Padres lament missed chances after dropping game, series to Mets

NEW YORK — There is much to be determined.

The Padres have been playing too well and winning so much that Wednesday can easily be dismissed as a speed bump.

“We played good baseball,” Manny Machado said. “… Yeah, we lost two out of three, but we’ve been playing some good baseball. So let’s go back home.”

All of the above is true.

The Padres headed to San Diego following Wednesday’s 4-2 loss to the Mets having dropped a series for the first time this month.

They’re still in possession of the final National League postseason spot. They still have the best record (18-7) in the major leagues since July 24.

But the playoff race is tightly bunched enough that two confounding losses in three games here could be recalled as devastating come the end of September.

“Decent,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said of the 3-3 road trip that concluded Wednesday. “Could be better. Could have played better baseball as a team — done the small things, just executed in the right moment. But that’s why this game is so tough.”

The Padres were 2 for 12 with runners in scoring position Wednesday after letting a journeyman pitcher off the hook several times in the first two innings. And an error in the eighth inning made a rally in the ninth moot.

The lost opportunities early and the blunder late will be haunting if these losses matter.

And Carson Benge.

Regardless of how the rest of 2026 goes, Benge has a place in the Padres’ season story.

The rookie right fielder, who in Monday’s series opener threw out two runners at home plate in the first two innings of a 2-1 Mets victory, accounted for his team’s first runs in Wednesday’s finale, hitting a two-run homer in the fourth inning.

That was all the damage against Padres starter Michael King, who yielded four hits and walked two in 6 2/3 innings before the game crumbled around Jeremiah Estrada in the Mets’ two-run eighth.

Estrada took over for King with two outs and two on in the seventh and promptly yielded a single to Marcus Semien that Tatis fielded and threw home in time to get Francisco Alvarez trying to score from second base.

Estrada began the eighth with a fly ball out before walking A.J. Ewing, yielding a single to Francisco Lindor and then almost getting out of the inning on a ground ball by Bo Bichette.

But Sung-Mun Song, who had just that inning moved over from third base to shortstop in place of a cramping Xander Bogaerts, fielded the ball and threw it into right field, allowing Ewing to score while Lindor advanced to third base and Bichette got to second.

“He’s almost out of it,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said of Estrada. “We turn that double play, and (Estrada comes) out smelling like a rose. But that isn’t what happened.”

Yuki Matsui replaced Estrada and got the second out when Benge hit a grounder to Cronenworth, who threw out Lindor at home. But a single by Jared Young followed to increase the Mets’ lead to 4-2.

Facing their fifth different reliever in four innings, the Padres got the tying run on base in the ninth against Kodai Senga.

Luis Rengifo’s one-out single began the effort. A walk by Luis Campusano and a pinch-hit RBI single by Gavin Sheets followed before Austin Hays grounded into a double play that ended the game with Tatis on deck.

That deprived Tatis of another opportunity to stun Citi Field a day after he robbed a grand slam and hit two home runs in a 5-2 victory.

All Tatis could do at the plate Wednesday was drive in a run with a double in the fifth inning.

The Padres had just three hits in the first eight innings, as their day started with them being mostly flummoxed by a pitcher with a 6.59 ERA making his fourth start of the season.

Robert Stock, who was a hard-throwing reliever when he debuted with the Padres in 2018 and is now a deceptive starter, survived 4 1/3 innings and departed with the Mets ahead 2-1.

He went from effectively wild in the first two innings — he surrendered a leadoff walk and another with two outs in the first inning and then a walk and a hit batter with one out in the second — to locked in.

Stock retired eight consecutive batters to get through the fourth.

King ended up surrendering a hit before Stock when Ewing singled up the middle to start the bottom of the fourth. Then, after getting a double play that emptied the bases, King allowed the first two runs.

A walk by Bichette was followed by Benge driving a full-count sinker on the outer portion of the plate the other way down the left-field line and about five feet on the fair side of the pole.

“Missed my location by a full foot,” King said. “Trying to go up and in, left it middle away. Put a good swing on it. … I was hoping off the bat it was going to keep curling foul. But I knew it was hit pretty hard, so I just was praying. Didn’t work.”

King, whose 25 pitches in the fourth inning were just six fewer than he needed to get through the first three, set down seven in a row to get through six innings for the seventh time in his past nine starts.

Stock was 71 pitches in when the fifth inning began, and he would not make it out of the inning.

Bogaerts’ leadoff double off the left-field wall was the Padres’ first hit, and a one-out double by Tatis got them their first run.

That also brought Mets manager Andy Green from the dugout to make a pitching change.

Jonathan Pintaro took over and walked Cronenworth before Machado grounded into a double play.

Ty France began the next inning by lining a double down the right-field line.

Left-hander Nate Lavender entered the game for the Mets and began a run of 10 consecutive outs before Rengifo’s one-out single in the ninth.

“We had an opportunity there at the end, and we just fell short,” Machado said. “But our mindset has always been that we’re never going to stop fighting. We’ve had it all year, honestly. Yeah, we went through a bad stretch, but that mindset was always still there that we’re always going to come out on top.”

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