Michael King, Padres get their act together, run away with win over D-backs

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

Published in Baseball

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Michael King eventually got his act together Wednesday night.

The Padres’ offense did, too.

Eventually.

King battled command but gutted his way through six innings, Luis Campusano hit his first home run since returning from the injured list and the Padres pulled away for a 10-4 win to get back to .500 with four games left before the All-Star break.

The Padres dropped two games under .500 after they were blanked on Monday to start the final homestand of the unofficial first half. But they responded with a win behind Germán Márquez’s return to an injury-ravaged rotation on Tuesday and backed King’s quality start on Wednesday by wearing down the Diamondbacks’ pitching staff en route to tying a season high in runs.

They scored once in the third and fourth innings, got a two-run single from Xander Bogaerts in the fifth and opened the floodgates in a four-run sixth that began with Campusano’s fourth home run of the season.

Campusano reached base in his first three plate appearances while batting sixth, his highest start in the order this season.

Singles from Sung-Mun Song, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Jackson Merrill ultimately opened an 8-1 lead and allowed Padres manager Craig Stammen to comfortably turn to his low-leverage relievers for a change in a victory.

“Yeah, yeah, very nice to add on,” Stammen said. “Get the lead and then add on, add on a couple times and get a comfortable lead, where we don’t have to use the back-end leverage guys every time we win.”

Miguel Andujar’s third double drove in the ninth run in the seventh inning and Jase Bowen drove him in with a single for his first big-league RBI.

King allowed just one run on four hits and two walks in six innings. He threw 60 of his 92 pitches for strikes but worked especially hard in the early innings.

That included 26 pitches (15 strikes) while allowing a run in the first inning. Ildemaro Vargas walked on four pitches with one out, swiped second and scored on a 75-mph ball that Gabriel Moreno dumped down the right-field line for a double.

King managed traffic in the second and fourth innings and wasn’t in any real trouble again until the sixth inning of a 4-1 game. A one-out walk to Corbin Carroll put runners on first and second, but King retired the next two hitters, the Padres scored four runs in the bottom of the inning and Stammen’s middle-relief arms took the baton from there.

The effort lowered King’s ERA to 3.41 heading into the All-Star break.

Not bad considering his fight to find feel after missing most of last year with injuries and enduring a five-start slump from the end of May through the middle of June.

“A grind,” King said of his first half. “I don’t know if there was a single game where I felt like I had everything. So hopefully they come in bunches in the second half. But I mean, I think there was some decent results on games that I felt like I didn’t have anything, but ultimately it’s got to be a lot better in the second half.”

A double-play ball minimized the damage that Ron Marinaccio allowed on his fourth homer allowed in his last four games in the seventh inning.

The Padres chased Cabrera in the fifth inning after getting to him for single runs in the third and fourth.

Their first run off the 24-year-old right-hander scored in the third on a tapper up the first base line from Merrill, capping a rally that began with a one-out walk to Song and an infield single from Tatis. Both swiped second and third base, respectively, to set up Merrill’s game-tying groundout.

The next inning, Campusano worked a two-out walk and scored from first when Andujar roped a single into the left-field corner.

The Padres’ hardest hit of the game to that point arrived in the fifth on Bogaerts’ 103-mph single off the glove of a diving Vargas. It might have been a routine double play had Cabrera not balked Tatis and Merrill to second and third base. Perhaps only one runner would have been on base — Tatis, via a pitch off his backside — but Cabrera mistakenly threw to second after looking Tatis back to second on Merrill’s tapper back to the mound.

Tatis slid safely into the bag, and the relay to first base was not in time to get Merrill.

After the balk call on Cabrera and the ejection of Arizona manager Torey Lovullo after an argument with plate umpire Willie Traynor, the infield was drawn in for Bogaerts’ hot shot to the right of Vargas, and both Tatis and Merrill scored when the ball caromed into left field.

Cabrera allowed four runs on four hits and two walks in 4⅓ innings and the Padres piled on against Arizona’s bullpen in slipping ahead of the Diamondbacks in the wild-card race.

“It’s great for the offense, just like that, all cylinders,” Tatis said. “Today was a really beautiful game of baseball for our side, obviously.”

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