Reds walk off on reeling Padres with 11th-inning home run
The Reds’ Will Benson, right, is tagged out at first base by Jake Cronenworth.
This is a group acutely aware actual victories are needed. Many of them.
The Padres’ desperation to achieve those victories can perhaps explain some of the strange ways this season has crumbled.
What they were trying to grasp in the still, quiet aftermath of a 7-5 walk-off loss to the Reds in 11 innings on Friday night was hope.
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It was a fleeting solace.
“I think we found something that we’ve been looking for,” Manny Machado said. “We didn’t get the ‘W’ today, but I think overall — I don’t know. It (expletive) sucks. It sucks.”
But neither was it nothing for a team that had acknowledged it wasn’t responding the way it needed to in games like what went down Friday at Great American Ball Park.
“The fight, definitely, that we put out there,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said.
A single win is required before the Padres can think about piling up the numerous victories they need to make this season matter the way it was supposed to.
So they held a meeting Friday afternoon in the visitors’ clubhouse at Great American Ball Park in which a handful of the team’s leaders spoke and reiterated many of the themes expressed in previous team meetings but also parlayed the midpoint of the season as a chance to reset and refine a focus they have recently acknowledged has not been consistently present.
“The only game that matters is today’s game and don’t get bogged down with yesterday’s game or the game before or whatever,” manager Bob Melvin said before Friday’s game. “Where we are, just go out there and really try to concentrate on that particular game, that particular at-bat and focus all our energy on that.”
That was all the Padres’ accomplished in the opener of their three-game series against the leaders of the National League Central.
It didn’t result in a victory. But all they could do was believe it resulted in something.
“We left it on the field,” Machado said. “I think that’s the biggest thing. We said we were gonna play nine innings. Today we played 11, and we left it all out there. They just came back and took it from us.”
With two hits and two fly ball outs, the Padres tied the game 2-2 in the ninth inning. It was the kind of manufacturing and kind of late rally they have not produced often this season.
They scored in the 10th inning and again in the 11th, something they had done just once in the seven previous extra innings they had played.
But they lost a sixth consecutive game after the Reds tied the game in the 10th with two runs off Ray Kerr and won with three runs against Drew Carlton in the 11th, the final two on Spencer Steer’s two-out homer.
It was the eighth time the Padres have been walked off this season and dropped them to 0-7 in extra innings.
“I mean, I feel like this game was one of the best games that we played,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said. “And just not having the end result that we wanted … it’s a punch straight to the face or straight to the (groin), however you want to call it.”
Kerr and Carlton were the pitchers in extra innings because closer Josh Hader had worked the bottom of the ninth to keep the game tied.
The Padres went up 4-2 in the top of the 10th on an RBI single by Tatis and RBI double by Juan Soto. The Reds’ Matt McLain tied the game with a two-out, two-run homer off Kerr in the bottom of the inning.
Bogaerts began the 11th on second base and scored on Sánchez’s one-out single. The Padres could not add on, which meant they entrusted the slimmest of margins to a rookie who had faced just four batters in a high-leverage situation in his career.
With Jonathan India beginning the bottom of the 11th on second base, Elly De La Cruz lined a double to right-center field to tie the game, moved to third on Kevin Newman’s sacrifice bunt and beat a throw home on Nick Senzel’s grounder to Bogaerts at shortstop.
But De La Cruz was called out because his hand was prevented from touching the plate by Padres catcher Gary Sánchez’s foot. A replay challenge, with the Reds contending Sánchez had blocked the plate, confirmed there was no violation.
Three pitches later, Steer hit his 13th homer of the season and first career walk-off homer.
That followed the Padres having tied the game in the ninth when Bogaerts led off with a single through the left side, and Jake Cronenworth laid down a bunt single before both moved up on successive fly ball outs to the warning track. Sánchez’s drive to the wall in left field got Bogaerts to third, and Matt Carpenter’s sacrifice fly to left field allowed Bogaerts to amble home.
It was Reds’ closer Alexis Diaz’s first blown save in 23 chances this season.
Hader, pitching for the first time in 10 days, struck out three of the four batters he faced in the bottom of the ninth. He was finished, because he has not pitched more than one inning in a regular season game since 2020 and hasn’t pitched two full innings in a game since ‘19.
The Padres are also down Steven Wilson due to a pectoral strain and had to use Nick Martinez to finish the seventh inning and navigate the eighth after the Reds took a 2-1 lead with an unearned run in the sixth off starter Seth Lugo and a home run off Brent Honeywell in the seventh.
Trent Grisham hit a home run in a second consecutive game and was charged with his second error of the season.
One gave the Padres a 1-0 lead, one extended an inning and contributed to the Reds tying the game 1-1.
Lugo did not allow a hit until the fourth inning and finished having allowed just an unearned run on five hits in six innings, the longest of his three outings since a stay on the injured list rehabbing a left calf strain.
After Grisham led off the sixth inning with a home run, Lugo was a seemingly a routine catch from leaving the game with a 1-0 lead.
Lugo struck out McLain and Jonathan India, and it appeared he would get out of the sixth inning on a fly ball to left-center field by De La Cruz, the cleanup hitter. Soto ran 80 feet to his left, calling for the ball and holding out his bare hand toward a charging Grisham, who sprinted 96 feet from center field and only at the last instant pulled up as the ball fell between the pair and Cruz bounded to second base.
The next batter, Jake Fraley, flared a single over second baseman Rougned Odor to tie the game.
“It’s tough,” Lugo said. “I thought we played a good game, though. I think tonight’s game is something we can build off of and bring that tomorrow and the next day, and I think we’ll have some good results.”
Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune
