SAN FRANCISCO — Same view. Seems different.
The Padres are still looking up, but suddenly they are holding their heads high with smiles on their faces.
A winless start to a road trip in which the Padres never held a lead and might as well have not held their bats has turned. It has given way to consecutive victories over the team with the most wins in the major leagues during which the Padres got more hits than they had in the previous week.
The Padres on Thursday again scored early and added on late to beat the Giants 7-4 at Oracle Park, splitting a four-game series.
Next up is what feels like could be a season-altering set in St. Louis.
That is where the Padres headed after the game and where they will play the Cardinals the next three days on the final leg of a three-city, 10-game trek.
The Cardinals (76-69), who were off Thursday after a sweep of the New York Mets, hold the second wild-card spot, a half-game up on the Padres (76-70) and one game ahead of the Cincinnati Reds (76-71).
For all the Padres did at the plate Thursday, following their 16 hits Wednesday with 14 more, the tenuous state of their pitching staff made the four scoreless innings Nabil Crismatt turned in arguably the most significant performance on a day the team had to use seven relievers.
After Pierce Johnson pitched a scoreless first, Crismatt worked the second through the fifth innings, extending his scoreless streak to 12 2/3 innings over eight outings.
By the time he departed, the Padres were up 4-0.
They did not face quite the same Kevin Gausman they saw three times earlier this season. The All-Star right-hander’s split-finger fastball confounded them in April and May, as he allowed one run in seven innings once and one run in six innings twice.
The Padres doubled that production by the third inning this time.
After not holding a lead at any point in the first five games of this trip before leading all nine innings Wednesday, the Padres went up in the second inning Thursday on singles by Adam Frazier and Tommy Pham and Trent Grisham’s sacrifice fly.
Fernando Tatis Jr.’s 39th home run of the season, a liner that just cleared the wall near the left field corner, made it 2-0 in the third inning.
They doubled that lead in the fifth on singles by Jurickson Profar and Tatis and a two-run double to right by Pham.
Thursday was the third time this season and first time in five career starts against the Padres that Gausman allowed more than three earned runs. He was lifted for a pinch-hitter in the fifth.
Crismatt was replaced by Austin Adams, who had his viciously unpredictable slider lead to a run coming in on a wild pitch in the sixth. Adams began the inning with a strikeout before Kris Bryant doubled to right field, went to third on a fly ball to right field and then ran home on an 0-2 slider Adams bounced in the dirt.
After Even Longoria bounced a double off the left field wall and Brandon Crawford walked, Daniel Hudson replaced Adams and got Wilmer Flores on a fly ball to center field.
The Giants scored another run with help from a wild pitch in the seventh by Hudson, but he escaped the inning when Darin Ruf lined out to Manny Machado at third base and Bryant struck out.
The Padres added three runs in the eighth on singles by Nola and Grisham and an RBI double by pinch-hitter Wil Myers, all in succession with one out, and then a two-out walk by Tatis and a two-run single by Machado.
It was the second straight game in which the Padres scored in four innings — after they had not done so even once in 22 games. Their 30 hits in the two games were their most in back-to-back contests since mid-July and just two fewer than they totaled in their previous six games.
The Giants got their final run in the bottom of the inning against Tim Hill before Emilio Pagán struck out Curt Casali to end the eighth.
Mark Melancon worked a third straight game and yielded a run on two singles and yet another wild pitch, but he retired pinch-hitter Thairo Estrada on a fly ball and struck out Brandon Belt for his major league-leading 38th save.
