No matter how many good hitters it has in its lineup, every baseball team goes through a stretch where it struggles to score runs. The San Diego Padres were stuck in a string of 21 straight scoreless innings and in danger of losing three straight to the St. Louis Cardinals.<\/p>\n
One swing from Ty France put a little jolt into the moribund bats.<\/p>\n
France ripped a solo home run in the 5th inning to ignite a three run rally and lead the Padres to a 4-2 win over the Cardinals in front of another sold out crowd at Petco Park on Saturday evening. When France stepped in, St. Louis starter Dustin May was working on a no-hitter. The first pitch he threw to France landed 405 feet over the right-centerfield wall.<\/p>\n
France’s 4th homer of the year seemed to ease the pressure on a struggling lineup. Sung-Mun Song followed with a walk, Freddy Fermin singled, and the mightily struggling Fernando Tatis Jr. finally had something go his way when he hit a flare into right field for a two-run single and a 3-1 San Diego lead.<\/p>\n
St. Louis got one back in the 8th inning off Adrian Morejon but Manny Machado answered immediately with a solo shot, his 6th home run of the year to make it a 4-2 game and set up what turned into a more stressful 9th inning than we’re used to with Mason Miller on the mound.<\/p>\n
Miller walked a pair and struck out two, then got catcher Yohel Pozo to go down swinging on a slider in the dirt … but the ball skipped away from Fermin, allowing Pozo to reach base on a wild pitch. So, Miller was in the unique position of striking out four batters in one inning.<\/p>\n
He took full advantage of it, sitting down J.J. Wetherholt with a 102-MPH fastball and secure his 12th save of the year. The Padres can pull off a split of the four game series on Sunday afternoon with Walker Buehler on the mound against Kyle Leahy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No matter how many good hitters it has in its lineup, every baseball team goes through a stretch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4658,5,2614,7344,2615],"class_list":{"0":"post-13134","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-france","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-padres","12":"tag-san-diego-padres"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}