Manny Machado returns, Rougned Odor injured in Padres' loss to Cubs
Padres third baseman Manny Machado (13) reacts after grounding out against the Cubs during the sixth inning of Friday’s game at Petco Park.
The Padres were back in town.
“Feels like we’ve been gone a month,” manager Bob Melvin said Friday afternoon.
They got Manny Machado back, too.
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“It’s about that time,” Machado said before playing in his first game since May 15. “Get back to the team and start playing some baseball.”
For the first time in 15 games and for just the 20th time this season, the Padres had the entirety of their “Big Four” in the lineup Friday night.
“That front part looks really deep again,” Melvin said. “Good day.”
The night ended with a 2-1 loss to the Cubs and with the Padres being booed multiple times over the final two innings, even as some of those were drowned out by the cheers from the overwhelming number of Cubs fans.
In their first turn back at Petco Park following a nine-game, 11-day road trip, the Padres spent most of the night looking a lot like they have on many days — with or without Machado.
“Another game,” Machado said afterward when asked how his fractured left hand felt. “Another (expletive) loss.”
The Padres made a struggling starting pitcher look all but unhittable, and they lost the player who had played a significant role in three of their past six victories and made the biggest contribution toward their attempt to win Friday.
Rougned Odor started both innings in which the Padres did much of anything.
With the Padres trailing 2-1, Odor led off the eighth inning with a single to the gap in right-center field. As he prepared to round first, he began hobbling and stopped before the ball was mishandled and Odor resumed his limp to second base.
Odor, who was diagnosed with a left groin strain, was able to walk off the field unassisted and was replaced at second base by Ha-Seong Kim.
After Trent Grisham walked, lead-off batter Xander Bogaerts grounded into a double play and Fernando Tatis Jr. struck out.
Odor had doubled, moved to third on Grisham’s groundout and scored on Bogaerts’ infield single in the sixth inning.
As he walked to the plate for his first at-bat, in the second inning, Machado got an enthusiastic but relatively muted ovation from a sellout crowd far more skewed to the visitors than most this season.
He struck out. In his next three at-bats, he appeared to essentially have picked up where he left off before suffering a fractured bone in his left hand, lining out at 105.4 mph in the fourth, grounding out to end the sixth and striking out in the ninth.
Machado’s .639 OPS is the lowest of his career through his first 41 games in a season.
“He hits one ball hard, he had some pretty good swings,” Melvin said. “But look, it was our entire lineup. We had some key guys up there at key times. We just didn’t get it through. I mean, it’s gonna take a little time for him to feel great at the plate. But I thought some of his swings were really good. And they were aggressive.”
Tatis’ infield single, on a half-swing that produced a slow roller up the middle, with one out in the fourth inning was the Padres’ first hit off Cubs starter Jameson Taillon. Tatis was stranded when Juan Soto struck out and Machado lined out.
Taillon entered the game with an 8.04 ERA over 31⅓ innings in his eight starts and pitched beyond the fifth inning for the first time this season.
“To be honest, I don’t know how that guy made it into the sixth inning,” Tatis said of Taillon, who in five starts last month had a 10.90 ERA and allowed a .351 batting average and last night allowed three hits and earned his first victory of the season.
Meanwhile, the Cubs wore down Padres starter Michael Wacha, who on Friday afternoon was named the National League Pitcher of the Month for May.
Wacha didn’t have the same command he possessed through virtually all of his previous five starts, during which he allowed three runs in 32 innings, going seven innings twice and six innings three times. He was lifted Friday with two outs in the fifth inning after walking his fifth batter.
“Definitely frustrated with the walks,” Wacha said. “I felt like I just added a lot of stress to my innings there and just trying to be too fine at times and losing them late in the count. A lot of 3-2 counts, a lot of deep counts with foul balls and then just losing them without really challenging them with a pitch. ... I feel like the body and everything feels great, and felt like stuff was really good, had good action on it. Just trying to be able too fine at times.”
Wacha, who walked a total of two batters in 20 innings over his previous three starts, worked around leadoff walks in the first two innings.
The right-hander finished with eight strikeouts. He struck out five straight batters between the third out of the first inning and first out of the third.
That is when successive one-out singles by Nico Hoerner and Dansby Swanson, the latter one on a line drive through the spot vacated by second baseman Odor when moved to cover second base as Hoerner took off from first, put runners at the corners. Ian Happ followed with a grounder to Odor that was just slow enough that it allowed Happ to beat out the Padres’ attempt to finish a double play, which scored Hoerner.
Swanson’s one-out homer in the fifth gave the Cubs a 2-0 lead.
That left the Padres with five innings to come back. And they had a full lineup with which to do so.
But outside of Bogaerts’ 61.7 mph RBI single, the vaunted top of the order could not accomplish what the Padres needed them to in two tries.
“We got four hits,” said Melvin, whose team was coming off a 10-1 victory over the Marlins on Thursday. “... We felt like offensively we’re starting to hit our stride. Didn’t happen today, so it continues to be a little bit frustrating.”
Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune
