SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Wheee! And Whew!<\/p>\n
The Padres won their seventh consecutive game on Sunday, jumping to their biggest lead in the playoff race since May.<\/p>\n
Their 6-4 victory over the Giants, which moved the Padres 2\u00bd games ahead of the Diamondbacks in the race for the National League\u2019s final postseason spot, was the fifth game in a row they scored at least five runs.<\/p>\n
Manny Machado homered. Fernando Tatis Jr. had another three-hit game. Jackson Merrill drove in two runs with a double.<\/p>\n
They are rolling.<\/p>\n
But this weekend in the wind-swept ballpark by the bay was no breeze.<\/p>\n
The sweep of the youthful and well-below-.500 Giants was not easy for even one of the three victories.<\/p>\n
\u201cCredit them,\u201d Padres manager Craig Stammen said. \u201cThey\u2019re playing their tails off. They run the bases really well. They\u2019re pesky at-bats. \u2026 They\u2019re dangerous. All those players are fighting for their time in the major leagues, and there\u2019s something to be said about that. It was three tough games that we squeezed out in the end. The bullpen finished the games really well all three days.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just a little differently Sunday, as earning the first two wins made the third especially difficult.<\/p>\n
The residual effect of losing big leads and having to close out\u00a0 7-5 and 7-6 victories in the first two games of the series by using their highest leverage relievers was that Yuki Matsui was on the mound in the ninth inning with the tying run at the plate.<\/p>\n
Matsui finally got a fastball past rookie Jonah Cox on the 10th pitch he threw him.<\/p>\n
The persistent at-bat by the rookie was indicative of what happened the entire series.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re a scrappy young bunch,\u201d Padres starting pitcher Nick Pivetta said.<\/p>\n
This wasn\u2019t as simple as the Giants turning a 5-0 lead into another nailbiter.<\/p>\n
Navigating Sunday\u2019s game was complicated by the limitations of the Padres\u2019 starting pitcher (because he has not pitched enough) and their three best relievers (because they have pitched too much).<\/p>\n
Pivetta was making his second start after a nearly four-month layoff. And the Padres were without the back-end trio of Bradgley Rodriguez, Adrian Morej\u00f3n and Mason Miller, who had all pitched the previous two days and pitched at least five times in the previous nine days.<\/p>\n
Pivetta made it through four innings on 69 pitches, leaving with the Padres ahead 6-2.<\/p>\n
The Padres had Giants starter Logan Webb out of the game after five innings. But their only hit off rookie left-hander Matt Wilkinson, who took over for Webb, was Jake Cronenworth\u2019s single leading off the ninth.<\/p>\n
So it was up to a cavalcade of middle relievers to finish off another tense contest.<\/p>\n
Kyle Hart and David Morgan allowed a run apiece while combining to get the next five outs.<\/p>\n
Wandy Peralta took over for Morgan with two outs and two on in the sixth inning and retired the next four batters.<\/p>\n
Randy V\u00e1squez worked around a leadoff walk and another walk with two outs to get through the eighth.<\/p>\n
Matsui, who was Japan\u2019s saves leader three different seasons before signing with the Padres prior to the 2024 season, got the first two outs in the ninth before Bryce Eldgridge dropped a single in front of Jackson Merrill, who overran the ball, allowing Eldridge to get to second base.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was ignoring the runner on second base,\u201d Matsui said through interpreter Ike Ogata. \u201cThe biggest thing (was) I was trying not to walk (Cox) and win that battle.\u201d<\/p>\n
When he did, he had his second save with the Padres and first this season.<\/p>\n
And the Padres had earned a crucial victory with three arms tied behind their back.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are this point of the season where it doesn\u2019t even matter,\u201d Matsui said. \u201c\u2026 We are just all in to get 27 outs.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Padres were able to escape with their eighth victory in nine games because of that and because of what their offense did at the start.<\/p>\n
Two runs in the first and three in the second inning had the Padres up 5-0.<\/p>\n
They loaded the bases before making an out and scored two runs, both on Merrill\u2019s two-run double that came between two first-pitch pop-ups and a strikeout that kept them from getting more in the first inning.<\/p>\n
Samad Taylor led off the second with a single, stole second and scored on Tatis\u2019 single grounded up the middle, and Machado broke a string of 13 hitless at-bats with a home run sent to the bleachers beyond left field.<\/p>\n
Andrew Knizner\u2019s two-run homer in the bottom of the second inning was the Giants\u2019 first punch back.<\/p>\n
The Padres scored again in the fourth on a pair of firsts.<\/p>\n
Ethan Salas\u2019 triple off the base of the wall in right field gave him his first major league hit, and he scored his first major league run when Tatis singled up the middle for a third time.<\/p>\n
Webb retired the final five batters he faced, and Wilkinson the first nine he faced.<\/p>\n
On this night, it wasn\u2019t important. A victory like Sunday\u2019s can only really be prized.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re a very good club out there,\u201d Machado said. \u201cThey have one of their aces on the mound. They play really good baseball, and you can never take a team like that lightly. So we knew we had to play our best baseball, and, you know, we definitely did it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Wheee! And Whew! The Padres won their seventh consecutive game on Sunday, jumping to their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[181,1334,74,76,75,2611,127,1696],"class_list":["post-463159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-latest-headlines","tag-mlb","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-san-diego-padres","tag-sports","tag-top-stories-sdut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463159","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=463159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}