Fernando Tatis Jr. booked a hotel room for a couple days of relaxation during next week\u2019s All-Star break.<\/p>\n
He made that reservation just Saturday.<\/p>\n
Then on Sunday morning, he got a call informing him he had been named to the National League All-Star team. And on Sunday night, he played like an All-Star.<\/p>\n
The erstwhile Padres sparkplug scored their first run and drove in their second in a 4-1 victory over the Rangers at Petco Park.<\/p>\n
Tatis\u2019 selection to a third All-Star game had seemed inevitable when he finished May with a 1.011 OPS but not all that likely when he began July 120 points lower than that.<\/p>\n
\u201cA humbling reward, and very excited and happy,\u201d Tatis said after the game. \u201c\u2026 You know, every day it\u2019s not going to be as we want it, but we\u2019re going out there and showing our faces.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for the reservation, he canceled it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to be out there in Atlanta,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Tatis has spent more than two months trying to get himself out of one of the most prolonged slumps of his career and entered Sunday\u2019s game hitting .212 with a .674 OPS since May 2, a span of 57 games. Only for portions of 2023, the season he returned after missing all of \u201822 due to injury and suspension, had Tatis ever struggled that much for that long.<\/p>\n
But he went 2-for-3 and walked twice Sunday, providing the kind of ignition he has only sporadically been able to of late but that he \u2014 and everyone in the organization and probably in all of baseball \u2014 knows he can every night.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s one of the best players in the world,\u201d Padres manager Mike Shildt. \u201c\u2026 It was on display tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
The victory finished off a series win to start the season\u2019s longest homestand, which has seven games remaining and will take the Padres (48-41) up to the All-Star break.<\/p>\n
A three-game series against the Phillies will end the traditional \u201cfirst half\u201d of the season, and Tatis, Manny Machado and reliever Jason Adam and their families will board a private plane to Atlanta. The All-Star game is next Tuesday.<\/p>\n
That leaves plenty of time for Machado, who will be the NL\u2019s starting third baseman, to get two more hits in front of the home crowd. It is the second of those that will the 2,000th hit of his career. Machado was 0-for-4 Sunday, on his 33rd birthday.<\/p>\n
In Monday\u2019s opener of their four-game series against the Diamondbacks, Yu Darvish will make his season debut after nearly three months rehabbing a balky right elbow.<\/p>\n
The Padres filled Sunday\u2019s rotation spot with a bullpen game, opened by David Morgan, covered with 3\u2154 perfect innings in the middle by Kyle Hart and then finished off by their highest-leverage relievers \u2014 Jeremiah Estrada, Jason Adam, Adrian Morej\u00f3n and Robert Suarez.<\/p>\n
The four back-end relievers had been used to close out Friday\u2019s 3-2 victory over the Rangers. None of them had pitched in Saturday\u2019s loss. There is no way Shildt could have drawn Sunday\u2019s pitching up any better.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore or less, that was the plan,\u201d Shildt said.<\/p>\n
Estrada worked a 1-2-3 sixth. Adam, also named an NL All-Star on Sunday, worked around a two-out single in the seventh. Morej\u00f3n did the same in the eighth, and Suarez earned his NL-best 25th save by setting the Rangers down in order in the ninth.<\/p>\n
The night began with Morgan navigating quite an adventure in his first time pitching in the first inning as a professional.<\/p>\n
The Rangers had a 1-0 lead two batters in \u2014 on a single by Josh Smith and double down the right field line by Corey Seager \u2014 and sent\u00a0 five more batters to the plate in the inning.<\/p>\n
But on Morgan\u2019s 32nd pitch, with the bases loaded, Jake Cronenworth laid out to catch a line drive by Jonah Heim and end Morgan\u2019s first frame as the \u201copener\u201d with the Rangers still leading just 1-0.<\/p>\n
The Padres also left the bases loaded in the bottom of the first, but they didn\u2019t score against Jack Leiter. After a lead-off single by Tatis and Luis Arraez\u2019s single and Gavin Sheets\u2019 walk with two outs, Xander Bogaerts hit a long fly ball that Rangers center field Evan Carter caught about five feet in front of the wall and a projected 386 feet from home plate.<\/p>\n
Morgan left a runner on first base with one out for Hart, whose night started with the left-handed batters atop the Rangers\u2019 order.<\/p>\n
Hart, who has made six starts for the Padres this season and was recalled from Triple-A Sunday, retired Smith and Seager on six pitches and went on to set down all 11 batters he faced on a total of 43 pitches to get through the fifth inning.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, the Padres tied the game in the third inning and took the lead in the fourth.<\/p>\n
Tatis walked to lead off the bottom of the third before Jackson Merrill and Manny Machado struck out. But as Machado swung through the 11th pitch of his at-bat, Tatis was on his way to second base, where he slid in safely. That put him in scoring position for the Padres\u2019 best hitter with runners in scoring position, and Arraez came through by grounding a single up the middle to tie the game 1-1.<\/p>\n
Bogaerts began the bottom of the fourth with a single before Cronenworth flied out to right field and Bogaerts was eliminated on a fielder\u2019s choice grounder by Trenton Brooks.<\/p>\n
But Mart\u00edn Maldonado got his first hit in 12 at-bats, a single lined to center field that moved Brooks to second, and Tatis followed with a double lined to the corner in left field that easily scored Brooks and sent Maldonado barreling around the bases. He was waved home by third base coach Tim Leiper and was called safe before the call was overturned on replay review, ending the inning.<\/p>\n
Maldonado drove in the Padres third run his next time up, with a two-out single in the sixth inning. His grounder through the right side scored Bogaerts, who had flared a one-out single down the left field line and moved to second on Cronenworth\u2019s walk.<\/p>\n
Cronenworth drove in the Padres\u2019 fourth run to culminate a two-out rally in the seventh. The three-batter burst consisted of a single by Sheets and a walk by Bogaerts and Cronenworth\u2019s single, which scored Bryce Johnson, who pinch-ran for Sheets.<\/p>\n
\u201cMe and (Morgan) are just fighting for those first-half outs, because we know who\u2019s behind us,\u201d Hart said. \u201cWe know we have some pretty talented guys itching to come out of that bullpen. So it\u2019s like if you could just hold on, be patient, let the offense put together some at-bats, which they were fabulous tonight just grinding away at those guys. We knew if we could turn it over to them in the fifth or the six, we\u2019d have a really good chance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Originally Published: July 6, 2025 at 9:10 PM PDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fernando Tatis Jr. booked a hotel room for a couple days of relaxation during next week\u2019s All-Star break.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":45401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,1370,1266,3549,1306,7264,62,7289,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-45400","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-latest-headlines","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-san-diego","14":"tag-san-diego-padres","15":"tag-sandiego","16":"tag-sports","17":"tag-top-stories-sdut","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-united-states-of-america","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","22":"tag-us","23":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114810775464580805","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}