PITTSBURGH — Trent Grisham homered on the fourth pitch of the game.
A mere 73 pitches later, the first inning was over and the Padres trailed by a run.
Blake Snell lasted just two-thirds of an inning, and Tuesday night’s game against the Pittsburgh Pirates would only get worse and weirder from there.
The Pirates scored six runs in the first three innings and went on to an 8-4 victory at PNC Park.
This, despite the Padres setting a team record with 13 walks, getting hit by three pitches and having at least one runner on base in all but the ninth inning and at least one runner in scoring position in all but three innings.
They left the bases loaded four times and had only one hit in 13 at-bats with runners on second and/or third base. They stranded 15 runners, two shy of the team record.
For as bizarre as the night was, one thing was familiar. The Padres are now 12-for-70 (.171) over the past nine games with runners in scoring position.
The loss stopped a winning streak at four games.
And for all that, the worst part of the night might be that right fielder Wil Myers, who had five RBIs Monday and entered Tuesday’s game with a team-high 1.110 OPS, left the game in the fourth inning with an apparent injury.
Reliever Nabil Crismatt allowed four runs but helped the Padres avoid more casualties.
The right-hander threw a career-high five innings, taxing a bullpen they would have loved to keep as fresh as possible as they move toward this weekend’s series against the Dodgers.
The Padres used their bullpen for 8 1/3 innings just two days earlier in Texas and do not have another day off until April 26.
So Crismatt going 85 pitches, almost twice as many as he had ever thrown, and two innings longer than he had in any of his previous eight major league outings, was of great import.
Crismatt’s heavy lifting was necessitated by Snell’s second-shortest outing in his 111 career starts.
He took the mound with a 2-0 lead, and the craziness didn’t begin until after he retired the first two batters on eight pitches.
His night ended 30 pitches later with him having given three runs on a double, two singles, two walks and hit a batter on a bounced pitch that would be his last.
As Snell walked off the field, Craig Stammen ran onto it for the second time in three days with two outs in the bottom of the first inning.
He got Pirates pitcher Chad Kuhl on a groundout.
Kuhl had started the strange evening by taking 37 pitches to get through a first inning in which he yielded Grisham’s lead-off homer and a double to No. 2 hitter Jake Cronenworth before striking out Manny Machado and getting Eric Hosmer on a grounder to first base.
Kuhl then walked Myers, hit Tommy Pham on the top of the helmet to load the bases and walked Jurickson Profar.
Luis Campusano grounded out to leave the bases loaded. Pham would do so in the fourth and sixth innings. Profar grounded into a double play with the bases loaded in the eighth.
The Padres tied the game in the second when Grisham walked with one out, went to second when Kuhl’s pickoff attempt skipped past first baseman Phillip Evans, to third on a fly out and home on a wild pitch.
Machado, who was up when Grisham scored, ended up reaching on a 20-foot, 61 mph single to the left side because Kuhl’s throw, in the running lane, went past Evans, who appeared to lose the ball as it passed Machado. Eric Hosmer then walked.
As Myers walked to the plate, the Pirates used the fourth of their six allowed mound visits. Myers grounded out to end the inning.
The Pirates scored a run in the bottom of the second and never trailed despite their pitchers attempting to let the Padres walk away with the game.
Kuhl walked a career-high seven batters in his four innings, and four of the six relievers who followed him walked at least one batter.
