peoples, the Luiseño and Juaneño.

“The place where they play is all level, in length a quarter and a half league, in width the same, the players all men of 30 to 60 years,” he wrote. “In all they can be 70 or 80, 30 or 40 men on one side, 30 or 40 on the other. They choose two leaders from this and from that side. Each one of the men holds his stick, four hands high, five joined fingers thick, arched below. The ball of the game is wood, bigger than the egg of a turkey. There are two marks where they must throw the ball, and when the enemy crosses this mark, he has won.”

Play ball!