Good morning from Toronto,
Manny Machado had just ended his hitless streak at 16 at-bats with a double lined off the wall in right-center field.
There was one out in the fourth inning of a scoreless game.
There was hope.
And then it vanished, as it has in every instance like it since Friday.
This is how it did:
After Jackson Merrill hit a fly ball out to left field, Xander Bogaerts came to bat and saw five straight splitters, at least three of them pretty wicked, from Kevin Gausman. Bogaerts fouled one of them hard off his ankle.
He took the fifth one, which dove below the zone in the same spot he had fouled one off two pitches earlier, to get to a full count.
It was a magnificent take. And it was a setup.
The next pitch was a fastball that came toward Bogaerts in the same lane as the previous pitch but this time did not dive. Bogaerts watched the pitch sail through the bottom of the zone for a called strike that ended the inning.
They call the majority of those offerings from Gausman “bastard pitches.”
And the 35-year-old right-hander threw a lot of them last night. In holding the Padres to three hits in seven scoreless innings, Gasuman looked every bit the guy the Blue Jays gave a five-year, $110 million contract to in 2022 and not much like the guy who took a 4.59 ERA into the game.
The Padres have missed some pitches they should have crushed. Some of their at-bats have dissolved in bats held too tightly and swings taken too mightily.
But also, they are on a remarkable run of facing good pitchers. And they are not faring well.
This is not to provide them an excuse.
They were supposedly built to withstand this sort of thing. They were supposed to be able to find ways to beat good pitchers. They have done it this year.
“We will again,” Machado said.
Their wheezing offense looks wholly incapable of doing so the past five games.
You can read my game story (here) from last night’s 14-0 loss to the Blue Jays for some of the particulars of a five-game losing skid in which the Padres’ offense has been as inept as any in the team’s 57-year history.
You have to go back to the dreadful early days of the franchise to find anything worse than the three runs the Padres have scored over the past five games.
This is the team that scored enough to beat Chris Sale, Logan Webb, Andrew Heaney and Jack Flaherty. Merrill homered off Max Fried two weeks ago. Fernando Tatis Jr. hit a triple and a home run against Framber Valdez a month ago.
When the Padres scored three runs in the first inning against the Angels eight days ago, it was the 23rd inning this season in which they had scored at least that much. They scored twice in the eighth inning that day, their 45th multi-run inning.
They have scored three runs in the 45 innings since.
“It just swivels your head,” Tatis said of what has happened.
It is remarkably bad. So bad that it can hardly get worse and can’t possibly continue for long.
Take a look at some of the underlying numbers during the streak and decide whether this is truly as bad a run as the paltry .200/.228/.297 line makes it seem:
There was no team meeting after last night’s game. There almost certainly won’t be one this morning beyond the usual “ball talk” session the Padres have before every game and the usual conversations initiated by veterans individually and in smaller groups almost daily.
Padres manager Mike Shildt did not hold one team meeting to address any of the Padres’ four five-game losing streaks last season.
“I tend to feel very strongly about this in our game: It’s a sprint within a marathon, but it is a marathon,” Shildt said last night. “And I’m not a big overreactor or under-reactor to any of it.”
Merrill’s third one
Merrill is enduring the unfortunate combo of swinging at pitches he should not and missing pitches he should hit.
“The ball looks smaller,” he said last night. “Sometimes it looks smaller. … I’m not worried about it. Just keep working. Can’t worry about it. Got to trust the process, just relax, up there.”
Merrill is 2-for-27 over the past seven games in what is just the third slump of his career.
The first two were pretty short.
Triple E
If you were watching the seventh inning last night, you saw history. And it was probably your only chance.
“You will never see that again,” Shildt said.
Machado committed three errors in an inning for the first time in any of his 14,519 innings at third base and shortstop in the major leagues.
Two came on back-to-back plate appearances — when he had a grounder go off his glove as he came in to try to field a short hop and then when he raced in to field a sacrifice bunt only to have the ball go off the tip of his glove as he run past it. The third was initially ruled a hit, as Machado fielded the ball near the line and threw across his body to first base. However, the throw would have beat the runner had it not bounced wide, and it was changed to an error a few minutes later.
“(It was) three,” Machado said. “I made three errors. I should have hit the guy in the chest. I should have caught the ball, and I should have got that easy bunt play, and I didn’t.”
Even with the lopsided score, Machado remained in the game. He came up in the ninth inning and hit a single.
“Play like (expletive),” he said. “You stay out there.”
Not all bad
Before looking like the Rockies in the field for a couple innings, it had been a night marked by fine defense for the Padres.
Bogaerts made a number of sharp plays at shortstop, including a diving stop on a grounder up the middle after which he tossed the ball directly from his glove to second baseman Jake Cronenworth for a fielder’s choice in the fifth inning.
That was actually the third play in a row by a Padres fielder that might have made a difference had Randy Vásquez not served up a two-run homer right after that.
The first play was on Anthony Santander’s line drive off the top of the wall in right field that Tatis wisely pulled up on and waited to field the carom off the wall and hold Santander to a single. The next batter, Addison Barger, hit a 405-foot fly ball to center field that Merrill leaped to catch at the top of the wall.
I know you don’t want to hear about what the Padres did right last night. But these are the kinds of things that added up to win after win for the first several weeks of the season. So they don’t count for nothing now.
P-Wade
Last night was the first time in his Padres tenure that Shildt used a position player to pitch.
Alek Jacob had given up seven runs without getting an out in the eighth inning. So, with the Padres down 12-0 and with seven more games before their next day off, Shildt went to Tyler Wade, who had started at six positions in the major leagues but had never pitched and didn’t really care to.
He eventually ended the inning.
“Tip of the hat to him,” Shildt said. “I don’t like (doing that). Position players play positions, and pitchers pitch, but today was one of those deals, with where we’re at, we needed to get him out there.”
Tidbits
- The Padres’ are 0-for-32 with runners in scoring position over the course of their five-game losing streak. They were also hitless in their final such at-bat the game before that. So the hitless streak is 33 at-bats. The Expansion Era (since 1961) record is 48, set by the 2022 Cubs.
- Luis Arraez was 2-for-4 with a double and a triple last night and has his batting average back above .300 (.301) for the first time since May 4. Arraez is batting .355 (11-for-31) during an eight-game hitting streak.
- Tatis was 0-for-4 last night and is batting .210 (13-for-62) with a .704 OPS over his past 15 games.
- I spoke to Jason Heyward yesterday afternoon about the rough start to his season. You can read about that (here) in my pregame notebook. Also in there is an update on Yu Darvish and a check-in with Joe Musgrove as he works back from Tommy John surgery.
All right, that’s it for me.
Early game today (10:07 a.m. PT). And this is all running together.
Talk to you tomorrow.
