Padres return to form after delay, take series from Guardians
Published in Baseball
CLEVELAND — The Padres, for all intents and purposes, took Saturday night off.
Sunday, they had to wait to get back to work.
Then they won, same as most days the past three weeks.
A 5-0 victory over the Guardians, which maintained for the Padres their standing in playoff position, had a little bit of a lot of things.
It began with a weather delay of three hours, 11 minutes and began just 10 minutes before it would have become a night game instead of a day game.
Casey Mize worked six innings for the second straight start. Luis Rengifo and Gavin Sheets hit the Padres first back-to-back home runs of the season, and Jase Bowen and Jake Cronenworth homered late. Bowen made a diving catch that almost certainly saved a run and extended Mize’s outing. The Padres did also miss a prime opportunity to make the game more comfortable.
They also made it through the series without using closer Mason Miller after resting him and Adrian Morejón in their 7-5 victory Friday and not having any reason to use them in Saturday’s 6-1 loss.
Jeremiah Estrada navigated a two-out walk in the seventh. Morejón worked a 1-2-3 eighth. Miller was warming up when Cronenworth homered in the ninth, so he sat down and Yuki Matsui got up and finished off the game.
The Padres led almost from the start of their 17th victory in their past 22 games, a .772 winning percentage that makes them the winningest team in the major leagues since July 24.
After the first five batters were retired by Guardians starter Tanner Bibee, Luis Rengifo and Gavin Sheets sent balls just beyond the wall in successive at-bats to put the Padres up 2-0.
Jackson Merrill’s leadoff walk and aggressive baserunning led to a 3-0 lead in the third inning. Merrill got to second because he was running on the 2-1 pitch Rengifo grounded to first base, got to third on a wild pitch and scored on Xander Bogaerts’ two-out single.
The Padres had a chance to add on in the top of the sixth but failed to get a run after loading the bases with one out.
Mize, relatively speaking, labored through the sixth on a day in which he allowed three singles and allowed just one runner to reach second base.
Brayan Rocchio’s walk was Mize’s first of the day and the first time the Guardians got their first batter aboard. It was also the first time Mize had gone to three balls since the first batter of the game.
He recovered to get leadoff batter Steven Kwan on a fly ball and got help from Bowen, who had just entered the game as a defensive replacement for Sheets in left field, running 63 feet and diving to catch a line drive for the second out. Mize finished his day by retiring José Ramirez for the first time in three at-bats, on a line drive to Merrill in center field.
Bowen’s homer in the eighth made it 4-0.
Cronenworth’s homer in the ninth was the Padres 10th hit and the eighth ball they hit 100 mph or harder. The night before, while being held to one hit, they put a season-low one ball in play that hard.
____
©2026 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Visit sandiegouniontribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.






Comments