LINEUP SHAKEUP DOESN’T SHAPE UP
Bob Melvin chuckled. There was no science to the decision. No rhyme, just a flier of a reason.
“I’m just trying to shake it up a little bit today, plain and simple,” Melvin said.
In an attempt to get his two struggling sluggers going, the Padres manager made a relatively blatant shift in his lineup Thursday by batting Manny Machado fifth in what turned out to be a 5-2 loss to the Cubs.
It was the first time since 2015 Machado batted that low and the first time this season he batted anywhere but second or third.
“We’re just trying to win,” said Machado, who homered in his first at-bat Thursday, singled his second time up and finished 2-for-4. “It doesn’t really matter. Whatever it is to get us going offensively. As hitters, as a team, as baseball players, we just kind of get into a routine of just seeing the same thing and doing the same thing every day, every single day, every single day. So changing up the lineup like that kind of just mixes things up, kind of loosens up the mojo.”
While Machado hit his first homer in 44 at-bats and had his first multi-hit game since April 9, it was likely he would have done so hitting anywhere. He hit the ball hard his final two at-bats Wednesday.
“I think Manny is close,” Xander Bogaerts said Thursday morning. “He shifted his approach the last two at-bats last night. He’s going to go off. Something in his mindset was a little different.”
To make Machado, who is now batting .225 with a .583 OPS, fit at fifth Melvin put left-handed hitting Jake Cronenworth in the lead-off spot and dropped Fernando Tatis Jr. a spot to second and leftyhanded-hitting Juan Soto a spot to third. (Soto’s single in his final at-bat made him 1for-12 in the series and left his batting average at .183.) Bogaerts, the only Padres player with a batting average above .256 or OPS above .731, remained in the cleanup spot.
“I love our lineup with Tati leading off and Juan two and Manny three, Bogey four, and I think that’s where we’ll settle in,” Melvin said after the game. “But we were just trying to shake it up a little bit today and see if a change of scenery helped us out offensively.”
Tough luck, bad pitch
Seth Lugo took a stepand-a-half toward the dugout. He thought he had ended the second inning.
“Yeah, I tried walking to the dugout,” he recalled after the game.
But the inning was just beginning.
Lugo’s 2-2 curveball bent across the outside corner of the plate against Cubs batter
Eric Hosmer and seemingly should have been the third strike and complete the inning’s third out. Instead, Hosmer got another chance and took advantage of sinker left at the top of the zone to hit a solo homer.
“I feel like I didn’t lose my focus,” Lugo said. “I think we picked the wrong pitch there.”
Before getting out of the inning, Lugo would give up a home run to the next batter,
Nelson Velazquez and graze the elbow guard of the next batter, Nick Madrigal, with a curveball before being victimized by a pop fly that fell for an RBI single when center fielder Trent Grisham lost it in the sun.
For the record, home plate umpire Gabe Morales was inconsistent throughout the game. But within that inconsistency, he gave Padres batters three calls on pitches clearly inside the zone. But none of them hit a home run afterward.
Off and running
All it took was getting on base.
Ha-Seong Kim quadrupled his stolen base total in the past two days.
After stealing one base through his first 23 games, he stole second base twice on Wednesday and once on Thursday.
“Going into the season I was looking forward to being aggressive on the basepaths,” said Kim, who raised his batting average to .215 last night. “But obviously I haven’t been able to get a lot of opportunities being on base.”
Kim was batting .197 with a .274 on-base percentage heading into Wednesday’s game. He was 2-for-3 with a walk on Wednesday and 1for-3 with a walk on Thursday.