CHICAGO — The Cubs picked up where they left off the night before. The Padres continued losing.
Losing ugly.
Losing ugliest.
Their 23-3 drubbing on Wednesday at Wrigley Field was the largest margin of defeat in franchise history, tied the franchise record for runs allowed and featured the most home runs a Padres team had ever given up in a single game.
“Got our ass spanked,” Manny Machado said.
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Somehow, both teams played like the weather on a Midwestern summer day, as the Cubs stayed hot and the Padres stayed miserable.
The Cubs hit eight home runs — a day after hitting five — en route to completing a sweep of the three-game series.
Seiya Suzuki hit a three-run homer in the first inning. Dansby Swanson homered three times after doing so twice the day before, putting the Cubs up 4-0 in the second inning, 9-0 with a three-run shot in the third and then clearing loaded bases to make it 22-3 in the eighth.
Michael Conforto hit two homers while Pete Crow-Armstrong and Michael Busch hit one apiece.
Padres catcher Rodolfo Durán moved to the mound in the seventh inning and closed out the game. As he had been when he finished off their 15-3 loss to the Dodgers on Saturday, Durán was not the Padres’ least-effective pitcher Wednesday, working a scoreless seventh before allowing eight runs in the eighth.
What went wrong before that was emblematic of the Padres’ shoddiness of late.
Their best starting pitcher had his worst game ever. They left the bases loaded twice. They made a play in the field to botch a rundown that was hardly even a footnote on this day but a bad look nonetheless.
“It’s been sloppy,” Gavin Sheets said. “One thing that we’ve done all year extremely well was the small things, stuff that we can fully control — the defense, the hustle, all that stuff. And I feel like it kind of snowballed this series, especially, maybe a little bit of the last series towards the end. That’s what happens against good teams. If you don’t bring it, you’re gonna get buried.”
Padres starting pitcher Walker Buehler reacts after Seiya Suzuki hits the first of the Cubs’ eight home runs on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
The loss was the Padres’ fifth straight. In between the 12-run loss and the 20-run loss, they dropped a pair of two-run games and were walked off on once.
The skid has been rife with baserunning blunders, defensive miscues and a failure to move plentiful runners in scoring position.
“We’re just not playing good baseball,” Ty France said. “You can’t point at one thing. We’re just playing bad. That’s all there’s to it.”
The Padres have fallen to a game above .500 for the first time since they were 7-6 on April 9.
And their flight Wednesday night took them to Los Angeles to play the team with the major leagues’ best record.
“I shouldn’t have to say it, but we need to turn the intensity up for this next series,” Sheets said. “Obviously, we get off to slow starts, and the game starts to snowball a little bit. But we’ve got to keep that under control and as a defense not let that unravel and not let it affect the way we play. I think, unfortunately, it did the opposite. We need to get back on track against the Dodgers and right this road trip.”
The Padres came back from a 9-3 deficit to lose 9-7 on Tuesday. And it would be wrong to say they showed no fight on Wednesday.
But they punched back only briefly and only after they had been knocked out.
Sung-Mun Song’s lead-off home run and a pair of two-out doubles by Machado and France cut the Cubs’ lead to 9-2 in the fifth inning. A triple by Samad Taylor and a single by Miguel Andujar made it 15-3 in the top of the eighth.
The last time the Padres had a realistic shot at getting back in that game was the third inning. Song led off with a double and Cubs pitcher Colin Rea hit Sheets with one out and France with two before Jackson Merrill grounded out.
It was 4-0 at the time.
It was 9-0 the next time the Padres came to bat.
That is because another starting pitcher kept leaving pitches up and over the plate when he wasn’t walking batters.
Walker Buehler had not allowed nine runs in any of his previous 162 major league starts, and he entered Wednesday as the Padres’ most consistent pitcher by far.
“A little bit out of sync, obviously, to start, and then kind of compiled on top of it,” said Buehler, who allowed one run in each of his five starts in June and finished the month with a 1.71 ERA. “… I feel like we’ve done some really good things, and we’re in a really good spot, but sometimes you run into the wrong team on the wrong day and give up nine (expletive) earned runs.”
Buehler departed after four innings, the 10th time in the past 14 games a member of the Padres’ starting rotation has failed to complete five innings.
Kyle Hart surrendered the next three home runs in two innings before Durán spared any other relief pitcher from having to endure Wednesday’s torture.
It was a bad day, for sure. The heat and humidity had the heat index at 104 degrees at first pitch. The wind was blowing out, just as consistently but not quite as hard as Tuesday night, when the Padres almost matched the Cubs by hitting four homers.
“It’s been well documented when the wind blows out here that these games can get a little out of hand,” Stammen said. “And today was a game that got out of hand.”
Stammen was grim-faced but as even as ever in his analysis.
“You just move on from it,” he said. “That’s the only thing you can do. It only counts as one, and we’ve got to remember that. … Same as what we did the first game of the series, where we got walked off. Unfortunately, it’s in a stretch of some tough games and some tough losses.”