The Padres got two home runs in an inning for the first time this season. Walker Buehler went longer than four innings for the first time this season.
That wasn’t enough for a victory, as Adrian Morejón’s frustrating season continued.
But a night after their first walk-off victory of the season on a home run, the Padres got their second.
This one was not a grand slam and did not come in the 12th inning.
The Padres were able to accomplish Friday night’s 5-2 victory over the Colorado Rockies in nine innings when Gavin Sheets became the first Padres player to homer twice in a game this season.
The ninth inning began with Jackson Merrill grounding a single into left field and Manny Machado walking. Merrill moved to third on Xander Bogaerts’ fly ball to deep right field before Sheets walked it off.
That made the dual plot line of Buehler being exponentially better on the mound and Luis Campusano continuing to be exponentially better at the plate much more fulfilling.
It was home runs by Sheets and Campusano that put the Padres up 2-0 in the sixth inning.
They were cruising toward having those homers hold up after Buehler’s six scoreless innings and a scoreless seventh by Kyle Hart.
But Morejón allowed four singles, just one of them hit hard, and the Rockies scored twice against him in the eighth inning.
The Padres ended up needing Jason Adam, who came off the injured list Friday afternoon, to make his season debut with two outs and strand Morejón’s runners at second and third base.
Campusano, who had doubled in his first at-bat Friday, led off the bottom of the eighth with a walk and is 6-for-11 with four doubles in five games since breaking an 0-for-35 stretch that had its origin in 2024.
Mason Miller began the ninth inning for the Padres, pitching for the third consecutive day in a non-save situation. He struck out the side and got his first win of the season.
Friday was the first time in his three starts for the Padres that Buehler made it past the fourth inning.
He didn’t just make it. He breezed through those first four innings in 49 pitches, throwing a first-pitch strike to 12 of the 13 batters he faced and allowing a single in the first inning and another in the second.
Those were the innings he had sailed through in both of his first two starts before not just faltering but falling off a cliff.
Buehler had not retired the first batter in the third inning. He retired all three batters he faced in the third on Friday and did it in eight pitches.
He took 14 pitches to get through a 1-2-3 fourth and nine to get through the fifth, which saw Willi Castro get the Rockies’ third single of the night, a grounder that bounced off the first base bag, and 10 pitches to retire the Rockies in order in the sixth.
That put him at 68 pitches, 50 of them strikes. He fell behind 1-0 to three of the 20 batters he faced, 2-0 one time and never threw three balls to a batter.
Hart replaced Buehler and helped himself out of a jam he created in the seventh inning. After walking a batter and giving up a hard single, the left-hander got a pop-up and then picked off Jordan Beck at second and finished the inning with a groundout.