Another patchwork pitching performance finishes off Padres' series win over Giants

Kevin Acee, The San Diego Union-Tribune on Aug 2, 2026

Published in Baseball

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SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Padres built a big cushion early Sunday afternoon.

Then they added a run after it got close.

It was just enough on a day they pushed their patchwork pitching staff to its limit.

A 5-4 victory over the San Francisco Giants meant the first half of a pitching parlay paid off.

And it got the Padres within a game of one of the teams directly ahead of them in the playoff chase, and that happens to be the team they are about to visit for four games.

The Padres decided to move Michael King back a day to face the Arizona Diamondbacks, against whom he has a 1.05 ERA in five career starts.

Their stopgap was to employ their stopgap.

The Padres have been for most of the past two weeks cobbling together nine innings at a time with contributions from the 11 pitchers in their bullpen, with King and Walker Buehler the only regular starting pitchers.

Sunday, they turned to three guys who have been central to the plan. And their four-run second inning and another run in the fifth after the Giants got to 4-3 lifted the Padres to their eighth victory in nine games.

But the big lift Sunday was by the assembly line of arms who took the mound.

Long reliever Kyle Hart started for the second time in four days, and the left-hander turned in three scoreless innings on the heels of his 2 2/3 scoreless innings on Wednesday. Former starter JP Sears followed with an inning three days after he pitched 3 2/3 innings. Former starter Griffin Canning worked two innings four days after he threw three.

What Sears and Canning did was not spectacular, but it was serviceable and could accurately be described as gutty.

Sears needed 28 pitches to get through a two-run fourth inning. Many of those pitches were sprayed to places he did not intend them to go, as he walked a batter, hit a batter and allowed two singles.

Canning took over to start the fifth, and it was almost immediately a one-run game after it almost was not.

Osleivis Basabe launched Canning’s sixth pitch, a 3-2 fastball in the heart of the strike zone to deep center field, where Jackson Merrill chased it down, leaped and caught the ball before having it jarred from his glove when his arm hit the wall.

After Osleivis’ second home run and fifth RBI in two games made it 4-3, Canning allowed just a single and got the next six outs.

The Giants did not score against Jeremiah Estrada in the seventh, but Rafael Devers’ two-out home run off Bradgley Rodriguez in the eighth made it a one-run game again.

Jung Hoo Lee followed Devers’ blast to left field with a double that resulted in his being on third base when left fielder Luis Rengifo’s throw bounced past second base.

That prompted manager Craig Stammen to go to left-hander Adrian Morejón, who struck out Willy Adames to end the eighth and earned his second save of the season by finishing off the game.

That all seemed like a long time after the Padres took a 4-0 lead.

Their big second inning began with Ty France looping a broken-bat single into center field and Merrill reaching up to wallop an 0-2 fastball well above the strike zone and sending it 420 feet toward left-center field, where it cleared the wall and bounced off a shade umbrella on the party deck.

With a pair of one-out walks and a two-out walk, Giants starter Landon Roupp loaded the bases. Jake Cronenworth, the previous night’s walk-off hero, then got to a full count.

That had the runners taking off on the next pitch, which Cronenworth hit hard on the ground toward shortstop. Adames dove to stop the ball on the edge of the infield, but he did not have a play. And Xander Bogaerts, who had been on second base, kept running and scored behind Gavin Sheets to make it 4-0.

Roupp struck out Manny Machado with his 39th pitch of the inning.

He would make it to the fifth throwing just 30 more and without allowing a run.

The Giants trailed 4-3 by that point, and Roupp quickly got two outs before the Padres added a run on a single by France, walk by Merrill and single by Luis Campusano that ended Roupp’s day.

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