Padres walk away with win in wild one against Blue Jays

Kevin Acee, The San Diego Union-Tribune on Jul 12, 2026

Published in Baseball

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SAN DIEGO — Saturday’s game needed a designated driver, even though it had sobered up by the end of the night.

It was stumbling from the start of the evening. It got out of control. It crawled at times. It teetered back and forth.

It might have been humorous if it were not such a spectacle.

Two teams seemingly destined to be irrelevant by the end of summer, played a game in which the final score was practically an afterthought.

The details of how the Padres finally put to bed an 8-7 victory with Ty France’s tiebreaking home run and three scoreless innings from the bullpen were footnotes to the game’s dubiously historic beginning.

It was the first game since at least 1901 in which two starting pitchers walked 11 batters while recording 11 or fewer outs and just the fourth game in the Expansion Era (since 1961) in which at least 11 batters walked in the first two innings.

Padres starter Walker Buehler walked four while getting through the first two innings. The Blue Jays’ Trey Yesavage walked seven and got five outs.

The game was tied 4-4 after two.

The Padres went up 6-4 in the third inning and stretched their lead to 7-4 in the fourth.

After three scoreless innings by Matt Waldron, who was activated off the injured list earlier in the day, the Blue Jays tied the game in the top of the sixth on a three-run homer by Vladimir Guerrero Jr. that came against Bradgley Rodriguez.

The Padres went back up in the bottom of the sixth on France’s homer off the fronting of the second balcony of the Western Metal building.

Normality prevailed in the end, as Rodriguez worked a 1-2-3 seventh, Adrian Morejón navigated a leadoff single in the eighth and Mason Miller worked around a leadoff single in the ninth by striking out Guerrero and Kazuma Okamoto and getting George Springer to fly out to deep center field.

All that seemed so long after the incoherence of the first two innings.

The Padres were gifted two runs in the first inning when Yesavage could hardly throw a strike.

The right-hander, in fact, threw just one among his 13 pitches to the first three Padres batters, as he loaded the bases on three walks.

After Manny Machado made an out on a foul ball behind the plate, Gavin Sheets walked to bring in a run and France followed with a sacrifice fly before Jake Cronenworth flied out to end the inning.

Yesavage threw 32 pitches, 11 of them strikes. He would leave an inning later, having thrown 27 more pitches and nine more strikes.

That was after Buehler had succumbed to whatever force field was around the strike zone, walking the first two batters in the second inning before Alejandro Kirk drove in a run with a double, Andrés Giménez tied the game with a groundout to the right side and Jonatan Clase put the Blue Jays up 4-2 with a home run.

Buehler walked two more batters before ending his 44-pitch inning and his outing. His 47% strike ratio was better than the 34% by Yesavage, and Yesavage would help get Buehler off the hook.

So would Machado, who came up with the bases loaded (again on three walks) and two down and drove in two runs with a single that was the Padres’ first hit.

They finished the game with a season-high 11 walks and eight hits, including Sung-Mun Song’s two-out single that drove in two runs in the third and Cronenworth’s RBI single in the fourth.