Tom Krasovic: Padres are down to 'third card or bust' after brutal defeat wraps losing series in Philly
Fernando Tatis Jr. and the Padres lost three of four to the Phillies.
Head down, Manny Machado leaned across the dugout railing Sunday as the nearby Phillies celebrated their 7-6 victory, nearly seven hours after rain had delayed the game’s first pitch.
Machado appeared spent. Wiped out. Exhausto.
As for the Padres’ playoff chances, they stood somewhere between meager and “what playoff chances?” before they lost three consecutive road games to a deep Phillies club whose relentless, gritty offense would harken back to last year’s surge to the World Series.
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Let’s revisit the 87-win threshold for the Padres to claim the National League’s third wild card.
It’ll take a 43-25 sprint to the tape.
Playing .632 baseball across 68 games will take extraordinary energy, considering the hot weather and the pressure of such slim margins.
Certainly in the wake of Sunday’s 12-inning marathon, the Padres will welcome Monday’s open date ahead of a series in Toronto.
The organizationally deeper Phillies (51-42) showed how hard it can be to maintain the type of winning pace the Padres (44-50) will need to sustain.
The Phillies had looked vulnerable in Friday’s series opener. Yu Darvish held them to one run in six innings and the Padres hit four homers. Might the Padres claim the four-game series?
Turned out, the Phillies supplied a valuable clue in the final inning of the 8-3 defeat.
With an assist from Juan Soto clanging a flyball, the Phillies scored twice in the ninth inning and had the bases loaded with one out.
So Bob Melvin had to bring in closer Josh Hader. He got the final two outs. But in the next three games, the Phillies rallied for three victories. And Sunday, they got to Hader.
A problem in the series finale was the Padres tried to beat the surging Phils and ace Zack Wheeler with Jake Cronenworth batting fifth and Brandon Dixon batting eighth.
Cronenworth, who’s having a poor season with the bat, appeared out of sorts earlier in the series. In the first game of Saturday’s doubleheader, he produced three soft outs before choosing to bunt with a runner on second base and none out.
He popped the bunt for a key out.
Sunday, he tried another bunt and popped it out, completing an 0-for-3 day. He’s batting .212 with a .666 OPS.
Dixon is a La Jolla-born, Murrieta-raised 31-year-old who’s played small portions of four big league seasons. His longest run in the majors came with a Tigers team that lost 114 games in 2019.
The power he showed in amassing 23 homers last year in 51 games with Padres affiliates has been mostly a rumor with the big-league club, and the righty appeared overmatched Sunday in taking two ripe fastballs for a third strike and whiffing three times overall. He’s batting .203 with a .573 OPS.
Surfacing whiffs of 2021, when A.J. Preller’s Padres ran out of capable pitching in July, collapsing their playoff bid, the Padres saw weak-link moments in the series serve as a drag against an opportunistic opponent.
No one other than perhaps Peter Seidler should be surprised that Phillies executive Dave Dombrowski has built a deeper and more versatile roster than Preller has.
Dombrowski’s team has overcome a season-ending winter injury to homegrown first-baseman Rhys Hopkins — whose hitting is better than average for the position — and not getting one pitch from Baseball America’s top pitching prospect, Andrew Painter, who was projected to break camp with the team before an arm injury shelved him.
The Padres have no realistic chance of catching the Phillies. They’re falling further behind the Giants 52-41, who are validating their architect Farhan Zaidi’s emphasis on matchup versatility, two years after they won 107 games.
Ah, but in today’s big leagues, it’s extra hard to go fully kaput before August. And in the race for a third wild card, the Padre can take a crumb of solace from a recent development: three teams they’re pursuing – the Diamondbacks, Marlins and Reds – stand winless since the All-Star break.
Who knows? As a warming climate transforms the Southwest into an even hotter furnace and Florida into a more extreme sauna, perhaps the Diamondbacks and Marlins will wear down. The Reds would like to apply ice to their starters’ ERA, which was 5.60 going into Sunday.
Back to the task at hand: The prospect of the Padres’ reaching 87 victories appears fool’s gold unless almost everything falls into place for a team that can’t seem to piece together more than an occasional complete performance.
If nothing else, the Padres are deepening fans’ appreciation of several teams who performed well in the years before Seidler and Preller first teamed up in late 2014.
Three other Padres clubs, in fact, went 43-25. The World Series squads of 1984 and 1998 did it, the latter sustaining a 46-22 (.676) surge.
And, so did the 1989 team that rode the pitching of Bruce Hurst, Ed Whitson and Mark Davis and the offense of Tony Gwynn and Jack Clark, who most assuredly never sang “Kumbaya” together.
Back then, there wasn’t one wild card, much less three of them. For the 2023 Pads, who are short-changing a terrific season by Fernando Tatis Jr., the third card may end being just a mirage, but in what may have felt like an endless season to Machado and friends Sunday, it’s a shimmering speck of hope.
Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune
