Yankee fans know how it feels to give up a big home run to Freeman, and wouldn’t you know it, Nestor Cortes is now a Padre.
More disturbing than the losses was the fact the Padres starting pitching could not go anywhere near the distance. The first game was started by reliever Wandy Peralta, the second game Dylan Cease walked the first three batters he faced and could not make it out of the fourth inning.
Darvish only went four innings. The Padres clawed their way back from that 4-0 deficit to tie the game at 4-4, only to lose it because Mookie Betts, who had been in a terrible slump, hit a leadoff home run in the bottom of the eighth off Robert Suarez so it was the Padres bullpen that failed on Sunday, not the struggling Dodgers bullpen.
“Finally I did something good for the boys,’’ Betts said.
Padres analyst Mark Grant warned Suarez who fell behind 2-0, saying, “Try to keep the fastball away. Got to keep it down though.’’
Instead it was middle-in, on a tee.
A top talent evaluator told me earlier in the week, “I’ve never seen so many home runs hit on 0-2 pitches right down the middle as I have seen this year. It’s a lack of focus, a lack of command, a lack of work.’’
And by work, he means the kind of work where pitchers had the common sense to waste a pitch – and also worked at command so they could place the waste pitch where they wanted to place it to set up the next pitch.
And fans old enough to remember, people like me, and people like the talent evaluator, remembered that there was a time pitchers would be fined for giving up 0-2 hits and really fined for giving up 0-2 home runs.
Those “Accountability Days’’ are long gone in baseball.