Padres blow chances (again) in loss to Nationals
Published in Baseball
WASHINGTON — This is who the San Diego Padres are. This is how they lose.
What they do has been enough to win more often than not this season. But what they don’t do is why they have lost more often than it seems they should.
“We created the opportunities,” Jake Cronenworth said Saturday night. “And we just didn’t execute.”
Might as well play that on a loop.
The Padres had chances on Saturday to make a young pitcher work a lot harder and leave a lot earlier. Then they had a chance against the major leagues’ worst bullpen.
They could have beat a bad team and created a surge at the start of the season’s second half.
Instead, a 4-2 loss to the Washington Nationals was like so many before it this season.
The defeat at the hands of Mitchell Parker and the team that entered the night with MLB’s third-worst record had its moments both good and bad.
Jose Iglesias played third base masterfully, making a highlight-reel out on a grounder and snaring two scorched line drives. Jackson Merrill made a diving catch that started an inning-ending double play. The Padres answered a two-run bottom of the second with a two-run top of the third.
But they went down meekly in two innings to allow Parker (6-10, 5.00) to hang in the game. And they did not hit when doing so would have made a difference.
“We were on the brink a lot,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said. “Just couldn’t get the big hit.”
Manny Machado’s strikeout with the bases loaded ended the fifth inning, and his strikeout in the eighth inning was the first of three straight outs that stranded what had been two runners in scoring position with no outs.
A walk by Fernando Tatis Jr. off Luis Garcia started the eighth, and Luis Arraez followed with a bunt against Jose A. Ferrer that Nationals catcher Drew Millas grabbed and threw into right field. That allowed Tatis to run to third and Arraez to reach second.
Machado came to the plate and walked away four pitches later.
Gavin Sheets followed with a grounder that Ferrer fielded and threw home. Tatis stopped and got in a rundown that initially seemed would result in the Padres having the bases loaded with one out.
But the ruling that Tatis had gotten safely back into third was overturned on replay review, which showed Millas had tagged Tatis on the left calf.
A lineout by Xander Bogaerts ended the inning.
The Padres were 3 for 9 with runners in scoring position, which is not a bad night on its own and is a good night for them. Their .207 batting average with runners in scoring position is second worst in the major leagues since May 16 (56 games).
Kyle Finnegan, who allowed five runs in the ninth inning to take the loss Friday and had blown three opportunities since getting his last save on June 6, retired the Padres in order in the ninth for his elusive 19th save of the season.
Parker, a 25-year-old left-hander, whose 6.85 ERA over his previous 14 starts was 99th among the 101 pitchers to work at least 60 innings in that span, allowed two runs in six innings for his second quality start against the Padres this season.
In his third start off the injured list, where he spent more than three months at the start of the season with an elbow issue, Yu Darvish (0-2, 6.08) allowed three runs in five innings.
Darvish departed after 69 pitches, many of them under duress, and Yuki Matsui yielded a home run to Nathaniel Lowe in the sixth inning.
The game began one hour, five minutes late due to the threat of weather in the area.
And it started slowly before a brief rush of activity.
There were four runs scored in a span of nine batters, as the Nationals went up 2-0 in their half of the second inning and the Padres tied the game in the next half-inning.
Darvish retired the first five batters he faced before three consecutive two-out hits — by the sixth, seventh and eighth batters in the Nationals lineup, who all together have not yet played in 100 big-league games — brought in two runs.
The Padres’ No. 7 batter, Iglesias, led off the third with a double grounded to the right-field corner for their first hit of the game.
Iglesias moved to third on a fly-ball to center field by Cronenworth and scored on Martín Maldonado’s double. Arraez followed with a single to center field that scored Maldonado from second.
It seemed Darvish might be in for another long inning when CJ Arbams turned a late swing on a sinker into a double just inside third base to lead off the bottom of the third.
But four pitches and two fine plays in the outfield later, the inning was over.
First, Sheets ran 78 feet to catch a fly-ball by James Wood in the narrow foul territory just in front of the side wall. Luis Garcia Jr. followed with a sinking line drive to center field that Merrill ran in and dove to catch just above the ground before getting up and throwing to second base to double up Abrams, who had taken off on a sprint and never stopped until he had crossed the plate.
Darvish began the next inning by walking Daylen Lile, who moved around to home on a groundout by Millas, single by No.9 hitter Jacob Young and RBI groundout by Abrams that put the Nationals back on top.
The Padres loaded the bases with two outs in the fifth inning before Machado, whose ninth-inning grand slam sealed Friday’s night’s victory, struck out.
“We put a lot of things together to create some traffic,” Shildt said. “Did a lot of small things. … We had some traffic out there that couldn’t quite cash in and get that proverbial big hit.”
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