Fernando Tatis Jr. would like nothing more than to put a ball over the fence like Ty France did \u2014 on a 110 mph line \u2014 in the fifth inning at Petco Park.<\/p>\n
One day. Definitely. Maybe.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, he had to settle for a ball finding a patch of grass.<\/p>\n
Tatis followed France\u2019s game-tying homer with a soft go-ahead hit, Randy V\u00e1squez turned in another strong effort, Manny Machado added an eighth-inning insurance homer and Mason Miller survived a wild ninth in the Padres\u2019 4-2 win over the St. Louis Cardinals in front of a sellout crowd of 41,559.<\/p>\n
The Padres have won seven of the eight games started by V\u00e1squez, who rebounded from two sub-par starts (10\u2154 IP, 8 ER) to throw five innings of one-run ball. He struck out six, threw 59 of his 94 pitches for strikes and allowed one run on six hits without walking a batter.<\/p>\n
V\u00e1squez had traffic in every inning but the fifth and nearly escaped the fourth inning without damage after inducing a double play after allowing back-to-back singles to Jordan Walker and Nolan Gorman.<\/p>\n
But Nathan Church lined a ball to right-center for a run-scoring double to put the pressure on a Padres team that hadn\u2019t gotten a hit since Jackson Merrill\u2019s fourth-inning single on Friday.<\/p>\n
The scoreboard had shown for a few innings that the bouncer off JJ Wetherholt\u2019s glove in the second inning, but the official scorer had decided to take that hit away from Xander Bogaerts by the time France had dug in for his fifth-inning at-bat.<\/p>\n
The first pitch from Dustin May was then drilled just left of center, 405 feet from the plate, for the Padres\u2019 first hit.<\/p>\n
They weren\u2019t done.<\/p>\n
Sung-Mun Song walked, Freddy Fermin singled to center and a passed ball put runners on second and third for Tatis.<\/p>\n
The ensuing swing on a low-and-away cutter left Tatis\u2019 bat on a 69.4 mph, 40-degree arc bending away from a hard-charging Jordan Walker and toward the right-field foul line.<\/p>\n
It dropped in front of Walker as Song and Fermin scored easily to give the Padres a 3-1 lead. Tatis rounded first base aggressively before retreating to first base with a go-ahead single.<\/p>\n
Machado\u2019s eighth-inning homer, his 200th as a Padre, arrived after Mason Miller fetched a ground ball to strand Adri\u00e1n Morej\u00f3n\u2019s runner on second base. Jeremiah Estrada and Jason Adam followed V\u00e1squez with scoreless frames, but the Cardinals got to Morej\u00f3n in the eighth with a hit-by-pitch and Ivan Herrera\u2019s run-scoring double.<\/p>\n
Morej\u00f3n stayed in the game to get the left-handed Alec Burleson to ground out to short for the second out and Miller trotted in for his second four-out save of the season.<\/p>\n
Miller walked two in the ninth and even loaded the bases on a wild-pitch strikeout with two outs before striking out Wetherhold to lock up his MLB-leading 12th save.<\/p>\n
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