PADRES AVOID SWEEP
No one has been better with RISP and two outs since start of 2019 than Hosmer, who delivers twice Sunday
Eric Hosmer drives in Padres’ first three runs, leading to a 5-2 win over the Dodgers.
The Dodgers played an almost flawless series, made almost every play and seemed headed toward a series sweep that would have made it feel as if the Padres were still very far away from where they want to be.Then the defending World Series champions gave their hosts a gift. And Eric Hosmer didn’t let it go to waste.
His single in the eighth in- ning drove in the go-ahead run in the eighth inning, and the Padres held on for a 5-2 victory that prevented them from going winless in the first series of the year against the team they can now legitimately claim is a rival.
“I don’t know if I could have said that my first couple years here, but there certainly is a rivalry now to this series and against that team,” Hosmer said. “It’s just the start of it. It’s going to be fun all year, getting to play those guys. To get to where we want to go, we understand it’s going to go through them. We welcome the challenge, and this was a good first start.”
No errors, excellent pitching, timely hitting. And what do you know? The Padres halted a sevengame losing streak against the Dodgers that encompassed the first two games of this series, the final two games they played last regular season and the three-game sweep the Dodgers scored in the National League Division Series.
“We just understand we’ve got to play great baseball against these guys,” Hosmer said. “We can’t afford to give mistakes. … We’ve got to make sure we’re playing good baseball. That was proved in the playoffs last year as well. We know we’ve got to be on the top of our game to beat those guys.”
The Dodgers’ fatal mistake Sunday was shortstop Corey Seager’s throw wide of first base, which allowed
Jurickson Profar to reach base at the start of the eighth inning. Between two pop-outs, Fernando Tatis Jr. worked a full-count walk.
Hosmer, one of the few Padres doing well with runners in scoring position this season, grounded a 1-0 change-up from Dennis Santana up the middle and into center field, sending Profar home and Tatis to third.
“It’s … who he is,” manager Jayce Tingler said. “We ask all our guys to be themselves, and Hos is, in my
opinion, as good as anyone in the game in those moments.”
In 100 at-bats with runners in scoring position with two outs since the start of the 2019 season, Hosmer has 42 hits. That’s a .420 average, and it has resulted in his driving in 79 runs. It is also the best such mark in the majors in that span.
“I just want to be in those situations,” Hosmer said. “I picture myself in those moments.”
After a review showed Tatis had erroneously been called out at third, Tommy Pham drilled his first extrabase hit of the season, a double to the left-field corner that scored two more.
The win followed two losses that had the Padres frustrated and the Dodgers looking like they could practically run away with the National League West before the season really got going.
The Dodgers, who at 13-3 have started the season better than any defending World Series champion in history, appear to be exactly what they were expected to be.
The Padres (10-7) on Sunday kept alive the belief they might soon be as well.
“We knew what they were coming in,” said Chris Taylor, whose second-inning home run was pretty much the entirety of the Dodgers’ offense. “We know they are very talented. They have some good pitchers. We knew every game was going
to be a battle, so I don’t think I learned anything new about them. It was a good, hard-fought series and that’s pretty much what we expected.”
As has been the story much of the season, it just took the Padres a while to make it happen.
They entered the day 21for-115 (.183) with runners in scoring position over their previous 13 games and began Sunday by going 1-for-6 before Hosmer and Pham capitalized in the eighth.
The one hit: Hosmer’s seventh-inning double that scored Manny Machado to tie the game 2-2.
“Especially in games like
this against the Dodgers, we know with the pitching matchups we had all weekend it’s going to come down to one or two hits that decide the games,” said Hosmer, who is 10-for-22 with runners in scoring position this season. “… I try to lock in that much more in the moment and try to do whatever I can to produce for the team.”
The Padres had been close in both of the series’ first two games.
They lost the opener after leaving runners at third base in two extra innings. The second game ended with two runners in scoring position when Mookie Betts made an improbable diving catch in
center field.
The defeats were all-themore agonizing because proximity to the Dodgers is no longer the aim. Sunday allowed them to at least look back with a concrete belief they had pushed the Dodgers.
“It was a good first series against them,” Hosmer said. “Each game could have gone either way. … We didn’t win this series, but we certainly felt that we were playing good baseball until one or two certain plays or innings.”
Sunday’s battle of Cy Young winners belonged to the Dodgers’ Trevor Bauer, if only by a bit.
The top pitcher in the National
League last season allowed one run in six innings. Of the three hits he gave up, two were by Machado, who is 11-for-19 against Bauer in their career meetings. The other was a home run by Jake Cronenworth that sliced the Padres’ deficit to 2-1 in the fourth inning.
Snell, the American League Cy Young winner in 2018, followed up his 38-pitch, two-out start Tuesday in Pittsburgh by going five innings Sunday. Both hits he allowed came on successive pitches, a single by Will Smith and then Taylor’s blast.
While Sunday’s clutch hitting was a rarity, the Padres’ clutch pitching has come to be expected.
After yielding the 443-foot homer to Taylor on a firstpitch fastball, Snell retired 11 of the final 13 batters he faced. And four relievers — Austin Adams, Keone Kela, Craig Stammen and Mark Melancon — shut down the Dodgers the rest of the way.
After Taylor’s homer, the Dodgers were 1-for-24 with 13 strikeouts.
“I think you have to give credit to those guys,” Roberts said. “We got Snell out of there after the fifth, but he had a lot of punchouts. He was obviously really good through five. And they matched us up, and their pen did a nice job. … It’s a hungry group. I think they’ve looked at us and want to take us down in the National League West, and they’re talented. They can pitch. Lot of talent over there.”