Failed bunts haunt Padres as latest skid hits six games
Channel: My ChaNneL
Date: 2018-08-03

eic Lauer recovered after an early home run buried the Padres. His bullpen followed him with six scoreless innings. There’s no telling how many more they would have needed for the NL’s lowest-scoring team snap what’s now a six-game losing streak.

The Giants’ Gorkys Hernandez led off the 12th inning Monday night at Petco Park with a solo homer in a 5-3 loss that rang especially hollow given San Diego’s abundance of wasted opportunities at the plate.

The Padres stranded nine runners.

They went 0-for-9 with runners in scoring position.

Three times they failed to get bunts down in key spots.

The last was Austin Hedges’ failed attempt at a suicide squeeze with runners on first and third and one out in the 11th.

But Sam Dyson’s 93 mph two-seamer ran in on Hedges’ hands, the bunt bounced swiftly in the pitcher’s glove instead of up the first base line and Carlos Asuaje struck out with runners on second and third to end the threat.

A half inning later, Hernandez deposited an 0-1 change-up into the second deck in left to start a two-run rally that sent the Padres to their second six-game skid this month.

“I've always been a good bunter,” said Hedges, who’d already doubled, singled and score a run in helping the Padres tie the game by the eighth inning. “Any time we have a chance to win the game like that, I have confidence in myself to do that or drive the run in swinging, too.

“It just didn't work out.”

The bunt, Hedges said, was his call.

He went to the plate expecting to swing away but switched gears when Dyson’s first offering – a 94 mph sinker – caught the inside of the plate for strike one. The Padres’ 25-year-old catcher won a game last September in Colorado with a well-timed squeeze with runners on first and third.

“The first pitch being called a strike definitely set us back,” Hedges said. “It wasn't necessarily a good pitch. If that's Ball 1, I think that puts us in the driver's seat to drive that run in. The fact that it was 0-1, I was still confident to put the bunt down.

“It wasn't the best bunt. It's kind of the way it's going right now.”

Clearly.

With a runner on second and no outs in the fifth, Cory Spangenberg opted to bunt for a base hit as a pinch-hitter for Lauer and didn’t reach. The 11th inning started with Strahm whiffing on three bunt attempts after Christian Villanueva led off with a single. Then Villanueva, at third base on Freddy Galvis’ one-out single, didn’t break for the plate when Hedges’ bunt touched down on the third base side of the diamond.

In between all that, Hunter Renfroe hit his eighth homer, Eric Hosmer extended his hitting streak to seven games with a two-hit effort and the bullpen turned in six scoreless innings, but it was Hedges’ last attempt at a bunt that cast the biggest shadow over the second six-game losing streak this month.

“It stings, I think, all the way around,” Padres manager Andy Green said. “Lauer gives up the three-run homer early in the game and manages to get through five and then our bullpen is lights out for the next five or six innings. A lot of guys did a lot of really good things today. We put ourselves in a good position in that inning with the first and third situation.”

Yet the third-year skipper deferred to Hedges’ judgment over second-guessing his fourth-year big leaguer.

“In that situation you have a player with the ability to do both,” Green said. “You're just going to turn him loose to do both in the same situation.”

The really good stuff came from the bullpen.

Jose Castillo and Kirby Yates each turned in two scoreless frames, Craig Stammen turned in one and Strahm had added another when Hernandez opened the 12th with the go-ahead homer. The Giants added another run when Buster Posey’s pop fly to left field with runners on the corners fell in between Wil Myers, Manuel Margot and Galvis.

The finish to Lauer’s start helped curtail one disturbing trend: the worst month for Padres starting pitching in the Petco Park era.

He allowed all three runs on d’Arnaud’s second-inning blast before turning in three scoreless innings to close his start, slightly lowering the rotation’s July ERA to 7.11.

Briefly a Padre last year, d’Arnaud turned on an inside, 0-1 cutter after Brandon Crawford and Austin Slater opened the inning with back-to-back singles.

Lauer finished with three strikeouts, seven hits and three walks scattered over the 101-pitch start. His first walk – to Evan Longoria in the first inning – was erased via his 10th pickoff, four more than the next-best pickoff artist in the majors.