Fernando Tatis Jr., Padres do just enough to beat Cardinals

Jeff Sanders, The San Diego Union-Tribune on May 9, 2026

Published in Baseball

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SAN DIEGO — Fernando Tatis Jr. would like nothing more than to put a ball over the fence like Ty France did — on a 110 mph line — in the fifth inning at Petco Park.

One day. Definitely. Maybe.

On Saturday, he had to settle for a ball finding a patch of grass.

Tatis followed France’s game-tying homer with a soft go-ahead hit, Randy Vásquez turned in another strong effort, Manny Machado added an eighth-inning insurance homer and Mason Miller survived a wild ninth in the San Diego Padres’ 4-2 win over the St. Louis Cardinals in front of a sellout crowd of 41,559.

The Padres have won seven of the eight games started by Vásquez, who rebounded from two sub-par starts (10 2/3 IP, 8 ER) to throw five innings of one-run ball. He struck out six, threw 59 of his 94 pitches for strikes and allowed one run on six hits without walking a batter.

Vásquez had traffic in every inning but the fifth and nearly escaped the fourth inning without damage after inducing a double play after allowing back-to-back singles to Jordan Walker and Nolan Gorman.

But Nathan Church lined a ball to right-center for a run-scoring double to put the pressure on a Padres team that hadn’t gotten a hit since Jackson Merrill’s fourth-inning single on Friday.

The scoreboard had shown for a few innings that the bouncer off JJ Wetherholt’s glove in the second inning, but the official scorer had decided to take that hit away from Xander Bogaerts by the time France had dug in for his fifth-inning at-bat.

The first pitch from Dustin May was then drilled just left of center, 405 feet from the plate, for the Padres’ first hit.

They weren’t done.

Sung-Mun Song walked, Freddy Fermin singled to center and a passed ball put runners on second and third for Tatis.

The ensuing swing on a low-and-away cutter left Tatis’ bat on a 69.4 mph, 40-degree arc bending away from a hard-charging Jordan Walker and toward the right-field foul line.

It dropped in front of Walker as Song and Fermin scored easily to give the Padres a 3-1 lead. Tatis rounded first base aggressively before retreating to first base with a go-ahead single.

Machado’s eighth-inning homer, his 200th as a Padre, arrived after Mason Miller fetched a ground ball to strand Adrián Morejón’s runner on second base. Jeremiah Estrada and Jason Adam followed Vásquez with scoreless frames, but the Cardinals got to Morejón in the eighth with a hit-by-pitch and Ivan Herrera’s run-scoring double.

Morejón stayed in the game to get the left-handed Alec Burleson to ground out to short for the second out and Miller trotted in for his second four-out save of the season.

Miller walked two in the ninth and even loaded the bases on a wild-pitch strikeout with two outs before striking out Wetherhold to lock up his MLB-leading 12th save.

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