With eight days before the trade deadline, the San Diego Padres couldn’t crack one of the potential big fish on the market as they fell to the Miami Marlins 3-2 at loanDepot Park.
Sandy Alcantra had his longest start of the season, allowing the Padres (55-47) only two runners in scoring position against him. San Diego left Manny Machado on third in the seventh and Jose Iglesias on second in the eighth against the Miami (48-53) bullpen.
“(Alcantra) was hitting his spots and in command of what he’s doing, I didn’t feel like we were throwing at bats away, I feel like (Alcantra) was making quality pitches and guys were in the competition,” said manager Mike Shildt.
The Miami starter went seven innings and allowed one unearned run off four hits with four strikeouts and no walks to earn his fifth win of the season. After getting rocked for 38 hits and 25 runs over his previous five starts, It was his sixth outing with two or fewer runs allowed.
Jackson Merrill led off the eighth inning against reliever Josh Simpson with a double, his second in as many games and gave him hits in six of his last eight outings. Then Iglesias knocked him in with a pinch-hit bounder into right field to cut the deficit to 3-2, but that would be all as he was left stranded at second after a Fernando Tatis Jr. two-out single.
Meanwhile the Padres got another battling effort from starter Dylan Cease, but the big blow came when Jesús Sánchez worked a fifth inning at bat to hit his ninth home run of the season for what ended up being a decisive pair of runs.
“The walks got him early, we kind of hurt ourselves. We’re playing a lot of games where we don’t have a lot of margin for error and we play a lot of clean games, and today we gave away a little bit too much and it cost us,” Shildt said.
A key difference from the previous start was inability to get batters to chase outside the zone — Marlins batters went for only 17% of such pitches, half the rate of the last outing.
Cease put the first two Marlins aboard on free passes by missing high and low after not allowing a walk last time out for the second time of the season. It led to an early run when Augustín Ramírez shot a single back through the middle after a pair of strikeouts.
After the 28-pitch first inning, he worked his way through the next three throwing 43 and working around a leadoff walk in the third and a two-out double in the fourth.
Trouble came in the fifth when Javier Sanjoa led off by reaching on Machado’s MLB-high 14th error, then Sánchez worked an eight-pitch at bat to club a middle-low knuckle curveball out to right field for a 3-1 Miami lead.
Cease finished with five innings pitched, conceding three runs with two earned off four hits to go with five strikeouts and three walks to take his tenth loss.
“Outside of one game early in Sacramento, and even that game… it wasn’t like he was getting hit all over the ballpark, he’s given us a chance,” Shildt said. “The expectations are high for Dylan, but he’s given us a chance to win a game. We look up and shoot, they score three runs and one was unearned.
“If Dylan can continue to throw the ball (and) keep us in games we’ll reward it more than we typically have to this point of this season.”
Kyle Hart came out of the bullpen and pitched a pair of innings with a pair of strikeouts and a hit, while David Morgan pitched a clean eighth.
Luis Arraez got the Padres on the board in the fourth, reaching for a pitch low and away from the zone and slapping it through the left side for the first hit of the game. After getting to second when catcher Nick Fortes missed on an attempted snap-back pick off throw, Machado singled him home with a rope to left to tie the game.
Machado also had a one-out double in the seventh inning, but the Padres couldn’t bring him home as a Gavin Sheets fly out advanced him to third and Xander Bogaerts flew out.
The loss evened the season series against the Marlins, with the teams winning two of three on their home field. With seven runs in series, it was the third of the last six three-game sets that San Diego was held to fewer than 10 runs (and in two they scored exactly 10) — they’ve been held below that mark in 11 of 28 three-game series this season.
Up next for the Padres is a four-game series in St. Louis and another team in the thick of the playoff race — the Cardinals were 3.5 games behind San Diego for the final National League Wild Card coming into Wednesday. The Redbirds were swept in their three-game set at Arizona out of the All Star break and will play a rubber game at the Colorado Rockies later this afternoon.
Yu Darvish (0-2, 6.08 ERA) is slated to start the series opener for the Padres, while the Cardinals will counter with right-hander Sonny Gray (9-4, 4.04 ERA) for the first pitch scheduled for 4:45 p.m. PDT on Thursday at Busch Stadium. All four games will be broadcast on the Padres Television Network with radio coverage on 97.3 FM KWFN and 860 AM XEMO.