The San Diego Padres celebrated their wild card berth, and they helped knock out Arizona in the process.
The San Diego Padres are heading to the playoffs, and they helped make sure the Arizona Diamondbacks won’t be going with them with a 9-4 win that knocked the Dbacks out of the playoffs.
Two things had to go right for Arizona to make it as the third wild card, and one of them was a win over San Diego that the Padres made sure wan’t happening. The Pdres rested most of their regulars, but they still scored single runs in the third, fourth and fifth innings to take a 3-0 early lead.
Manny Machado singled home the first run in his brief cameo, and Gavin Sheets hit a solo homer for the second off Arizona starter Michael Soroka. Ty France got the third run home with an RBI single, but after that the scoring started in earnest.
Both teams scored a run in the sixth and three in the seventh inning as a slugfest suddenly broke out. The Diamondbacks got their big hits from Ketel Marte, Corbin Carroll and Tim Tawa, while the Padres mostly got their RBIs from Freddy Fermin, who doubled and singled to drive in three, with Jake Cronenworth drawing a bases-loaded walk to get the fourth run home.
That made it 7-4, but Arizona ran out of gas offensively after that, and the Padres added two more runs in the eighth on a two-run RBI single from Dustin Hays to finish off the scoring and account for the final 9-4 margin.
The initial pitching hero was Randy Vasquez, who pitched six innings of three-hit, one-run ball to go with a pair of strikeouts. Griffin Canning struggled in the three innings he pitched after that, but the Padres offense picked him up to get him the win despite Canning giving up three runs on five hits and a walk.
It was a celebratory day for the Padres, but not so much for the Dbacks. They also needed the Philadelphia Phillies to lose to the Tampa Bay Rays, but the Phillies piled up a big lead early in parallel with what the Padres were doing to them, so the scoreboard watching didn’t provide cause for hope in the late innings.
The Padres now await the arrival of the Chicago Cubs on Tuesday night to start their wild-card series, and San Diego will be seeing revenge for last year’s 2-1 Cubs series win as the Padres simply couldn’t score enough runs to win.
