The San Diego Padres couldn't hit against the Cardinals last night, and Nick Castellanos couldn't play defense, either.
The San Diego Padres offense has been an ongoing exercise in fits and starts so far this season, and that trend stayed true to form as the Padres dropped the first game of their four-game series against the St. Louis Cardinals, 2-1.
The Padres took the lead right away in this one on a pair of hits in the first inning. Xander Bogaerts once again provided the production after Manny Machado walked and Fernando Tatis Jr. singled him to second, with Bogaerts lining a single to right to score Machado.
Unfortunately, that was as good as it got for the Padres offensively. They tallied just four hits for the night, with the Bogaerts RBI hit and a pair of singles from Tatis being the lone bright spots.
The surprising Cardinals came into this one as contenders in the NL Central, and they showed why after getting behind early. Starter Matthew Libertore was superb, as he threw six innings of three-hit ball with six strikeouts, and a trio of Cardinal relievers shut down the Padres for the final three innings.
The Padres also wasted a fine start by Michael King, whose line was close to a duplicate of Liberatore’s. King did get nicked up on a home run by Alec Burleson in the fourth to tie the game at 1-1, but that was literally the only hit he gave up.
Trouble came calling for the Padres in the seventh, however, courtesy of the ongoing experiment of using Tatis at second. He was fine, but the problem that came with this move was using Nick Castellanos in right, where he had some of the worst defensive outfield metrics in baseball last year.
The Padres inserted Bradgley Rodriguez into the game in the seventh after King’s pitch count climbed to 86, and Jordan Walker quickly doubled off Rodriguez. Masyn Winn hit a drive down the right field line, and it was a ball Tatis in right almost certainly catches.
Not Castellanos. He made the decision to do an all-out dive, and the result was an instant triple when his dive failed. That drove home what provide to be the winning run, but manager Craig Stammen defended his decision to use Castellanos in right.
“We’re trying to score runs,” Stammen said in a piece written by AJ Cassavell of MLB.com. “You want to play offense. You want to play offense early, get ahead, then you can put your defense in late. That’s kind of the way I look at it. You just can’t have both at all times.
“He went for it. That’s what we want our players to do. We want them to go for it. We want them to play with freedom.”
Playing with freedom is fine if you have the talent to back it up, but Castellanos doesn’t have that defensively. It was a poor alignment that cost San Diego the game, and now they have the same record as the Cardinals at 22-15.