HR WELL WORTH WAIT
Cronenworth delivers three-run blast in 10th as Padres win third straight and take season series over Brewers
Could be that there is something to the resilience this team keeps showing.
Seven days after they arrived in St. Louis tired and four days after they departed there having been swept by the Cardinals and three days after they dropped a season-high fourth straight game when their closer couldn’t close, the Padres finished the first third of the season with another galvanizing victory.
They continued to get excellent starting pitching — this time from two of them — and also put together a rare pair of big innings, the second of which got them past the Brewers for a 6-4 win Sunday afternoon at American Family Field.
With the season exactly one-third over, the Padres are 33-21, owners of the major leagues’ fifth-best record.
“We’re 50-some games in now,” said Jake Cronenworth, who has driven in seven runs over the past two games. “Whether you want to say that’s too long or not enough time, whatever it is, I think guys are starting to settle in and we’re playing like the team we are now.”
Cronenworth’s second home run in two days was a big one — a three-run blast in the 10th inning off Trevor Gott. Taylor Rogers allowed a run in the 10th but completed his 18th save, which tied him with Milwaukee’s Josh Hader for the major league lead.
The Padres’ third straight victory gave them the season series (4-3) over the National League Central leaders.
They had feasted on a collection of losing teams for much of the season’s first month and a half. In 13 games against teams with winning records over the past 2½ weeks, they are 7-6.
They returned home after Sunday’s game to host three games against the NL East-leading Mets,
who just split four games at Dodger Stadium and have the major leagues’ secondbest record.
And the Padres would arrive back in San Diego with affirmation.
“As the season is going, we are getting better,” Jurickson Profar said. “We have been playing really good defense and pitching (well) since the beginning of the season, but the bats were kind of slow. But I think right now, we know what we can do. They tied the game right there and we put up three. That’s the kind of offense that that we believe we have.”
The two innings in which the Padres scored Sunday were their 20th and 21st times scoring three or more runs in an inning this season, something they have still done less frequently than all but three teams.
“As a collective group, since the beginning of the year, this is probably the best at-bats we had one through nine from everybody — against really, really good pitching,” Cronenworth said of the four games here.
The Brewers starters in this series had a combined 2.63 ERA before facing the Padres, who scored 21 runs in the series and 13 against starting pitchers.
Against left-hander Eric Lauer, who pitched for them in 2018 and ’19, the Padres went down quickly in the first inning Sunday and squandered opportunities in the next three innings before
taking a 3-1 lead in the fifth.
Trent Grisham’s double leading off the fifth inning was the Padres’ 13th extrabase hit of the series — after they had just 12 in the previous eight games. It was Grisham’s third double of the series and sixth extra-base hit in 13 games — after he had just eight extra-base hits in his first 39 games.
Grisham would have run into the inning’s first out had shortstop Pablo Reyes not made an error that instead left runners at the corners. Grisham scored when Profar blooped a single into shallow right. Cronenworth followed with a single through the right side that scored Jose Azocar. Luke Voit’s groundout to third scored Profar, who had advanced
two bases on Cronenworth’s single.
With Azocar on second to start the 10th, Profar singled to move Azocar up 90 feet.
“Runner on third, nobody out, just trying to get that guy in any way possible,” said Cronenworth, who has raised his OPS 52 points (to .654) over the past two games. “If I do get a pitch that I can drive, I can do something with, like I did, even better.”
An offensive awakening, especially one partially fueled by Cronenworth and Grisham, is something the Padres have needed.
But they remain a team whose strength is without question the arms of the seven pitchers who have regularly started games for them.
Officially, Padres starting
pitchers allowed two runs in 23 innings during the four games here.
That included the run the Brewers scored in the fifth inning Thursday against Sean Manaea and Kolten Wong’s leadoff homer Sunday against Mike Clevinger. It did not include the tworun, game-tying homer Wong hit off Nick Martinez in Sunday’s eighth inning, as he had come out of the bullpen at the start of the fourth inning to relieve Clevinger.
Between the Brewers’ runs in the first and final games, Joe Musgrove had a no-hitter going for 72⁄3 innings and finished with eight scoreless innings Friday and MacKenzie Gore threw six scoreless innings Saturday.
The Padres entered Sunday having gotten at least six innings from their starting pitcher in 10 consecutive games, the club’s longest streak since 2011.
An 11th straight game was highly unlikely, as Clevinger had not pitched in a game since May 17 and was coming off a 15-day stay on the IL with a right triceps strain.
The suspense of whether the Padres would throw a third consecutive shutout was put to rest two pitches into Clevinger’s day when Wong turned a sinker down and in and sent it a projected 390 feet over the wall in right field.
Clevinger took 60 pitches to get through his three innings but did not allow another hit.
“I felt uncalibrated the first inning and then I started zoning in, and by the time the third hit, I felt like I was back to where I was the previous start,” Clevinger said. “Then I ran up against the pitch count.”
Martinez, who began the season in the rotation and had started twice in Clevinger’s absence, allowed a single to the first batter he faced before retiring 13 of the next 14 batters to get through the seventh inning. An infield single by Reyes started the eighth, and Wong hit a 2-1 fastball off the facing at the bottom of the second deck of seats beyond right field.
“I felt great,” Martinez said. “I just yanked that fastball.”
Padres relievers threw just 10 innings in the series, and they were the one Rogers meltdown from a sweep and a winning road trip.
They are 6-3 in extra innings, the majors’ most extra-innings victories and the sixth-best record in extras. They are 16-10 in games decided by one or two runs, the fifth-best record in such games. Sunday was also their 14th comeback victory, second most in the majors.
“To have to come back and after a 3-1 lead and then have to come back again and fight even harder,” manager Bob Melvin said. “I mean, these guys have been doing it all year. Times when it looks bleak, these guys seem to come back and find a way to win a game. To finish off winning three out of four here against a really good team after losing three in a row (in St. Louis), just kind of the same theme this year, in that when it looks hardest these guys play even harder.”