SAN DIEGO — Incredibly, the skies opened up here of all places on Friday afternoon, scrambling the Petco Park grounds crew into a rare tarp drill as the San Diego Padres prepared to resume a game that began in rainy Atlanta two months earlier, back when the bullpen was the strength of a playoff-bound team.
The baseball gods can be funny like that.
Only this is hardly ha-ha funny.
Fernando Tatis Jr. hit his 41st homer to spare the pitching staff of a meltdown two months in the making in a 6-5 win over the Braves only to see Max Fried throw his second career shutout in the Braves’ 4-0 win in the nightcap, yet another hit to the Padres’ waning postseason hopes.
The biggest blow occurred in the middle of the country as the red-hot St. Louis Cardinals swept a doubleheader at Wrigley Field, tying a franchise record with their 14th straight win and shaving their magic number to 3.
Any combinations of Cardinals wins or Padres losses that add up 3 will end a playoff push that seemed a near certainty when the Padres arrived in Atlanta on July 20 for a three-game series with the Braves.
That team was 14 games over .500, within a stone’s throw of the NL West lead (5 games back) and sitting on 92 percent playoff odds, according to fangraphs.com.
As of Friday morning?
The Padres’ odds had completely flatlined as the focus had shifted from a postseason push to simply finishing above .500.
“We can’t get caught up in the numbers, elimination, all that,” Padres manager Jayce Tingler said earlier this week. “We’re doing everything in our power to try to win.”
Tatis’ blast to center in the top of the seventh inning certainly helped because the 5-0 lead that Reiss Knehr had as he climbed the hill for his second inning of work in Atlanta on July 21 continued to salt away.
Knehr allowed three of the Braves’ four runs in that second inning before rain ultimately suspended the second game of a doubleheader despite waiting more than three hours for a storm to pass.
Funny enough, it began to rain at Petco Park around 3:15 p.m. Friday, leading to a 1-hour, 5-minute delay before the suspended game could finally resume.
“Somebody said (it was raining),” Tingler said, “and I looked on the TV and it is confirmed, we have a tarp. So that’s good to know. And then it felt like for a moment that this game is not supposed to happen when it starts to rain in San Diego.”
That’s not all that was a bit off about Friday.
The Padres were wearing their home whites as the visiting team in their own ballpark as they took the field in the bottom of the fifth, clinging to a 5-4 lead. They needed just three innings from their bullpen because they were resuming the second game of a doubleheader that was scheduled for seven innings. The starter in both games completed on Friday was none other than Knehr, who saw his ERA jump from 3.93 to 5.25 after his three runs in 1 2/3 on July 21 became official and three more runs crossed the plate in four innings in the nightcap.
At least the Padres won the opener because Fried, a former Padres first-rounder traded away for one year of Justin Upton, needed just 98 pitches to complete Game 2.
Pierce Johnson survived two first-inning walks and Tatis one-upped Adam Duvall’s sixth-inning homer off Daniel Hudson with what was officially his 30th homer — because Friday’s opener technically occurred before Tatis blasted his 40th homer on Wednesday.
However you wrap your head around that, Tatis’ 41 blasts this year are tied with Phil Nevin (2001) for the second most in franchise history.
Only Greg Vaughn, with 50 in 1998, hit more and he played in 158 games in help the Padres reach their second World Series.
Tatis, meanwhile, has wrapped 122 games and counting around three trips to the injured list, twice for his shoulder and once for a positive COVID-19 test. Tatis’ single and double accounted for two of the Padres’ three hits off Fried in Game 2.
“He’s been so impressive just managing the shoulder and managing the adversity that he’s dealt with with that shoulder and the three stints,” Tingler said. “I really like the way he’s playing right now. It’s a game of ups and downs and when he’s been in there the majority has been quite a few hot stretches.
“He’s really on a good groove right now of not trying to do too much.”
Mark Melancon survived a two-out walk to Freddie Freeman to record his MLB-leading 38th save in the opener.
