PHOENIX — The Cincinnati Reds lost on Saturday.
Thus ends the good news for the Padres.
With a pitching staff tattered already, their most reliable starter was torched for five runs in the first inning and their mercurial offense was held hitless by a 27-year-old rookie making his first major league start.
Joe Musgrove, the native San Diegan who threw the first no-hitter in Padres history on April 9, watched from the railing of the visitors’ dugout as Tyler Gilbert was mobbed his teammates after Tommy Pham lined the first pitch he saw in the ninth inning to Ketel Marte in center field.
Musgrove was the last Padres player to leave the dugout. He departed just as the public address announcer practically screamed that the Padres had gotten “no runs, no hits and no errors.”
Musgrove had started the game and yielded five runs before recording his second out. That gave Gilbert a cushion the Padres never came close to overcoming in what ended up a 7-0 Diamondbacks victory.
In his fourth big-league appearance, Gilbert allowed only Pham to reach base, as the Padres lead-off hitter walked three times. Pham was erased on a double play grounder in the first inning and was doubled up on Adam Frazier’s line drive in the fourth inning. So Gilbert faced just one more than the minimum 27 batters.
His 102 pitches were nine more than he had thrown even in Triple-A this season. His first three games since his first-ever call-up on Aug. 3 were relief appearances totaling 3 2/3 innings.
He got through the eighth inning on three pitches. In the ninth, Trent Grisham and Ha-Seong Kim watched called third strikes for the first two outs of the ninth.
It was the Diamondbacks’ third no-hitter and their first at Chase Field.
It was the 11th no-hitter ever thrown against the Padres and first since four Dodgers pitchers combined for one on May 4, 2018, in Monterrey, Mexico.
The historic game sent the reeling Padres to their fourth straight defeat.
The 7-0 loss was the Padres’ second defeat by that score in the four-game skid.
The Padres maintained a 2½ game lead over the Reds in the race for the final National League wild-card spot because of a result more than 2,000 miles away, which is about how far the Padres appear at present from anything resembling a playoff team.
They have scored in three of the past 36 innings, totaling five runs in four games.
This comes after they reached a season-high 17 games above .500 on Tuesday.
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