BOSTON — The Padres are not living up to expectations just yet.
Neither their own, nor their fans’ nor what the metrics suggest is possible.
“We’re hitting the ball hard, and we’re making good swings, and we’re making good decisions at the plate,” manager Craig Stammen said Friday morning. “That bodes well for our future. We keep doing that, that’s evidence that if we keep doing it, things are going to turn our way. And sooner or later, the expected numbers aren’t going to be expected. They’re going to be real.”
The reality later in the day was another loss on an otherwise wonderful afternoon at a baseball cathedral.
The Padres overcame their first deficit of the season. One of their starting pitchers worked into the sixth inning for just the second time. They got a hit from Luis Campusano.
But they mostly continued to struggle producing at the plate and fell 5-2 to the Red Sox in the first game of the season at Fenway Park.
“It’s rough,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said. “Rough, because everybody wants to see results. Everybody’s talking, everybody’s pointing at it. So, it’s just rough.”
Two home runs in the sixth inning — by Willson Contreras off Michael King and by Eastlake High School alumnus Marcelo Mayer against Wandy Peralta — turned a tie game into Boston’s first victory since opening day. That kept the Padres from winning consecutive games for what would have been the first time this season.
The Padres scored twice in the fifth inning to tie the game 2-2, and King had thrown just 67 pitches when the sixth inning began.
After King got the first out, Contreras sent a first-pitch sinker over the Green Monster and out of the ballpark to Lansdowne Street.
King then yielded a 113 mph single by Wilyer Abreu and struck out Caleb Durbin before Stammen walked to the mound to remove him from the game.
“End of the fifth, a couple hard-hit balls; sixth inning, hard-hit balls,” Stammen said. “Then we felt like we had a matchup that was better in our favor with Wandy against (Mayer). Ended up not being that.”
Peralta’s first pitch to Mayer, a sinker just above the knees on the inner third of the plate, was sent to right field, where Tatis ran back and jumped up and almost entirely over the short wall separating the field from the visiting bullpen as the ball sailed a smidge too far for him to make what would have been a hardly believable robbery.
“I actually thought he did catch it for a second,” Stammen said.
Tatis held two fingers about two inches apart when asked the distance between the ball and the tip of his glove.
The Padres missed an opportunity to take an early lead after Gavin Sheets led off the third inning with a bloop single to shallow left field, which fell between three fielders. Sheets stole second on the final pitch of Jake Cronenworth’s strikeout, and remained there after Campusano’s groundout and Tatis’ flyball out to right field.
The Red Sox also got their first hit from their first man up in the third inning, a double off the Green Monster by Mayer. And with a one-out single by Ceddanne Rafaela, they did not fail to get him home.
Another leadoff double (this one by Jarren Duran) and a two-out single (this one Durbin’s first hit in 20 at-bats this season and 35 at-bats going back to last season) made it 2-0 in the fourth inning.
In their next at-bat, the Padres took advantage of another fortunate ball hit in the air and tied the game.
Their rally began with Miguel Andujar’s long fly ball to center field almost directly at Rafaela, who was temporarily blinded by the sun and ran just past the ball, which fell to the grass as Andujar sprinted to third base with a triple.
Sheets followed with a hard single this time, lining an 0-2 sweeper through the right side of the infield.
After Cronenworth lined out to center field, Campusano came to the plate looking for his first hit since late in the 2024 season.
He got it on a full-count fastball that he clobbered off the Green Monster in left-center field. Sheets, who had been running on the pitch, scored easily while Campusano made it to second base with a double and a .143 batting average (1-for-7) and no longer in possession of the longest active hitless streak in the major leagues (35 at-bats).
But Red Sox right-hander Sonny Gray got Tatis to ground out and retired Xander Bogaerts, Jackson Merrill and Manny Machado in order in the sixth to finish off the fifth quality start against the Padres in their seven games this season.
Outside of their 7-1 victory over the San Francisco Giants on Wednesday, they have not scored more than three runs in a game.
They have had their share of empty at-bats and missed opportunities to do damage on mistake pitches. But overall, they maintain their at-bats have been good.
They rank 29th among the 30 teams with a .192 batting average but seventh with a .251 expected batting average, which is a metric that measures how often a hit with the same exit velocity and launch angle is normally a base hit. Their .244 batting average on balls in play is lowest in MLB, and a good number of those balls in play are hard outs.
The Padres put eight balls in play with an exit velocity of 95 mph or greater on Friday, and just three were hits. They are batting .607 on hard-hit balls this season, which is exactly 200 points lower than the average on hard-hit balls for the rest of the major leagues.
“It’s a results-based game and you want to have good results,” Cronenworth said. “When you don’t get them, it sucks. Good thing is it’s only game seven. But at the same time, yeah, you want those hard-hit balls to get through, not just the jam shots to land or the infield singles. It seems like everybody’s kind of having that luck right now, which is unfortunate.”