With 17 games left to play and a trip to the playoffs well within their grasp, this is the time of year the Padres should really be trying to flip the proverbial switch and play their best baseball.
Any time now, fellas.
San Diego’s bats failed to show up again and one bad inning from starter J.P. Sears sunk the Friars in a 4-2 loss to the lowly Rockies on Friday night, the fourth straight game in which the Padres scored exactly two runs.
Things started off with plenty of promise. In the first inning Manny Machado, mired in a 2-for-30 slump, detonated a 415-foot home run into the Western Metal Supply building in left field. Machado had a pair of hits and reached base three times. However, the rest of the club combined had three hits, struck out 12 times (four of them by Fernando Tatis Jr.), and went 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position.
On the mound, Sears also got off to a solid start. The lefty struck out seven of the first 10 hitters he faced before running into trouble in the 4th inning. A pair of singles set the stage for Blaine Crim to smoke a 3-run homer into the upper deck in left field, the first career big league home run for the 28-year-old rookie. On the very next pitch, Sears coughed up a solo homer to Kyle Farmer and that three-run gap was too much for the struggling San Diego bats to overcome.
We must give a tip of the cap to Ron Marinaccio. The reliever came on and threw a career-high 3.0 shutout innings, needing just 33 pitches to do it and giving his high-leverage mates a night off. This one hurts in a couple of ways.
One is the Rockies are flirting with the MLB single-season loss record so losing to terrible teams is just off-putting. The other is, the Giants beat the Dodgers on a 10th inning grand slam by Patrick Bailey so San Diego missed a golden opportunity to pull within 1.5 games of the National League West lead.
The Padres try to get things right on Saturday night with Dylan Cease on the mound against Bradley Blalock.