DENVER \u2014 Just when it seemed the Padres were not up to making Thursday afternoon a full-fledged Coors Field thrill ride, they put together a five-run ninth inning and beat the Rockies 10-8.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just kept it going,\u201d manager Craig Stammen said. \u201cGot guys on base (and) we weren\u2019t coming through with the big hit. Kept feeling like we had a lot of chances during the game. Even though we were down, we felt like we were in the game. And then all of a sudden, Coors Field shows up in the ninth inning and gives us one today.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of the Padres\u2019 runs in the final inning came before they made an out \u2014 on a walk by Jackson Merrill, singles by Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts and Miguel Andujar and a three-run 30th birthday homer by Gavin Sheets.<\/p>\n
His blast \u2014 his second three-run, game-winning homer in the ninth inning against the Rockies in two weeks \u2014\u00a0 took the Padres from down one run to up by two. And then Mason Miller closed out his ninth save by stretching his scoreless streak to 33\u2154 innings, tying the franchise record set 20 years ago by Cla Meredith.<\/p>\n
The victory, which secured the Padres\u2019 sixth consecutive series win, was their second time coming back from multiple runs down in the ninth inning. It was also their eighth victory earned by scoring the deciding run in the seventh inning or later.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the biggest thing is just the belief that we have in the clubhouse and the dugout in the ninth inning,\u201d Sheets said. \u201cWe thought there was a chance that we were gonna win that game. I think that\u2019s the biggest difference with this team this year, is that we\u2019re not gonna lay over, we\u2019re gonna fight and we truly believed that we were gonna win that game. And it was pretty cool to see it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Strange things ensue a mile high, in the thin air and in a giant ballpark. Pitches don\u2019t move. Fly balls become home runs and doubles off the wall. Would-be outs become singles and singles become doubles in the vast outfield grass. Innings spiral.<\/p>\n
After two days in which the baseball was not Coors Field\u2019s usual kind of crazy, Thursday\u2019s getaway day got a Rocky Mountain kind of unhinged.<\/p>\n
Before their flight to Mexico City, where they will play a pair of games at an even higher elevation (7,350 feet) this weekend, the Padres spent much of Thursday coming frustratingly close to breaking out of an offensive malaise that had gripped them for five games.<\/p>\n
They arrived in Colorado with high hopes of rediscovering their power strokes. They hit one home run and scored four times in the first two games.<\/p>\n
The Rockies led 6-4 after a stretch from the bottom of the first through the top of the fifth in which the teams scored in six of the eight half-innings.<\/p>\n
The Rockies\u2019 first run and and their seventh run came on solo homers by La Costa Canyon High alumnus Mickey Moniak, who had his second-two homer game against the Padres this season and the third his past eight games against them.<\/p>\n
The Padres had chances earlier than the ninth to turn Thursday\u2019s game into more of the kind of thrill ride the Coors Field is known for. But they went 2-for-10 with runners in scoring position in the first eight innings.<\/p>\n
They had at least one runner on base in each of the final eight innings and had a runner advance to second and\/or third base in six of those innings.<\/p>\n
The most disheartening of their failures came in the eighth, when they got the tying run to the plate and forced the Rockies to go to primary closer Victor Vodnik an inning early.<\/p>\n
After Freddy Fermin drew a two-out walk and Jake Cronenworth followed with a single, Ram\u00f3n Laureano sent the ninth pitch he saw from Juan Mejia through the right side to score Fermin, making it 8-5, and getting Cronenworth to second.<\/p>\n
Vodnik\u2019s first batter was Fernando Tatis Jr., who struck out for the third time in the game.<\/p>\n
In that inning, Sheets was called on to pinch-hit for Ty France and grounded out.<\/p>\n
After Ron Marinaccio worked a scoreless eighth inning, Sheets got another chance.<\/p>\n
First, Merrill got another chance at the end of a day in which he had struck three of the four times he had been to the plate. He began the ninth by walking on four pitches.<\/p>\n
Machado followed by grounding a hard single through the right side. Bogaerts, who had homered earlier, bounced a ball through the middle to score Merrill and move Machado to third. Andujar, who had driven in Machado and Bogaerts with a second-inning double, followed with a roller through the right side to get the Padres within a run.<\/p>\n
Sheets got them three more with a towering shot over the 16\u00bd-foot wall in right field.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust great at-bats,\u201d Sheets said. \u201cYou talk about Coors Field, but just the base hits opposite field, the ground balls opposite side, just hitting the ball where it\u2019s pitched \u2014 and against a really good pitcher. And the biggest thing is that we thought we were going to win it. We put it together, and then we have Mason Miller to close it out, which is a great feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miller was the only one among four Padres pitchers to not allow a run.<\/p>\n
The Rockies scored six runs off Matt Waldron \u2014 batting around and turning a 2-1 deficit into a 5-2 lead in the second and then adding a run in the fourth and another in the fifth.<\/p>\n
The Padres were down two runs at the start of the sixth, and given the environment and a day off Friday, Stammen chose to chase the victory by inserting high-leverage left-hander Adrian Morej\u00f3n.<\/p>\n
That is who Moniak launched his eighth homer of the season against with two outs, and the Rockies added a run against Marinaccio in the seventh.<\/p>\n
Stammen said he felt \u201calmost like giving up one run in Coors is actually a good inning. \u2026 That\u2019s limiting the damage.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was enough to give the Padres a chance.<\/p>\n
Their results so far, with six comeback victories helping them to the second-best record (17-8) in the major leagues, suggest that is all they need.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were in it the whole game,\u201d Machado said. \u201cWe had some opportunities early on. We couldn\u2019t go through, but we knew we were putting some good at-bats together. We\u2019re putting traffic on the bases, We come out (in the ninth), Jackson had that big walk. \u2026 And then we just, kind of just started chipping away there. And that just tells you about this team, man. They\u2019re resilient. We don\u2019t give up \u2019til the last out is made, and we\u2019ve shown it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DENVER \u2014 Just when it seemed the Padres were not up to making Thursday afternoon a full-fledged Coors…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[181,1334,74,76,75,2611,127,1696],"class_list":{"0":"post-283060","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-latest-headlines","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-san-diego","11":"tag-san-diego-headlines","12":"tag-san-diego-news","13":"tag-san-diego-padres","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-top-stories-sdut"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}