The San Diego Padres had a nice bounce-back win against the Angels last night that featured fine pitching throughout.
The San Diego Padres lost their eight-game winning streak on Friday night against the Los Angeles Angels, but they weren’t about to let things start to go the other way. The Padres bounced back with a strong performance last night that featured a shutout start by German Marquez, some late scoring and the usual fine bullpen work.
It’s a winning formula we’ve seen before, but starter German Marquez is relatively new to this sort of thing. He shut down the powerful Angels lineup with 5-2/3 innings of shutout baseball as he matched zeroes with his Anaheim counterpart, Yusei Kikuchi.
Both starters were gone by the end of the sixth inning, though, which made it a bullpen game. The Padres don’t lose many of those, and relievers Adrian Morejon, Jason Adam and Mason Miller combined to limit the Angels to one run the rest of the way as the San Diego offense finally got cranked up. Miller did give up a hit and a walk in the ninth, but his scoreless innings streak remains intact at 31-/2 innings as he notched his seventh save of the young season.
“We felt good about our bullpen,” said manager Craig Stammen in a piece written by AJ Cassavell of MLB.com. “And we felt good about our offense at the end of games.”
The offense wasn’t flashy, but it was more than enough to get the job done. The Padres plated two in the eighth and two more in the ninth, with Fernando Tatis Jr. leading the way with a pair of RBI singles. Ramon Laureano continued his strong early surge with an RBI single of his own to go with a run-scoring sacrifice fly. The Padres victimized relievers Ryan Zeferjahn and Nick Sandlin, both of whom have struggled mightily in the early going.
Contrast that with the performance of the Padres relievers, and this one was really no contest after the sixth. The Angels’ lone run scored on an RBI single from Nolan Schanuel, but the Halos managed just five other hits. They also kept Mike Trout at bay, which isn’t easy to do these days.
This game also featured a pair of unusual plays for the Padres. One was yet another incident of home-run robbery by center fielder Jackson Merrill, who’s becoming a regular at this sort of thing.
Merrill snatched back a potential homer by Yoan Moncada in the second inning, which was a big play given the lack of early scoring. Merrill has now matched his Angels counterpart, right fielder Jo Adell, in this department, although Adell did accomplish his feat in a single game.
Another astounding play that deserves to be mentioned happened to Jake Cronenworth, who was hit in the chin in the fifth inning on a Kikuchi fastball. Remarkably, Cronenworth not only managed to stay in the game, but he reached base four times as he drew two critical walks in the late-inning rallies.
“He’s a hockey player, and he didn’t lose any teeth,” said Stammen. “So he had to stay in the game. That was the rule. He took one off the chin, literally, and toughed it out, and then stayed in the game, made some plays for us.”
The rubber game of the series will pit Michael King of the Padres against the Angels’ Reid Detmers, which could be another fine pitching duel.