San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Friars need to fight off excuses, play through skid
Play through it.
Play through umpire Doug Eddings and his magical mystery tour of the strike zone. Play through Yu Darvish, Chris Paddack and Dinelson Lamet idling in the trainer’s room. Play through the offense flailing to rediscover its big-moment stroke.
The Padres need to play through the exhaustion, the perceived inequities and whatever late-season gut punches the baseball fates deliver.
The fan base seethed about missed calls Friday night by Eddings in a 4-3 loss to the Phillies that sent the Padres tumbling to another loss, the eighth in the last nine games.
In his last two plate assignments involving the Padres, four people wearing brown found themselves shower-bound before game’s end. And it’s true the game last month in Miami seemed a bold reinvention of what constitutes a ball or strike.
Not even Eddings, though, has the power to cause a team to go 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position and leave 12 on base — as the Padres did in the series opener at Petco Park. He cannot influence so fully to explain away the Padres recording just four hits and plating just two of 10 walks.
And he called just one of those last nine games that have pushed the Padres to the canyon’s edge.
Find your motivation, in whatever shape or form it needs to be packaged. Rally around your star, Fernando Tatis Jr., taking a pitch off the helmet. Increase the blood flow over a strike zone in flux. Wallpaper the bulletin board with language that would make Andrew Dice Clay blush.
But play through it. In the last week and a half, the Padres have not gotten close to doing that and their season is in serious jeopardy with three dozen or so games to go. No matter the vow from the Rolling Stones, time is not on your side.
“Why there is frustration with it, there’s a lot of hope, there’s a lot of optimistic views that if we can (find some consistency), we can still achieve our goals we set out to do at the start of this
year,” manager Jayce Tingler said.
Here’s the thing: If you say you’re better than this, as the Padres have for months, you have to prove that’s the case. If you don’t show you’re better than this, well, you’re not.
Yes, the battered starting rotation seems as if it’s gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson in his prime. An offense that once ranked among the very best in baseball has managed to hit just .175 with runners in scoring position during the nine games leading into Saturday. Tatis has missed enough time to tip the winloss scales.
What’s next? Locusts? Guess what. No one cares, starting with those across the field in the opposing dugout. The red-hot Dodgers are coming to Petco next week, nipping at the heels of the NL Westleading Giants. There will be zero sympathy about the smoke billowing from under the Padres’ hood.
“It starts with the starting pitching,” GM A.J. Preller said Saturday, when asked what’s fueling the ill-timed skid. “But when you go through a stretch like we’re going through right now, it’s all phases.
“We feel like we have a team that’s capable of playing deep into October. We haven’t played that way in the last month. We need to turn it around quickly.”
Between the final days of May and Friday, the Padres own a 33-38 record despite an 11-1 run in June. That means they’ve barely kept their noses above .500 for a big portion of the season, even without the late stumbles.
Preller said he maintains belief in the team on the field right now. He expects Darvish back next week and Paddack 10 or so days after that. He thinks that group, buffering Joe Musgrove and Blake Snell, can win.
And there has been fight, to be fair. We saw it on the field Friday, even in a loss. Tingler, as U-T reporter Kevin Acee pointed out, has more ejections (six) than any manager in baseball this season.
But if the Padres don’t sense the clock ticking, they’re the only ones.
“We’re still in a spot where we’re tied for that last playoff spot, so we control our own destiny,” Preller said. “It’s not like a situation where we’re five games back with two weeks left and need a lot of help. But we have to play better.”
Legendary wrestling coach Dan Gable, who won an Olympic gold medal without surrendering a point, drilled his athletes to rip excuses out of the equation by dominating so fully and consistently that a bad call or bad break cannot determine the final outcome.
The Padres’ long-held cushion in the wild-card race has been squandered. A full-on dogfight to the finish awaits. More will go wrong, because it inevitably does.
Play through it. That’s what playoff teams do.
bryce.miller@sduniontribune.com