Good morning from Los Angeles,
The Padres just can’t get it together.
Their starting pitching wasn’t always this bad. But then, their offense was not scoring much back when Randy Vásquez and the other starting pitchers were able to complete five innings.
A few hours before last night’s game, Gavin Sheets was talking about the incongruence of the offense having been anemic while the pitching was good and now the pitching struggling as the bats have begun to come alive.
That’s how a team runs as lukewarm and cold as the Padres have through 86 games.
“Can’t do that to get where we want to get to,” Sheets said. “If you want to be a .500 team, that’s fine. But that’s not our goal, and that’s not what we expected.”
Not so funny thing, the Padres went out and became a .500 team last night.
They scored six runs in the first two innings and then watched as the Dodgers scored twice that many.
You can read in my game story (here) about a 12-7 loss to the Dodgers on the heels of a 23-3 loss to the Cubs.
The Padres’ sixth consecutive defeat dropped them to 43-43, their first time at .500 since they were 6-6 on April 8.
As crazy as it was, last night’s loss had a familiarity to it.
The Padres hit three home runs and three doubles en route to their 6-0 lead. Vásquez allowed two runs in the bottom of the second and two more in the third before being pulled.
We’ll let Craig Stammen sum up the rest:
“We felt at that point in the game, 6-4, turned into our bullpen against their bullpen, and their bullpen outpitched us tonight. They’ve kind of had their way with us a little bit, how they deploy their bullpen against our hitters. We were able to scratch one across at the end. We didn’t stop competing. I felt like the at-bats were pretty solid, we just weren’t able to scratch any runs against them, and they were obviously able to hit us pretty well.”
The relievers who let the game get away were middle men Wandy Peralta and Yuki Matsui.
Peralta allowed twice as many runs (four) in one inning last night as he had in 31 innings since May 1. The 34-year-old left-hander was also making his 38th appearance of the season.
Matsui, who has also worked quite a bit lately, allowed two runs in the fifth inning as the Dodgers increased their lead to 10-6.
It is understandable the Padres offense is weary considering it is regularly playing from behind or having an early lead lost by a starting pitcher. But the Dodgers rebounded from their starting pitcher getting shelled last night.
The Padres got Dodgers starter Roki Sasaki out of the game after 88 pitches in three innings and then didn’t score for five innings.
Still, it is difficult to take an offense to task after it scored seven runs and had seven extra-base hits. (Teams have won more than three-quarters of the time they have scored exactly seven runs this season. Heck, take away the Padres’ meaningless run in the ninth inning. Teams have won 71% of the time when they score six runs.)
But, then, it always seemed this would be the way the Padres’ season unraveled if it unraveled.
We were talking in May, when things were still going relatively well, about how the offense was going to come around and the paper-thin starting pitching was going to get ripped.
That this isn’t surprising, however, doesn’t make it less frustrating.
The Padres are batting .256 with a .765 OPS and averaging 4.5 runs over their past 22 games. Those are middle-of-the-pack numbers, more than enough for the Padres to be better than the 10-12 they are since June 8.
In the same stretch, the Padres starting pitchers have a 5.54 ERA, almost a full point higher than it has been over the season’s first 66 games. Last night was the sixth time in the past 22 games that their starting pitcher (or opener and starting pitcher) allowed at least three runs in the first three innings. The Padres have trailed after the first inning six times in that span.
Across baseball this year, teams that score first have a .660 winning percentage.
“The team that strikes first definitely takes momentum,” Ty France said after Wednesday’s loss. “And we haven’t done a good job of that. A big thing is we haven’t come out of the gates and put up some runs early. For the most part this year, the pitchers have held it together of us. So it was bound to happen at some point. When you’re in one of these stretches and you’re down, yeah, I don’t want to say it’s difficult to bounce back, but we’re not doing that right now.”
The hitters are making every effort to be diplomatic. They sort of owe the pitchers from earlier in the season when the Padres offense hit .196 and averaged 3.5 runs a game and the team won 12 times in an 18-game stretch in large part because the pitching staff had a 2.98 ERA in that span and allowed two or fewer runs in eight of those games.
“We’ve put them in really bad spots, as well, this year,” Sheets said yesterday afternoon. “It kind of goes in ebbs and flows. It’s putting it all together at once. What they do can’t affect what we’re doing, and they’ve done a great job. When we’ve struggled at times, they picked us up. So that’s kind of the give and take.”
Ideally.
But things are so out of whack for the Padres that even when they do score what should be a sufficient number of runs, they are left to think about what more they could have done.
“Tonight, we scored six runs in the first two, and we don’t add on for the rest of the game there until the ninth,” Jake Cronenworth said. “We knocked the starter out in the third inning. We need to knock him out and continue to add on. That’s really good teamwork.”
Yeah, the Padres don’t have that.
Fermin rattled again
Catcher Freddy Fermin could be headed to the concussion injured list again after he took a foul tip off his mask with Freddie Freeman at the plate in the fifth inning.
Freeman walked two pitches later, and Fermin went to the mound to talk with Matsui. Infielders joined the conversation. As Fermin appeared ready to leave the mound, Xander Bogaerts waved toward the dugout and Manny Machado stopped Fermin.
Stammen and head athletic trainer Mark Rogow came out, and Fermin was eventually escorted off the mound by Rogow.
Fermin has taken several fouls off the mask this season, and a baseball hitting his head while he warmed up Matsui between innings is what sent him to the IL in the middle of June.
It would be surprising if Fermin, who has been removed from three games this season out of concern over his being hit in the head, is not held out for a time again.
There was a possibility Luis Campusano was going to be activated this weekend anyway, so he could rejoin the Padres sooner than expected. Or Blake Hunt could fill in for a few days.
Vásquez faints
Vásquez had a rough night.
He took a 99 mph bullet off his right ankle in the first inning, departed the game after the third and was on his way to get imaging in the X-Ray lab at Dodger Stadium when he fainted.
He regained consciousness and was said by Stammen to be in stable condition after being taken to a local hospital.
The plan was for Vásquez to have X-rays taken, but that had not taken place when Stammen spoke to the media.
“He’s getting all his tests done, so we don’t really know about his ankle yet,” Stammen said. “We’ll know more hopefully tonight and tomorrow, but right now I think he’s in good shape. … Sounded like it could have been from the pain in his ankle, the anxiety of the situation, the stress of the situation. Our bodies do some crazy stuff.”
Piecing it together
The Padres are looking at their pitching staff as a whole.
Think of it like a puzzle. It is up to Stammen and pitching coach Ruben Niebla to make the pieces fit.
They had a new piece last night in Germán Márquez, who was activated from his rehab assignment. He took the roster spot of reliever Jason Adam, who was placed on the IL with a shoulder strain, which you can read about in Jeff Sanders’ notebook (here).
Márquez, who began the season in the Padres’ rotation, worked the final three innings in mop-up duty last night. That is an important role, in that it did save the Padres from having to use any more of its tired arms.
Far more important is how the Padres survive when three-fifths of its starting pitchers can’t be counted on to get deep in games or even keep the Padres in games for half a game.
Last night was the sixth straight game and 11th time in 15 games a starter did not make it through five innings.
The fact is, the Padres won’t ask a few of them to do so anymore. They would love to be surprised on any given night, but they will enter games Griffin Canning, JP Sears and Vásquez start with the plan to not let them face a lineup a third time.
Vásquez didn’t even get two times through last night. There are only so many levers that can be pulled if that happens repeatedly.
Now he could be headed to the injured list, which means there would be another new piece, likely Jhony Brito.
King’s angle
Sheets spoke after the game about the challenge upcoming tonight when the Padres face Shohei Ohtani, who shut them out for five innings on May 20 and has a 1.54 ERA in 13 starts this season.
“You got him versus Mike King,” Sheets said. “It’s a great matchup. … It’s always a fun matchup when you got two guys like that going against each other.”
That shows how the Padres still feel about King.
But the truth is, him pitching like their No.1 starter is a 50/50 proposition at this point.
He has dominated the Dodgers before, and that is what it looked like might be happening this past Sunday at Petco Park when he allowed a run and two hits through four innings before he, in his words, “fully lost it” and allowed three runs while getting just one out in the fifth.
King is still batting his mechanics — how far out his arm is, the angle of his release, where his torso is in relation to the ground and the rest of his body as he gets through his complicated crossover delivery.
And he spoke this week about it actually being an issue well before the results showed it.
“I always use ‘22 as my best,” he said. “And then mechanics got a little bit worse in ‘23, mechanics got a little bit worse in ‘24, mechanics got a little bit worse in ‘25. You could see lots of differences. I think we’ve addressed it. We’ve figured out things that I need to focus on.”
One of those things is raising his arm angle, which has dropped little by little to the point where it is now at 24 degrees, down 7 degrees from 2022. Concurrently, his body got lower during delivery.
One thing he has incorporated is going back to doing long toss from a longer distance between his starts in order to keep his arm higher and be in a more powerful position.
“It was just because I was getting used to how I’m throwing every day,” he said of how his arm slot and torso lowered. “Now we address it as, like, ‘OK, we need to get back to those positions and find a happy medium of this is helping my delivery out.’ And in the last week or so it actually felt way better. But it’s a totally different move. So now it’s easy to lose it quickly, because it’s a new move.”
Brown out
The Padres will look different today than they have in more than two weeks.
“We’ll wear the pinstripes,” King said late last night.
For the first time since they had changed back to brown in 2020, the Padres have worn their brown tops for nine consecutive road games. In fact, they had never done it more than twice in a row.
The starting pitcher chooses the uniform the Padres wear on the road, and most Padres starters over the previous six seasons preferred the sand pinstripe alternate road outfit. (Yu Darvish and Vásquez prefer brown.)
King applies a sort of analytics approach to which jersey he chooses. He likes the pinstripes. But he bases his selection on how he has pitched in his most recent road outing and the team’s result from the day before he pitches.
Thus, the pinstripes tonight.
Still going
It’s OK if you figured the spark plug was fading earlier this week.
That isn’t so different from what Samad Taylor thought after he went hitless in three games against the Dodgers last week and struck out four times in the last of those.
“It’s easy to say that I wasn’t irritated, I wasn’t stressing or anything like that,” Taylor said Wednesday in Chicago. “But then you start seeing a trend — I had four punches and then the first at-bat here, I had another punchy. You start getting down on yourself and start panicking. So it was trying to get back to me being me.”
By that, he meant not chasing pitches and focusing on the situation and what the team needed from him in those situations.
Taylor singled in his second at-bat Monday against the Cubs and finished 1-for-4. He was 2-for-4 with a walk on Tuesday, tripled in one of his two at-bats Wednesday and was 1-for-3 with a walk last night.“I got back to being me,” he said.
To learn more about Taylor’s resilience, energy and background, check out Annie Heilbrunn’s Q&A with him (here).
L.A., even worse
You’re never too old to learn something.
Yesterday, I found out that it was possible to despise going to Dodger Stadium more than I already did.
That is because it took 20 minutes to get from the freeway exit to the entrance of the Dodger Stadium parking lot more than four hours before the game. It is generally a 90-second drive.
The giveaway last night was something called a One Piece, which is a collectible card. There were tales of it going for $4,000 or more even before the game. Online, there are listings for almost $10,000 for a One Piece giveaway last year.
People were lined up by the thousands on the sidewalk leading up to the main entrance to Dodger Stadium, which hosted its largest crowd of the year (54,081).
“One Piece” returns to Dodger Stadium Thursday night with exclusive giveaways for the first 52,000 ticketed fans, while supplies last.
Fans are trying to get their hands on the “One Piece” sports card and straw hat.
Read more at https://t.co/SbVWg8glnc pic.twitter.com/wEDUPup00r
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) July 2, 2026
Tidbits
The 35 runs the Padres allowed the past two days are more than they had ever allowed in consecutive games. And it is worse than that. According to OptaStats, the Padres are just the second team in MLB history to lose six straight games while allowing at least 75 hits, 60 runs, 30 walks and 15 homers. The 1929 Philadelphia Phillies also accomplished that dubious feat. (Now, catcher Rodolfo Durán allowed nine of those runs in his two appearances.)
The Padres have scored nine runs in seven innings against Roki Sasaki and 15 runs in 63 innings against every other Dodgers pitcher this season.
Fernando Tatis Jr. has been hitting the ball as hard as anyone in the major leagues, but he had not hit a ball like the double he laced to left-center field on the first pitch of last night’s game. At 115.7 mph, it was his hardest ball put in play since Sept. 11, 2024. It was his 61st ball in play with an exit velocity of at least 105 mph, tied for third most in the majors.
Manny Machado’s home run in the first inning was his 17th of the season and sixth in his past 19 games (82 plate appearances). Machado is batting .252 over that span, and 14 of his 18 hits are doubles or homers.
Machado is batting .302 (13-for-43) over his past 12 games, which has raised his season batting average to .192. That is the highest his average has been since he was hitting .193 on May 12. He is no longer the lowest-ranked qualifying batter in MLB, having moved up to 151st of 152. (The Marlins’ Jakob Marsee is hitting .187.)
A day after getting three hits, Cronenworth hit a three-run homer last night. He is 4-for-13 since returning from his eight-week stay on the concussion IL.
All right, that’s it for me.
No newsletter the next two days.
We will still have the rest of our usual coverage on our Padres page over the weekend.
The next newsletter will be in your inbox Monday morning. Talk to you then.
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