Good morning from San Francisco,

It happened again. Or didn’t happen again.

However you look at it, the Padres slept through their alarm again last night and lost to a team that isn’t very good but had a very good pitcher on the mound.

“Guy had good s—t tonight,” Jackson Merrill said. “Credit to him.”

Merrill is the only Padres batter to have gotten a hit off Giants rookie Trevor McDonald in the 23-year-old right-hander’s seven innings.

You can read in my game story (here) about Merrill’s home run in the first inning and Ramón Laureano’s home run in the ninth inning and the almost nothing that happened for the Padres offense in between in a 3-2 loss.

The Padres have the fourth-lowest batting average and fifth-lowest OPS in the major leagues.

But the bizarre part about that — besides that they have Merrill, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado batting in succession in the heart of their order virtually every night — is that they are doing it in reverse.

The Padres are batting .211 with a .608 OPS against starting pitchers and .255 with a .771 OPS against relief pitchers.

Leaguewide, starters are yielding a .244 average and .715 OPS while relievers are yielding a .243 average and .715 OPS.

“Relievers are supposed to be the tough ones,” Xander Bogaerts said last night. “You’re not supposed to be able to scrap a lot together.”

But the Padres have.

They have won 20 games. And half those victories have been earned by them breaking a tie or overcoming a deficit in the seventh inning or later.

Yes, I have written about this a lot. I have, in fact, touched on different facets of the phenomenon in each of the past three newsletters.

But the Padres’ ability to win late and them having to rely on that ability way too much is the story of the season so far.

They have held a lead after the sixth inning in just 14 of their 34 games.

Again, they have the National League’s fifth-best record. But there is not a person in the organization that doesn’t know it won’t last unless their offense picks up significantly.

Before last night’s game, Craig Stammen was asked about the disparity in the early offense and late offense.

“We’re definitely racking our brains and trying to figure out why that is,” he said. “I think a lot of teams feel really good about the guys they are bringing in from the bullpen — high-velocity arms and good offspeed pitches. You know, the starters in this league are good also. We just haven’t hit our stride early in games yet. We’re making small little tweaks here and there to see if that might spark the difference. I probably gotta look internally, maybe the lineup or something like that. But anything is on the table as far as early in games.”

Now, McDonald was excellent. His sinker and slider were almost as good as the Padres have seen in tandem, and those were the pitches that had the Padres grounding out, popping up and striking out for virtually the entirety of his seven innings. He probably was the best pitcher they have faced in a couple weeks, and that includes the two young White Sox starters who held them scoreless for six innings apiece just a few days ago.

But McDonald was also the 16th pitcher to turn in a quality start against the Padres this season. Add in the Rockies’ Chase Dollander allowing them one run in six innings working as a bulk reliever, and that means the Padres have effectively had a quality start thrown against them in exactly half their games.

They have faced a preponderance of excellent sinkerball pitchers this season. A good sinker is a difficult pitch to do damage on, as the good ones play down in the zone or below it.

“We’ve got to find a way to handle these guys that come in with a sinker-slider combo; that’s just part of what this season is going to bring for this team,” Stammen said. “We’re going to keep working. Those guys are going to keep working. Eventually we’ll figure it out.”

Merrill last night became the latest to say the Padres will be better for what they are going through.

“I think it all helps at the end of the day,” he said. “It’s still early in the year, so there is still time. We can build on this and move forward. But I do think we’ve faced a lot of good arms. So, you know, I think it’s gonna pay off at some point.”

They get another chance tonight when they face Logan Webb, one of the better sinkerball pitchers in the major leagues. Webb had one of the quality starts against the Padres this season, holding them to three runs in six innings on March 31.

Some Jackson action

Merrill had his second two-hit game in three days.

He had a clear plan last night.

Merrill, who until the past four games was chasing 38.3% of the pitches he saw outside the strike zone, connected on the only two swings of his first three at-bats. That included his looking at three pitches on the edge of the strike zone in a four-pitch strikeout in the fifth inning.

“I kind of just honed it in, looking for something good to hit,” he said.

Sounds easy enough.

Merrill is 5-for-15 over the past four games, during which he has chased just nine of the 38 pitches (23.7%) he has seen outside the zone. (He did chase both pitches he saw outside the zone in his ninth-inning at-bat last night, which ended in a groundout.)

He has raised his batting average 15 points to .220 in that span.

Actively waiting

The Padres recently began distributing a weekly medical update to the media.

Each week, the update for starting pitchers Joe Musgrove and Nick Pivetta reads thusly:

“Continuing active rest for the next several weeks.”

Essentially, this means they are conditioning, getting treatment and not throwing.

The Padres do expect both will pitch again this season. But it won’t be anytime soon. Perhaps some time after the All-Star break.

Not that either would be rushed back if the circumstances were different, but the Padres believe it best serves the pitchers and the team to give them ample time to recover and potentially be able to help in a postseason push.

Musgrove’s issue involves the bones and cartilage in his elbow, which has caused inflammation and discomfort. Imaging and consultations with multiple doctors have confirmed the graft from his Tommy John surgery is intact.

Pivetta’s injury is being called a right elbow flexor strain. That is the same issue that sidelined him for a month at the start of 2024, the only previous non-covid IL stint of his 10-year career.

Tidbits

My pregame notebook (here) was largely about Ty France and how he has found his swing. But the story touched on Yuki Matsui’s imminent return as well. The left-hander, whose contract dictates he has to be in the major leagues, will replace someone who is pitching OK in the bullpen. Unless the Padres find another injured pitcher or decide to go with four left-handers in the bullpen, the odd man out for now would seem likely to be Kyle Hart.
Hart struck out the only batter he faced last night after taking over for starting pitcher Randy Vásquez with a man on first base and one out in the sixth. Hart has allowed 10 runs this season. All but one of those has come when he is working a second or third inning.
Merrill’s 436-foot home run to center field tied Manny Machado for the longest homer by a Padres player this season. We’ll list Merrill’s blast first, since Machado’s was hit in Mexico City.
A clean-shaven Jake Cronenworth did reach base last night (by upping his franchise-record career hit-by-pitch total to 67). But he was hitless, same as the bearded Cronenworth went in 20 of his 29 starts this season. Cronenworth is batting .144/.272/.196, which is the lowest batting average and lowest slugging percentage over any span of 114 plate appearances in a single season in his career.
The Padres and Giants got back to playing their usual type of game at Oracle Park last night. Before a series last August in which all three games were decided by at least three runs, 15 of the teams’ previous 26 games here had been decided by one run.

All right, that’s it for me.

Talk to you tomorrow.