The San Diego Padres are getting bad pitching and minimal hitting, which is the opposite of a winning formula.
The San Diego Padres are playing some lackluster baseball so far this season, and once again the starting rotation took center stage in the worst way possible as starter German Marquez got hit hard by the San Francisco Giants, with the Giants sending the 1-4 Padres deeper into an early-season slump with their 9-3 win.
The back-to-back struggles of starters Walker Buehler and Marquez isn’t exactly unexpected. Both pitchers were close to being waiver-wire pickups with injury histories, but now they’re mainstays in the Padres rotation.
Manager Craig Stammen has seen this sort of thing before during his career as a reliever, and it didn’t take him long to identify the specific problem.
“You could tell right away he didn’t have his breaking ball, and that’s his bread and butter,” Stammen said in a piece written by AJ Cassavell of MLB.com.
Marquez put the Padres behind early, giving up a home run to Willy Adames in the first as part of a three-run Giants rally, then another to Matt Chapman in the third that left the Padres down 4-0.
San Diego fought back with a three-run rally to close the gap, but the Giants broke through again with a four-run inning against spot starter/long reliever Kyle Hart, and after that the Padres’ pop-gun offense made the eventual outcome a foregone conclusion.
A suspect managerial decision by Stammen may have cost the Padres a chance to keep this one close. Hart pitched two crisp, clean innings when he initially stepped in for Marquez, but being asked to add a third frame proved to be the reliever’s undoing.
“The role and the innings and the ups and downs, those were all well within what we had discussed,” Hart said. “There was no surprise. I was really excited to go back out for the [sixth]. … I felt great. Just didn't make pitches.”
Stammen defended his decision, but he really didn’t have much of a choice. The lack of a real rotation is stretching the entire staff thin, and in that scenario the matchups don’t matter much, even with Giants DH Rafael Devers on deck to possibly face Hart as Adames came to the plate during San Francisco's sixth-inning rally.
“I wanted him to face Devers, and Kyle had been pitching really well up until that point,” Stammen said. “I just felt like he was the guy at that moment. Hindsight is 20-20.”
Not much is going right for Padres right now, and the offense is part of the problem as well. Last night Stammen gave outfielder Ramon Laureano the night off, despite the fact that Laureano and center fielder Jackson Merrill are the only two Padres who are consistently hitting.
It’s hard to make good choices and win games with bad starting pitching and minimal hitting, and San Diego will send Nick Pivetta to the mound on getaway day today as they hope to get a win and avoid a three-game sweep.