Good morning from Washington,

Yu Darvish made his third start of 2025 last night.

That is three more starts than he thought he might make ever again.

And that is where we will start this morning.

“Yeah, that was possible,” Darvish said Friday regarding his wondering earlier this year if his career was over due to ongoing elbow issues. “But I didn’t give up. I kept working hard and believing I could come back. So that worked.”

Darvish is 38 years old, less than a month from being 39. That makes him a senior citizen playing a kid’s game.

He won’t say exactly what is happening inside his right elbow. But the fact is, he has missed time with elbow problems each of the five seasons he has been with the Padres.

One of the best pitchers of his generation is in some ways hanging on by the sheer will of wanting to.

Darvish worked five innings, allowing three runs on five hits and a walk, in last night’s 4-2 loss to the Nationals.

He and the Padres appear pleased with his progress after he missed more than three months at the start of the season.

Even now, not nearly what he has been nor what the Padres hope he will be, Darvish is due some credit.

He said Friday that when he was shut down in spring training he wondered whether he could make it back.

It turns out he never felt entirely right while working his way toward a rehab start on May 14. In that start in Las Vegas for Triple-A El Paso, Darvish worked four innings well enough that the Padres expected he was close to returning. At the same time, he wondered if he could go on.

“It got a little bit worse in Las Vegas,” he said.

But after a couple weeks off and “some adjustments” — “I changed some preparation routine, also treatment routine,” he said — Darvish resumed throwing and eventually worked in a series of simulated games against minor league hitters before making his season debut on July 7.

He remains rusty.

“I wasn’t particularly happy about how I was pitching out there,” Darvish said after last night’s game. “I was able to go five innings, and that’s the longest that I’ve been able to go after coming back, so I think that part was good. But I was maybe getting too much (of) the strike zone. So that part, I think I can adjust and be better next time out.

“Stamina-wise, I feel good. I was strong all throughout the game. So that part, I think, is good. Just the command. That was part of the issue for tonight, and that’s something that I need to work on a little bit more leading up to the next game. … I think it’s just part of coming back to the game. Just the mechanical adjustment that I need to fine tune in order to have that right command. Once I get there, I should be fine.”

The Padres are banking on him being at least that. They have built a rotation that essentially needs Darvish to be close to the best version of himself by the end of the season.

As a reminder, as recently as last September and October, that version was good enough to be a playoff ace.

Darvish returned from 3½ months off (first to rehab an elbow ailment and then to deal with a personal matter) and closed out the 2024 regular season with a 2.78 ERA over his final four starts and then made two excellent starts (three runs in 13⅔ innings) at Dodger Stadium in the National League Division Series.

Darvish’s MLB career began in 2012, and since then he has started 284 games and pitched 1,719⅓ innings.

Among the 55 men to have pitched 1,000 innings since 2012, Darvish ranks sixth in strikeouts per nine innings (10.6), seventh in WHIP and 18th in ERA (3.60).

His next win will be the 204th of his career between Nippon Professional Baseball and Major League Baseball, which will break a tie with Hiroki Kuroda for most combined wins in the two leagues by a Japanese-born pitcher.

That was undoubtedly a motivation for Darvish continuing to pitch.

There is no telling how much longer he will do so.

There have been rumblings for more than a year that he might not finish out his contract, which runs through 2028. He said in the spring that his plan was to do so but acknowledged it is not certain.

“Each year, I just focus to play baseball,” he said then. “If I feel like I can’t play baseball anymore, then I’m done playing.”

This week he offered pragmatic reasons for continuing to pitch.

It is his job.

“The Padres are paying me money,” he said. “So I have to work as hard as I can.”

It is what he knows.

“This is what I did since when I was eight years old,” he said. “I never study anything. Just play baseball. That’s why I need to do this.”

He enjoys it.

“If I don’t love it, I’m not here,” he said. “So I still love it for sure.”

Summer rerun

You can read my game story (here) for details on the last night’s loss.

But, honestly, you have read about plenty of games like it this season.

The Padres played a good game. Except for that hitting part.

We don’t need to break down the offense every day. It’s broken down enough.

No, I kid.

We just simply can’t talk about the same thing over and over any more than we already have and almost certainly will have to again.

Because as noted in the game story, this is who the Padres are.

They play their 99th game today. They rank 25th in the major leagues in runs scored. They have scored three or fewer runs in nearly half (48) of their games.

That doesn’t mean the players on their team who have a history of producing won’t start doing so or that an addition or two at the trade deadline won’t alter the offensive dynamic.

But this is a team that is by and large going to have to grind out victories. And a team that has to do that is going to lose its share of games like last night — their 55th of the season decided by two runs or fewer, second most in the majors.

“I think we’re all OK with it,” Jackson Merrill said. “We’re okay with the grind right now, because we know we’re gonna have an outburst here and there. We play all these tight games, you get close to the end of the season, we get this outburst going, that’s what you need when you’re in the playoffs. So that’s our main focus, just grinding down this last stretch. We’re a third of the way from the end of season. Just gotta keep playing hard.”

Loving the bunt

The Padres lead the major leagues with 27 sacrifice bunts, on pace for more than any team since 2021.

Their 39 total bunts – sacrifices, hits (six) and outs (six) — are second most in the majors behind the Brewers’ 40.

And they might be just getting started.

“It hasn’t been as much a part of our game as we would have liked it to have been up until recently,” manager Mike Shildt said yesterday afternoon. “We’ve broken through a little bit more.”

Six of their sacrifice bunts and two of their bunt hits have come in their past three games, including Luis Arraez reaching on a throwing error when he laid down a sacrifice in the eighth inning last night

Shildt indicated utilizing bunts has been a point of emphasis lately, but it always has been something the team has talked about.

He mostly attributed the uptick to “opportunity and people being able to do it and execute it.”

The successful safety squeeze bunts Elias Díaz laid down here Friday were called by Shildt. The majority of times a player attempts a sacrifice bunt, that was the player’s call.

After the Padres laid down three sacrifice bunts last Sunday, Shildt talked about the option he gives players to bunt.

“The one thing that I’m confident works at its best is when — and I say this internally a fair amount, but I can say it externally as well — championship players think and do for themselves,” Shildt said. “The one thing I don’t have is a feel for an at-bat. And if a guy feels like (bunting) is the best thing. … I can sit there and strategize, which I do. I do put on bunts, and I do put on hit and runs. And I do think for myself occasionally. But I also give the freedom for the guys that go play the game, what they see.”

Tidbits

  • Jose Iglesias was 2-for-4 last night and is 8-for-19 (.421) during a six-game hitting streak.
  • David Morgan replaced Wandy Peralta with a runner on first and one out in the eighth inning last night. Morgan’s first pitch was hit on the ground by Josh Bell and fielded by shortstop Xander Bogaerts, who stepped on second base and threw to first for a double play.
  • Nathaniel Lowe’s sixth-inning home run was the fifth homer surrendered by Yuki Matsui in his past eight appearances (7⅓  innings). Matsui had allowed just two homers in his first 32 appearances (30 innings) this season.
  • Fernando Tatis Jr. walked twice last night and is reaching base at a .460 clip during his 17-game on-base streak.
  • Manny Machado, who served as designated hitter last night while Iglesias started at second base, is one of nine MLB players who is not primarily a DH to start every one of his team’s games this season.

All right, that’s it for me. Early game today (10:35 a.m. PT) and then a flight to Miami.

Talk to you tomorrow.